Chapter 21
ISAK
The Mustangs came to town for the last preseason game and brought my entire family with them, which was normal since half of them played for the same tea.
The Broasis ended up containing four of my brothers, four wives including a pop star, a rooster in a travel crate, my father, my sister, Fox, two cats conducting a Pride Parade, and a Settlers of Catan board that had caused more lasting damage to the Kingman family than any opponent we have ever faced on a field.
"You're hoarding wheat," Declan said.
"I'm not hoarding wheat."
"You have nine wheat. That's hoarding."
"It's called a strategy, which you'd know about if you played a position that required—"
"Boys." My father didn't look up from his cards. He didn't play Catan. He sat at the head of whatever table the family landed at and read, and somehow losing nothing and winning nothing made him the most powerful person in the room. "Isak's house. Isak's wheat."
"Thank you."
"Isak, stop still hoarding it," my dad said, and turned a page. Declan howled.
This was the part of my family I'd spent my whole life standing slightly outside of. The noise. The way eight people who came out of the same house could fill any room until there was no air left for the only move I knew, which was waiting to be noticed.
I'd built a life five hundred miles from this exact noise because I'd decided the noise didn't have a frequency for me. I was the seventh of eight. By the time anybody got to me they were tired.
And now they were all in the building I'd bought and renovated and never once told them was mine, eating Cincinnati chili dogs off my plates, and not one of them had asked, because they assumed Chris's draft gift was all I’d ever need.
And I let them assume, the way I let everybody assume everything. Because being underestimated had become so comfortable I'd built a whole personality inside it.
Clover was on the couch with Trixie and Kelsey, and she was laughing.
That's the part that got me. Not that she fit in.
That she'd stopped checking whether she fit in.
I'd watched her walk into a room of professional athletes and their famous wives doing the thing she does, reading it for the edges, finding where she was allowed to stand, and I'd watched Trixie hand her a glass of wine and Kelsey ask her a question about the squad’s routines and within twenty minutes Clover had forgotten to guard the door.
She was just there. In my family. On my couch. Being funny.
I had nine wheat and I could not have cared less about any of it.
Chris found me on the balcony later, because it was the quarterback in him. He reads the whole field and then walks to the exact spot the play is going.
"Nice building," he said.
"It's a good building."
"It's a great building. Twelve units, the historic brick, the brewery bones.
" He leaned on the rail next to me, both of us looking out at the river doing its river business below.
"I bought you the penthouse. You bought the other eleven units and never said a word.
Dad thinks the management company's some firm out of Columbus. "
I didn't say anything. Chris let me not say anything for a while, which is a thing he learned from Dad and I never did.
"I'm not going to tell him," Chris said. "It's yours to tell. I just want you to notice that you did it again. You built something huge and beautiful and you hid it so nobody could clap for you, and then you got mad that nobody clapped."
"I didn't get mad."
"You've been a little mad your whole life, Isak. It's okay. You're the seventh of eight and the loudest people in your family ran out of attention before they got to you and you decided the answer was to become a man nobody could see clearly enough to disappoint." He said it gently.
That's the unbearable thing about Chris. He says the worst true thing about you in the kindest possible voice. "I'm asking you a real question now, and I want a real answer, not a bit. The girl on the couch."
"Clover."
"The one who forgot to guard the door." So he'd seen it too. "Is it real?"
And here's where I could have done the thing I do. The deflect. The joke. I had one loaded, something about the cats. I felt it come up.
I let it go past.
"It started fake," I said. Out of anyone in the world, Chris would understand that. "There's a problem named Tiki and we made a deal to look like a couple so Tiki would leave me alone and Clover’s ex-boyfriend whom her parents just love would leave her alone. That part was real. The deal was real."
"And now?"
"Now I bought her a helmet." I heard how it sounded.
I kept going anyway, because Chris had asked for a real answer and the real answer was a helmet.
"Before I knew I was going to. I paid the kid who worked at the store a hundo to bring it to me like pizza.
I ordered her a helmet in her size in the color I thought she'd pick, and I told myself it was for the bit, and Chris—" I stopped.
I made myself say the unlisted thing, the way I'd watched her have to.
"I don't order helmets for women. I've never ordered anybody a helmet in my life.
I order helmets for one woman and she doesn't know the most important thing about me and I keep not telling her because the second I tell her she has all the information and she gets to decide, and I'm scared of what she decides. "
Chris was quiet.
"What's the most important thing about you," he asked.
Not the building. Not the gaming money. He knew those.
"That I'm all in," I said. "On her. That it stopped being a deal somewhere before it was even a deal.
I've been pretending that I agree with all her rules like an end date.
I am so far past the edge of this that I can't see the edge anymore, and I haven't said it out loud until right now, on a balcony, to my brother, like a coward. "
"Yeah," Chris said. "That tracks."
"That's it? That tracks?"
"Yeah. Ask me how I know." He said it to the river, easy, a man who'd made it to the far side of the exact bridge I was standing on.
"Trixie and I spent a half a summer calling it an arrangement while I’d already fallen so hard I rewrote my whole life around her.
For ten fucking years, kid. I know the edge you can't see.
I've stood on it. Hell, I bungie jumped off of it. "
He finally looked at me. "The deal isn't the problem, Isak.
The deal's how it started. Plenty of real things start as pretend.
The problem is the part you're keeping. You don't get to be all in on somebody and keep the most important thing from her at the same time.
That's not all in. That's all in with an exit you built into the floor. "
"I know." I wasn’t sure I would have truly acknowledged it on my own though.
"Do you? Because you've got a whole life full of exits you built into the floor. The LLC that owns this building. The S-corp that has a whole ass gaming empire. The cat account. The. Motorcycle.”
Oh fuck. He knew about the motorcycle? I was going to kill Jules.
“You're a man who loves in secret so it can't be taken away, and it has never once occurred to you that loving in secret is just a slower way of not having it."
The river flowed, the stars at dusk twinkled, and the truth hung in the air.
"Tell her," Chris said. "All of it. The building.
The penthouse she's standing in. Your real feelings.
Before somebody else does, because somebody always does, and the difference between her hearing it from you and her hearing it from anybody else is the difference between a hard conversation and a closed door. "
"What if she closes the door anyway?"
"Then she closes it with all the information, which is the only honest way a door gets closed.
You'll survive it, because you're brave in ways nobody recognizes, including you.
" He pushed off the rail. "Now come back inside.
Declan's accusing your sister of stealing from the bank and Jules is about to commit a crime, and you're hoarding wheat, and your girl is laughing, and you built a place where all of this could happen at once.
That's not nothing and it’s not something to hide. Notice it."
I noticed it.
Through the glass, the whole loud beautiful disaster of my family was arranged around a board game in a home I'd built in secret, and Clover was throwing her head back at something Trixie said, and Vito was supervising the rooster crate with deep suspicion, and my father was reading at the head of the table winning nothing and losing nothing and seeing everything.
I was all in. I'd said it out loud. And I was going to tell her.
Tomorrow. After the game.
There it was again. That word. Tomorrow.
I really had to stop doing that.