Page 113 of The Tiger in the Sack

“How many signed up?” I asked.

“I’m not checking until later. Today I’m just going to go open the doors and see who walks in.”

That’s the thing she taught me that the things we deserve will find us 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, 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 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. 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 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, “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,, standing in a tunnel asking his invisible little brother to let him into the squad the little brother helped build. .

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.”