Chapter Isak
ISAK
Denver. The following spring.
First home game in a new city, in a new jersey, for a team m oldest brother had quarterbacked for a decade and ws about to stop quarterbacking forever.
I had a weird nervous energy I hadn’t had since my first Flower bowl appearance.
I dealt with it the way I deal with everything, which is that I narrated it out loud to my cat.
"The thing is, Vito, I'm the backup. Backups don't get nervous.
That's the whole job description. You stand there.
You hold a clipboard. You look ready in case the franchise quarterback, who happens to be your big brother, who happens to be retiring at the end of this season so that you can have his job, gets hurt, which you do not want, because he's your brother, but which is also literally the plan, so you're standing there in a state of — what's the word — I don't have the word.
There's no word for being the understudy to a guy you love in a play where the ending is he leaves and you get the part. "
Vito Catleone, who had made the five-hundred-mile move to Denver with the equanimity of a creature who considers all of America his litter box, looked at me from the windowsill of a house that was not a penthouse, that had a yard, that had mountains behind it doing their enormous mountain business, and said nothing, because he is a cat and also because he'd heard all of this already, twice.
King Manicotti, yipped.
"You're not helping."
"He's helping," Clover said, from the doorway. "He's telling you to be excited. You should try it."
She was in her good blazer, the one that means business, because she had her own morning today, a bigger one than mine, in my opinion, though she'd argue.
The Colorado School of Minds had its first open enrollment day this morning.
Not the engineering one. She'd gone back for that, finally, un-deferred it, walked into the master's program she'd put on hold for a one-year favor that turned into me, and she was crushing it, obviously, because she's the smartest person I've ever stood next to and I've stood next to my entire family.
But the other one. The one she built. Body-diverse dance and cheer for the kids and the grown women of the neighborhoods this city, like every city, had spent a hundred years quietly telling certain people, the field was for somebody else.
Youth classes in the afternoon. Adult classes at night, for the women who'd been nine-year-olds left off a roster once and never got to find out they could fly.
"How many signed up?" I asked.
"I'm not checking until tonight. I made a rule.
If I check the number all day I'll do the thing where I rank it against a fear, and I'm not doing that today.
Today I'm just going to go open the doors and see who walks in.
" She came over and straightened my collar, which did not need straightening.
She did that now, touched me for no operational reason, just because she's allowed and she likes to.
"The countdown's not running. I keep telling you. You can stop bracing for me to leave."
"I'm not bracing."
"You moved five hundred miles and bought a house with a yard for a cat who doesn't go outside. You're a little bracing." She kissed me. "It's okay. You can brace and stay. That's allowed too. Bracing and staying. Plus King can use the yard."
That's the thing she taught me, in the end, the woman I fake-dated into the realest thing in my life.
I'd spent twenty-five years certain that the only safe love was the invisible kind, the kind nobody could see to take.
And she'd spent years certain the only safe want was the half-kind, the kind that couldn't be fully taken because you never fully had it.
Two cowards, the exact same shape. And we'd looked at each other and decided, on purpose, out loud, to be visible and to want the whole thing anyway, bracing and staying, and it turned out that wasn't less safe.
It was just more alive.
Chris found me in the tunnel before the game. Because he's a quarterback. He reads the whole field and walks to the spot the play's happening, and I have spent my whole life being a spot he walks to.
"Last home opener," I said.
"Last home opener." He didn't say it sad. Chris didn't do sad about endings, he did the next thing, it's why he's the best of us. "You ready?"
"I'm the backup."
"You're the next one. There's a difference. A backup is a thing you are. The next one is the leader you're becoming, and I get to watch it, which is the only part of retiring I actually like. Well that and the seventeen more kids me and Trixie are going to have."
“You know you don’t have to get her pregnant every time.”
“Yeah, but I fucking love to.” He looked at me, the way Dad looks, the searchlight finally swinging on purpose. "You stopped hiding."
"Yep, I did."
"The building. The cat. The girl. The whole empire you built in the dark so nobody could clap." He bumped my shoulder pad. "You let us clap, Isak. Took you twenty-five years. Worth the wait."
And then he saw the shirt.
I'd worn it under my pads. I did it every game now.
A fan-made Cat-Dads shirt, the tuxedo cat on the chest, the one Big Tony swore me into a lifetime appointment over, the squad five hundred miles away in Cincinnati that I am still, by sacred pledge, a member of, and will be doing a bit with rubber pigs for at a home game I'm flying back for next month during our by-week, because you don't quit the squad, the squad's forever.
Chris tugged the collar of it where it showed over my pads.
"What's that," he said.
"That," I said, and I didn't make a joke, I didn't reach for the deflect, I let the true thing come out at the podium of my own brother in a tunnel in Denver, "is my other family.
The squad. Clover's people, who are my people now.
A foreman and a café guy and a bunch of grandmothers who can do a hip bump that would put you on IR.
They put me on a field in a cat shirt and let me hold a kid and be completely visible doing the thing I love, and nobody took it, Chris.
I had it out in the open where everyone could see and nobody took it.
That's the shirt. That's what it means."
Chris was quiet for a second.
Then my brother, the franchise quarterback, the best of all of us, the one who'd bought me a penthouse and waited a decade to watch me become the next leader, looked at the homemade cat shirt under my pads with solemn approval.
"I want one," Chris said.
"You can't have one. It's a closed squad. You have to be sworn in."
"Then swear me in."
"It's in Cincinnati. There's a pledge. Tony administers it. There's a whole thing."
"Isak." Chris put both hands on my shoulder pads, the way Dad puts a hand on the back of your neck, steadying something he built and intends to keep.
"I'm flying to Cincinnati for the pig game.
Swear me in. I want the shirt. I've spent my whole life being the quarterback and I just watched my baby brother find a family that loves him in a cat shirt and I want in too.
Don't be stingy with the squad. The whole point of the squad is nobody gets left at the edge.
You told me that. Don't leave your own brother at the edge. "
And there it was, the thing I'd been chasing my whole life without knowing it had a shape, the eldest Kingman, the one with all the memories of our mother that I didn't have, the one who got to remember her, standing in a tunnel asking his invisible little brother to let him into the squad the little brother built.
I'd built it loud. For once. Out where everyone could see.
And my family had walked straight toward it.
"Okay," I said, and my voice came out wrecked, the way it had on the balcony with Dad, the way it goes when the true one's too big for the fast mouth. "Okay. I'll swear you in. You're going to be terrible at the hip bump."
"I'm going to be incredible at the hip bump."
"You're going to be on IR by the second eight-count."
"This is the way," Chris said, which is my line, which he stole, which means it's a family line now, which is the whole point of a family.
We walked out of the tunnel together into a stadium full of people about to watch him do the thing he does for the last season he'll do it, and me standing one spot behind him becoming the next thing, in a cat shirt under my pads, five hundred miles from a squad I'd never quit and a building I finally told the truth about and a woman who was, at that exact moment across town, opening a set of doors to find out who walked in.
She texted me at halftime. I checked it on the sideline, which you're not supposed to do, and Coach yelled, and I did not care.
Two words and a number.
They came. And then the number, which was bigger than she'd braced for, which made me laugh out loud on the sideline of a pro football game, alone, a little manic with it, because we'd gotten away with something.
We had.
We'd gotten away with the whole thing. The fantasy with no asterisk. The career and the love and the quarterback and the family and the life everybody, including us, had spent so long being so brave about not getting.
I texted her back the only thing there was to say, the thing my whole family says, the thing that means I see you and I'm not going anywhere and the loud safe kind of love is the only kind worth having.
In this house, we bleed green.
She sent back a green heart and a photo of a room full of people of every size and age and shade, mid-leap, all of them in the air at once.
When pigs fly.
We did.
We do.
Forever.
The End.