Page 123 of Main Event

“That’s everything,” she says. Quietly. Just for me.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s everything.”

Travis plays the song after.

Not a song—the song. The one he started writing in the back of the tour bus eighteen months ago, the one he played in fragments for Andi on the Sound Bar tour when it was still taking shape, the one he told her he’d finish once he knew how it ended.

He knows how it ends now.

He plays it all the way through.

I don’t know all the words—it’s the first time anyone has heard the complete version. But I know what it’s about because I know what it was written in response to. A woman who built something in the middle of everything trying to destroy it, and the year it took to understand that what she built was big enough to hold more than she had thought.

Shane is not managing his expression at all now.

Will has given up entirely.

My mother is crying so deeply that my father has produced a handkerchief from somewhere, one that nobody knew he carried, which is one of the small revelations that days like this produce.

Kelly, in the second-to-last row, has her hand over her mouth. Deja, beside her, has her head tilted slightly, listening the way she listens to things she’s decided are worth hearing—completely, without pretending she’s doing something else.

Mrs. Alvarez has her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed.

Mack is looking at the ceiling.

When Travis finishes, there is a moment of complete silence in a room that has received something and needs a breath before it responds.

Then the room responds.

We eat in the kitchen, the dining room, and wherever there’s a surface because my mother has cooked for thirty people and intends to feed them all twice. Shane has found the speakers and is managing the music with the same serious commitment he brings to everything he considers worth doing. Brandon is at the kitchen table with Kelly and Deja, the three of them in a conversation I can’t hear that makes Kelly laugh until she covers her face.

I find Andi by the window in the living room, away from the noise for a moment, looking at the backyard. I come to stand beside her. She leans into me without looking away from the window.

“Mack,” she says.

“I know.”

“He gave me away,” she says. “He actually—” She stops. Starts again. “I didn’t know how much I needed that until he was walking me in and I understood that this is what it’s supposed to feel like. To have someone give you away who you know will still be there after.”

I put my arm around her.

“He’ll always be there,” I say.

“I know.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Your parents too.”

“Yes.”

“And Brandon.”

“Him too.”

She looks at the backyard. At the December garden, bare but still itself.

“Luke?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Travis finished the song.”