Parker approached us by himself.
“I’m sorry again,” he said.
Maisie held the football close.
“It’s okay.”
He shook his head.
“My mom shouldn’t have done that.”
Maisie thought for a moment.
“My dad used to say doing something bad doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.”
I looked at her.
Gavin had said that about a completely different situation involving a broken kitchen lamp, but I decided not to ruin the moment.
Parker smiled.
“Your dad sounds pretty cool.”
“He was.”
That night, Maisie placed the football on the coffee table beneath Gavin’s framed photograph.
Then she draped his old jersey across the chair where he used to sit.
For a long time, she stared at both.
“Do you think Dad saw today?”
There was no easy answer to that question.
I sat beside her.
“I don’t know.”
She nodded.
“I hope he did.”
“So do I.”
A few weeks later, she wrote Cole a thank-you letter.
At the bottom, she added one sentence:
The football is next to my dad’s jersey, so we both get to keep it.
Sunday football never became exactly what it used to be.
It couldn’t.
Gavin’s chair was still empty.
But Maisie started sitting closer to me, explaining plays the way he once explained them to her.
One afternoon, she paused the game and pointed at the screen.
“Mom, do you know what the safety is supposed to do?”
I remembered Gavin asking her almost the same question when she was six.
“Stops people from being safe?”
Maisie stared at me in horror.
Then she burst out laughing.
“Dad would be so disappointed in you.”
“Your father knew what he was getting into when he married me.”
She shook her head and started explaining the play anyway.
I understood maybe half of it.
But while she talked, I looked at Gavin’s jersey, the signed football, and the little girl who had finally started laughing at football again.
For almost a year, every game had reminded me only of the person missing from our couch.
