Epilogue
JUNIE
Second intermission, banner night, and here is what the sold-out building did not know: the board op, the game presentation department, the league office, one gum-chewing head coach, a sixteen-year-old consultant, my sister, both mothers in the family box, and every member of a group chat called Saint’s Wedding Planning Committee had been holding a secret for eleven days, and the secret was mine.
A summer. A whole summer since a June courier envelope and a midnight barn and a family clause.
A summer of a skylight and a cast iron and a cat with a fruit bowl.
Three months since a rain-lit Saturday when a man set two keys square to the counter edge, and six months since a night I stood in a kitchen that wasn’t officially mine yet looking at a renamed file, “Operation Sweetheart: no terms, no conditions,” at the one line in it still blank, and heard him say, in memory, we were saving it, and thought: saved long enough.
He proposed to a continent from a podium once, without meaning to. There was only ever one correct answer to that.
Planning it took the whole committee. Marcus built the graphic himself and encrypted the file, I’m not joking, the man password-protected my proposal because this franchise’s history with leaks is what it is.
Barb’s contribution was scheduling: “Second intermission. He’s useless the whole break anyway, he just sits there being weird at his stick.
Take the intermission.” Theo vetted my ASL over pancakes and made me drill one sign until my hands stopped shaking, and when I asked him if I was ridiculous, planning to propose to a superstitious goalie in the middle of a game he still had a period left to play, my consultant looked at me with the family eyebrows and signed, he plays better held.
Data attached. He had attached actual data.
Hazel’s contribution was a sticky note, delivered to my booth that afternoon, which I stuck under Beyoncé the Second next to the old spreadsheet: GO GET HIM, IDIOT. Singular this time. Growth all around.
So. 9:41 p.m., second intermission, score 2 to 1 us, zamboni doing its meditative laps, and the man in question at his bench doing exactly what Barb said, sitting there being weird at his stick, helmet up on top of his head, having his ritual water at his ritual minute.
The board ran the trivia thing. The board ran the t-shirt thing.
My hands, on the booth desk, were doing a thing I had zero content strategy for.
“Boss,” Bryce whispered, headset crooked, finger over the cue like it was the nuclear football, “confirm go.”
“Go,” I said, and my voice held, which I want noted in the record.
The board went dark. A barn’s worth of people did the little “ooh” that dark boards get.
And then, white on teal, in the font he once called “aggressively friendly,” it came up, and I heard sixteen thousand people read it at different speeds, a wave of it, gasp rolling into shriek rolling into a roar with my name in it somewhere:
RULEBOOK AMENDMENT, FINAL.
RULE 8, NO LONGER BLANK:
MARRY ME.
And then the camera cut, because Marcus is an artist, to the bench, to the goalie, to the exact second the words landed behind his eyes.
He stood up. The building went so quiet so fast it rang, sixteen thousand people inhaling as one organism, and he stepped over the boards onto fresh ice in full gear, alone out there with the zamboni idling in the corner like a scandalized chaperone, and he skated, unhurried, a man with no doubt and no rush, all the way down to his crease. To the posts.
He tapped them. Twice, left. Twice, right.
The building did the count out loud through its hands, TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP, and up in the booth I was crying with a professionalism I will defend forever, because I knew what he was doing, he was doing what the taps have always done.
Is anyone home. Checking with the older post first. Bringing Olle.
Then he skated to the bench boards below my window, and the ice-level mic was hot, we hot-mic’d the whole rink for banner night, my department, my invoice, my best decision, and he pulled his helmet off, and looked up fifty feet at the glass with his whole face open at the depth where lying is a structural impossibility, and said, into a live microphone, in the building where a hot mic started everything:
“Yes.”
The barn detonated. The glass shook. Marcus cut to the booth, to me, both hands over my mouth, headset fully sideways, and I am told the image was on national broadcasts within the minute and I have never once minded.
But he wasn’t done, because he is his grandfather’s grandson and his brother’s brother, and there is an order to things.
He turned from my window to the family box, where Theo was standing on his seat between our weeping mothers, and my beloved raised his hands and signed it big, the size of the sentiment, the way Theo signs when it matters, the sign he once sent to a camera for one boy and now sent up into the whole bowl for all of them, for all of us:
Family.
And Theo signed it back, huge, and then, because he is sixteen forever no matter how old he gets, pulled out his phone, and I knew, I knew before it posted, and I was right: the clip, up within four minutes, captioned “Took her longer enough.” He meant it that way this time.
He has claimed the phone corrected it two years ago.
The committee has doubts. It’s canon now, it’s on the family crest, we say it at birthdays.
They won, by the way, 3 to 1, because Theo’s data was right, he plays better held.
In the handshake-and-stick-salute after, the whole team mobbed the crease, and Pickle wept into the mustache, and Mason, arm in a sling by then, that’s another story, someone else’s whole book, was first over the boards yelling COMMITTEE ADJOURNED.
Later, much later, the barn empty and the banner up in the dark, we stood on the ice in street shoes, just us, which you are not supposed to do and which nobody in this organization will ever stop us from doing.
He held my left hand in both of his, a ring on it now, his grandmother’s, Duluth to Austin in a box marked MISC, resized in secret because the committee holds secrets in both directions.
Fifty feet up, the booth window was dark.
The wind chime of the whole year rang somewhere in me, softly.
“Rule 8,” he said, into my hair, in the register he saves for goalposts. “Worth the save.”
Two years ago a camera caught a grumpy man taping a loud woman’s wrist, and the internet, which is sometimes wrong about everything, was right first, before either of us: it looked at four seconds of footage and called it sweetheart.
We spent a whole season insisting the word was manufactured, a stunt, a scheduling error, terms and conditions.
Then we spent two more years finding out what the file history could have told anyone who checked.
The sweetheart part was never fake either.
THE AUSTIN CHUPACAbrAS RETURN IN THE REBOUND RULEBOOK