Chapter 20
CLOVER
Ihad been in The Rhinehaus a couple of months, paid rent via their online portal, and hadn't had any reason to visit the first floor management office. I'd never met, complained, or even messaged with the actual landlord. Hopefully he wasn't some slum lord. Probably just some rich investor.
The button for the penthouse needed a key fob. Isak had a key fob.
"You live in the penthouse," I said, as the doors closed and the car kept going up past my floor, past the floors I knew, into the part of the building I'd assumed belonged to some hedge fund person who collected wine.
"I live in the penthouse," he agreed, like it was a normal sentence and not a small earthquake.
"Of my building."
"Yep." Something flickered across his face, fast, gone before I could name it.
Right now it didn't matter. I was a woman in a good dress going up to have dinner with both sets of parents and I did not have the bandwidth to interrogate an elevator. "Is the penthouse all warehousy? Do you even have walls? Furniture? Maybe we should go out."
My brothers had really nice apartments with their professional football player money too, and all the furniture they had was to hold their enormous televisions.
"It's a brewery. You live in a brewery."
"I live in a former brewery, which is different, it has been thoroughly de-beered." The doors opened. "Come on before Fox tells your father the story about the goose. There's a goose story. He's been saving it."
And then I stopped interrogating anything, because I walked into the most beautiful home I had ever stood inside, and it had my mother in it.
It was all warm brick and enormous windows holding the whole lit-up river, and it should have been a cold rich-man box, and it wasn't, because somebody actually lived here.
There was a cat tree by the window that cost more than my car.
There was a wall of motorcycle helmets, dozens of them, arranged with a care that was either very cool or very alarming and I genuinely could not decide.
There was a couch built for a large family to argue on. And on that couch, thrown over the back of it like it had been fought over and won, was a pillow embroidered with In This House, We Bleed Green, the stitches a little uneven in the loving way that means a person made it and not a store.
My mother was already holding it.
"Clover, baby, come look at this." My mom turned the pillow over in her hands, and her face went open and young the way it had at the restaurant, the look I was learning to watch for. "Somebody embroidered this by hand."
"My aunt made it." Isak said it easy, but I'd spent enough days reading this man to hear what sat underneath the easy.
"But it's a copy of the one my mom made.
We all got one when Jules finally flew the coop.
There's one in every house in the family.
We call it the lucky pillow and fight over them at game night. "
And my mother went very still, the pillow in her hands, and said, "Like the one April originally made?"
The room shifted. Isak's father had been standing at the kitchen island, a big quiet man with my father, the two of them holding drinks and sizing each other up the way men who used to smash people into the ground for a living size each other up, and at my mother's voice Bridger Kingman turned around.
"You knew April," he said.
"I met her once." Tory pressed the pillow flat against herself, the same gesture she'd made at the restaurant, holding something in.
"A shoot my first year on the Bruins squad.
I was a cheerleader, she was the model, and they put us in the same green room for six hours because nobody schedules anything right.
She was pregnant. Hugely, gloriously pregnant, and she sat in that green room eating an entire sleeve of cookies and telling me I should never let anybody tell me my body was a before picture.
" My mom laughed, and it cracked in the middle.
"I was twenty-two. I thought I had to apologize for taking up a chair. She told me to take up two."
Nobody said anything. My father put his hand on my mother's back, the way he had at the restaurant.
"That would've been Chris," Bridger said. His voice was gravel and very gentle. "The pregnant. That was her first."
"She was so nice, and so authentic," my mother said. "I never forgot her."
I stood in the doorway of a penthouse in my own building and watched my mother and a man I'd just met in the VIP skybox at PlayCore hold a dead woman between them like a warmth they were both glad to find the other one had.
The door I saw at thirteen, the plus-size woman on the cover who made me believe for the first time that the fantasy might have a version with my body in it, the woman whose name I'd cried over without ever telling a soul, was Isak's mother.
April de la Reine. That mattered. She mattered, to more than just me.
She'd been important even to my mother, who had never worn a plus size anything in her life.
I had not known my own mother met her. Had sat in a room with her for six hours at twenty-two and been told to take up two chairs.
The genuine feeling broke through the list I kept, the way it does, messy and at the worst possible time, and I had to look at the cat tree for a second because the piece of fancy cat furniture did not have feelings and wouldn't mind if I got a little teary-eyed for a minute.
Dinner was loud in the good way.
Jules cooked, and made Fox help her, which I did not see coming. He didn't have a clue what he was doing, but in the way he did everything, he was narrating, claiming the kitchen was a sacred space, calling the risotto "a journey." And sweet Jules could not hide her smile over it all.
Vito Catleone sat on the back of an empty chair and supervised the risotto with open ma?tre d' disdain, gracious enough not to comment.
Tig had somehow snuck up here too and was conducting careful diplomatic relations with Vito under the table, which my father narrated like a wildlife documentary in a whisper that was not a whisper.
And the two dads found out about each other.
It happened over the risotto. My father was telling some story about the best sack of a quarterback he'd ever seen back when he played, and Bridger Kingman set down his fork and said, flat, "Bears and Stars. Week eleven. Your QB came across the middle on a slant and I put him into the third row."
My father stopped talking.
"That was you," Brick said.
"That was me."
"You're the one who—" My father started laughing, the big helpless kind I'd heard maybe four times in my life. "They fined you."
"It was a clean hit and the fine was robbery," Bridger said.
The League had voted him its meanest defensive player once.
He still believed every fine he'd ever paid was theft, and he said so now without a flicker of doubt.
"I wasn't going to let them take my money over a hit your guy walked away from.
Mostly. Your offensive line should have been stronger. "
"Mostly," my father agreed, delighted, rubbing the back of his head. "You went into coaching."
"Denver State. Eight national championships. You went into talking."
"Somebody has to explain the game to the people who can only hit it.
" Brick was grinning, full out now, the TV grin but real underneath it, and I watched my father, who eats quarterbacks for a living, who I had braced myself my whole life to perform competence in front of, be a delighted boy in a brewery because a man he'd been telling stories about for twenty-some odd years had grown up to coach and to make eight pillows' worth of children.
Across the table, Isak was watching his own father laugh with mine, and his expression had gone soft and a little stunned, an expression I had never seen on him, and I realized he had probably never once watched Bridger Kingman be charmed by anybody, and that he was watching it happen in his own grown-up home.
He'd set this table hoping to be seen at it. Instead he was getting to watch everyone else get seen, and the softness on his face was him deciding that was somehow even better.
I reached under the table and found his hand. Not for an audience. The audience thought we were real. I did it because there wasn't one that mattered.
It was Bridger who got me alone, at the end, the way quiet people do, without seeming to engineer it at all.
I'd carried plates to the kitchen because that's what I do when a room gets too warm and I need a job. He was at the sink, sleeves pushed up, already washing, a man who'd raised eight children alone and clearly did not believe in letting his son's risotto pans soak.
"You can dry," he said. Not a question. I dried.
We worked in quiet for a minute. Bridger Kingman, I was learning, used silence the way my father used noise, to fill a space and tell you something about himself, and his silence said he was comfortable and in no hurry and had decided something he hadn't said yet.
"That squad today," he said finally, handing me a pan. "The pig business."
"You saw that."
"Whole press box saw it. Whole country, by now." He scrubbed a glass. "I coached eighteen years. You know what I spent eighteen years trying to teach grown men who get paid to play a game to understand?"
"What?"
"That the moment it goes wrong is the only moment that tells you anything.
" He handed me the glass. "Anybody can run the play that's drawn up.
You found out today what thirty-one women do when somebody throws an insult at them that's built to make them small.
You didn't draw that up. You built the women who could.
" He looked at me then, finally, full on, and I understood why Isak talked about his father's attention the way he did, like a searchlight that never quite swung his way, because it had just swung onto me.
It was the most thorough looking-at I'd had in my whole life.
Not at my body. Not at whose daughter I was.
At the work I'd actually made. "My wife would have stood up in that press box and cheered until they removed her.
She didn't get to see it. So somebody who loved her ought to tell you she'd have seen exactly what you did out there. "
I did not have a single thing to say. The reflex that reads a room for its edges, that finds where I'm allowed to stand and never leans past it, the reflex that has run since I was nine, had nothing.
It had been seen straight through by a gruff man at a sink and it just sat down, quietly, and stayed down.
"Thank you," I managed.
"Don't thank me. I didn't do anything. You did it all." He pulled the drain. "Go on. My son's been looking at that doorway for ten minutes pretending he isn't."
I went to the doorway.
Isak was leaning on it, pretending he wasn't.
"Your dad sees everything," I said.
"Yeah," Isak said, low, the lit-up water behind him in the glass, and his voice came out a little wrecked. "He does."
I was so full of being seen, of my mother and April and a pillow and a man at a sink, that the flicker on his face in the elevator just floated off and I let it.
I was too busy being happy, which is its own kind of armor, and the only kind I'd never learned to take off in time.