Page 112 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Thank you, Warner,” I said, and meant it, both halves of it, the thank-you and the goodbye folded into the same two words.

“Be happy, Clo. He’s a weird dude. The cat on a motorcycle thing is genuinely strange. But he sees you.” Warner stepped back, gave me the tunnel, the way you give someone the field. “I never managed that part. He does it without trying. Don’t talk yourself out of being seen.”

He walked off toward the locker room, and I stood in the tunnel with my gear, and the song was over, and a new quiet had moved into the place where it used to play, and I found that I knew what to do in the quiet now.

I picked up my equipment.

I went to find my honorary Cat-Dad.

And I walked out of the tunnel into the lit-up empty stadium where a whole city had just decided we belonged, in the middle of everything, not at the edge of it, carrying my own gear, on my way to the loud man who’d been brave about the yes by himself for weeks while I caught up.

I’d caught up.

Neither of us had to be brave anymore.

We were just going home, and this time I knew the way, and the way had him in it.

EPILOGUE: WHAT VITO AND TIG KNEW ALL ALONG

ISAK

Denver

The following Fall

It was all new, but it still felt like coming home.

It wasn’t long after the last pig had flown on our history-making, but ultimately losing season in Cincinnati, that Fox and I were called into a meeting with Gabrielle to let us know she wasn’t going to be offering us new contracts. She explained it had come down to making the choice between having a few star players and a weaker team or accepting a trade for the both of us for a handful of top round draft picks over the next two years and a QB2 that had been trained up under Chris Kingman. Just like me.

The Mustangs were calling me home. Not just me and Fox, who despite his California good looks had actually grown up in Boulder. The Mustangs finagled their way into getting Flynn and Gryff from the LA Bandits as well as Xander Rosemont from the Miami Sharks.

Everybody was back where it all started. Just in time for it to end.

After 13 seasons as the quarterback for the Denver Mustangs, Chris had decided that his 14th would be his last. Trixie had just found out that she was expecting twins. It was the second set to bless our family this year, and would bring the grand total of kids for the two of them up to five.

Five is a terrifying amount of offspring.

Clover wasn’t from quite as large a brood as me, but with three older brothers of her own we had both agreed that two sounded perfectly reasonable. With a possible contract extension for a third.

But those were thoughts for Future Isak. Today 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 eleven-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. A house that had a yard surrounded by family, 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. After deferring her degree, the master’s program she’d put on hold for a one-year favor that turned into me. She had already started classes and she was crushing it. Obviously, because she’s the smartest person I’ve ever stood next to and I’ve stood next to Hayes. .

But the other one. The one she built. A body-diverse dance and cheer for the kids and the grown women of the neighborhoods this city, like every city, had spent telling certain people were 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.