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When I went out to the garage and picked up the car seat, intent on driving us somewhere to find breakfast, I had a brief flash of Zoe’s smug smile when I told her I’d be able to figure out how to get the car seat in.
Because I definitely could not figure out how to get the fucking car seat in.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
Mira was jumping up and down the front steps while I worked in the driveway. “We get pancakes, Uncle Liam?”
She was still in her pajamas—this time, ducks holding umbrellas—because she refused to change her clothes, and that was not a battle I was fighting before fortification with food and coffee.
“Soon,” I told her. “Just need to get this stupid thing in my car; otherwise, we can’t go anywhere.”
I pulled up an instructional video online and cursed through the entire thing.
“You need a fucking PhD to get this thing in,” I mumbled.
I cut my hand trying to wrangle it. My forehead was beaded with sweat. Once I’d attached it to the metal hooks hidden underneath my seat—put in a place where no large person’s hands could conceivably reach them—and pulled the straps hard enough, I knew without a doubt that I’d have to cut that damn seat out if we ever needed it moved.
My chest was heaving when I motioned for Mira. “Come on, duck. Time for breakfast.”
At the endearment, her eyes damn near glowed with happiness.
“Duck, duck, duck,” she chanted, hopping up into my car and settling herself into the seat. “I’m a little duck.”
My lips curved into a reluctant smile. “Mira the Duck,” I agreed.
We managed breakfast just fine, though I opted for the drive-through because the last thing I wanted to deal with was some intrepid Denver fan snapping our picture and making a big fucking thing about it online.
Chris’s accident had been headline news for a solid week. There was no escaping the tragedy of it and how it made the fan base feel after seeing his face on the field for more than a decade.
He was a stalwart on the team. Same as me.
And as I drove back to his house, with his daughter happily munching on pancakes in my back seat, I knew that if the situation were reversed, he would’ve handled all this shit so much better than I had.
My bones still felt heavy with it all. Like someone had draped extra weights over my shoulders, looped them to my wrists, and hung them around my neck.
And instead of feeling remotely equipped to step into this new reality, I felt quite like someone had shoved me off a one-hundred-foot-high diving board into an angry, churning body of water. Just keeping my head up was a task; so was trying to suck in air while I navigated something new.
Not that kids were new to me. I had a big family back home. Cousins always running around. Because Mum had married Nigel when I was just starting seventh grade, I was tiptoeing into my teenage years by the time she had a few more kids.
I knew how to change a nappy. Knew how to properly warm up a bottle.
But not once had I ever felt comfortable doing any of it.
I loved them just fine. Got along with the new family. Despite that, whenever I visited, I counted down the days until I could leave. I hated walking around that house, walking around a neighborhood where people recognized me, looking, as I did, exactly like my dad—all my pent-up anger coursing under my skin.
Every once in a while, a British tabloid would snap a picture of me out and about in London, and soon enough, Mum would see a small article with a quippy headline about my career in Denver. Inevitably,there’d be a few lines in the piece talking about how I’d never gone to any of my dad’s games after my parents divorced. Conjecture and assumptions abounded as to why, but there was always a comment about how I wasn’t playing the game he loved.
No. I was playing the gameIloved. And he could fuck off if it bothered him.
So, yeah, going home always came with a bucketload of tangled feelings that I strove to avoid. It was easier to let my family visit me. Kept things clean. Neat. Simple.
My mum never held that against me. Not any of it. The lack of visits. The articles. That my eyes, my jaw, the dark shade of my hair—they were all from him. But I always felt, just a little bit, that it must be hard to have his face staring back at her.
It was hard to shake the gloom of my thoughts when we got home from breakfast, and I worried that the dark turn in my head had somehow seeped into Mira.
Because the first thing she did when I unhooked her from her car seat was run up the stairs and stand in the open doorway of Chris and Amie’s bedroom.
It took me a moment to find her because she’d hardly looked at that room the entire time I was there.
