"I watched every game," he said. "Every single one. Since you got traded here. I watched them on my computer in the den and your mother pretended not to notice."
"I know. She told me about the bookmarks."
The faintest crack in his composure. Almost a smile. Almost. "That woman cannot keep a secret."
"She kept yours for two years."
The almost-smile faded. He nodded. The nod contained acknowledgment and regret and something else that I chose to interpret as love, because my father had never said the word and I had spent my entire life learning to read it in his silences.
"Can I take you to dinner?" he said. "You and... Mik. If he's willing."
"You want to have dinner with my boyfriend."
The word landed between us. Boyfriend. I had never used it in front of my father. I had never used it at all, actually. Mik and I hadn't labeled things. But standing in front of my dad, in a room full of families, the word felt right and necessary and I was not going to soften it.
My father absorbed the word the way he absorbed everything. Slowly, completely, without visible reaction. Then he said, "Yes. If he's willing."
"I'll ask him."
"Okay."
"Dad?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you for coming."
He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. His grip was firm and brief, the physical vocabulary of a man who expressed love through duration of contact rather than intensity. Two seconds. Then he let go and stepped back and my mother materialized at his side and put her arm through his and they looked like what they were, which was two people who had beenmarried for thirty-two years and were still figuring out how to talk to their son.
I went back to the locker room. Mik was at his stall, dressed and waiting. He didn't ask. He just looked at me and I saw the question in his eyes, and the concern, and the readiness to be whatever I needed.
"He wants to have dinner with us," I said.
"Both of us?"
"Both of us. He called you 'the defenseman' and then corrected himself to 'Mik.' He bought a Reapers polo. It still had the creases in it."
Something moved across Mik's face. Not pity. Not sympathy. Understanding. The understanding of a man who knew what it was like to have a father who failed you, and who knew that failure and love were not mutually exclusive, and who knew that the distance between them was where most people spent their whole lives standing.
"I will come to dinner," he said.
"Yeah?"
"He is your father. And he is trying. In my experience, trying is rare."
I sat down next to him and leaned my shoulder against his. In the locker room, in view of anyone who might walk by, I leaned against the man I loved and he leaned back.
Nobody walked by. But if they had, I would not have moved.
Neither would he.
MIK
Dinner with Cole's father was on a Wednesday at a steakhouse in Buckhead that was quiet enough for conversation and expensive enough to suggest that someone was trying to make an impression. I was not sure who was trying to impress whom. Perhaps all of us were performing for each other, the way people do when the stakes of a meal exceed the food on the table.
I wore a button-down shirt. I ironed it. Cole watched me iron it and said nothing, which was its own form of understanding, because he knew that my preparation for this dinner had nothing to do with wrinkles and everything to do with the need to control something when everything else felt ungovernable.
Cole's mother was named Linda. She hugged me at the restaurant entrance with the immediate, enveloping warmth of a woman who had decided before meeting me that I was welcome. She smelled like perfume and something baked, and she held on for two seconds longer than a polite greeting required, and I understood that the extra two seconds were a message. You are not a stranger here.