Page 90 of The Tiger in the Sack

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And my mother went very still, the pillow in her hands, and said, “Like the one April originally made?”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 photo 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 maître 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, flatly, “Bruins 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.