"He what?"
"He wants to come to Saturday's game. He called your brother and got the schedule. He didn't want to call you directly because he wasn't sure you'd answer."
"I would have answered."
"I know that. He doesn't."
I turned off the stove. The omelet was going to be a casualty of this conversation and I accepted that. I sat down at the counter, on the stool where Mik usually sat when I cooked, and pressed my free hand flat against the surface to keep it from shaking.
"Why now?"
"I don't know, honey. He didn't say much. He just said he wanted to come. I think..." Another pause. "I think he's been watching your games. Online. He hasn't said so, but I found the Reapers schedule bookmarked on his computer."
The image hit me with a force I wasn't prepared for. My father, alone in the den in Duluth, watching Reapers games on his laptop. Not calling. Not texting. Not acknowledging. Just watching in silence, the way he'd been silent for two years, except now the silence had a shape. It had search histories and bookmarks and a man sitting in a chair in Minnesota following his son's career from inside the closet of his own shame.
"Okay," I said. "He can come."
"Really?"
"Yeah, Mom. He can come."
"Cole, if you're not ready, I can tell him it's not a good time. He'll understand."
"When has Dad ever understood anything?"
She was quiet. The silence was its own answer.
"Sorry," I said. "That wasn't fair."
"It was fair. It just wasn't the whole picture." She took a breath. "Your father is not good at this. He's not good at feelings or conversations or any of the things that this situation requires.But he's trying, and trying is new for him, and I think it deserves a chance."
"I know."
"I love you."
"I love you too, Mom."
I hung up and sat at the counter for a long time. The omelet had congealed in the pan. Outside, the Atlanta afternoon was doing its thing, all sunshine and indifferent warmth, and somewhere in Duluth, Minnesota, my father had bookmarked my schedule on his computer and asked my mother to call me because he was too afraid to do it himself.
I told Mik that night. We were at his apartment, which had undergone a transformation so gradual that neither of us had formally acknowledged it. My running shoes were by the door. My cereal was in the cabinet, next to Mik's steel-cut oats, a pairing that said everything about us. There were photos now. Not many. One of Katya that his mother had mailed from Moscow. One of Mik and me at a team dinner, taken by Jonah, printed at a drugstore and stuck to the fridge with a magnet. We looked happy in it. We looked like two people who had stopped pretending.
"My dad is coming to Saturday's game," I said.
Mik was reading. He lowered the book. He had moved on from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, which he described as "an upgrade in suffering," and the bookmark was a piece of paper on which I had written "you are a beautiful refrigerator" in terrible handwriting, which he pretended to hate and clearly treasured.
"How do you feel about this?" he asked.
"I don't know. Scared. Angry. Hopeful. All of them at the same time, which doesn't feel like it should be possible but apparently is."
"These are not contradictory emotions. They are layers. You can be angry at someone for the past and hopeful about thefuture simultaneously. This is not dysfunction. This is being a person."
"When did you get so wise?"
"I have always been wise. You were too busy being loud to notice."
I threw a pillow at him. He caught it without looking up from his book, which was infuriating and impressive.
Saturday arrived with the inevitability of all dreaded things. I knew my father was in the building because my mother texted a photo of their seats, lower bowl, center ice. Good seats. My brother must have arranged them. The family network operating behind the scenes, moving pieces into position for a reunion that nobody had scripted and nobody knew the ending to.