Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
Rook
The salt pork went in first, cut small and rendered low until the bottom of the pot was glassy with fat. I’d driven to two stores that afternoon for the clams, settling on the little ones from Cedar Key that were as close to Maine as Illinois was ever going to get.
My mother made chowder in a pot twice as old as me. She’d give it to me if I asked.
I diced the onions while the pork rendered. When they began to cook, the kitchen smelled like Sunday afternoons when I was a kid. Diced potatoes waited on the cutting board beside clam juice in a measuring cup and cream coming to room temperature.
The first time I made the chowder for Varga, I carried it across the city in a container that was still warm.
He opened the door on crutches and looked at it, and then at me, like he was trying to work out the angle.
There wasn’t one. It was only me who didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say in words, so I brought soup.
Six years later, I still sometimes used my cooking to speak for me.
I dumped the potatoes in and gave them a stir.
Varga had texted from his apartment an hour ago.
It was a one-bedroom prop in a high-rise near the rink.
To the world, it was Lucas Varga’s official residence, and he curated it like a stage set: receiving mail, leaving a toothbrush by the lavatory, and cycling condiments in the fridge.
It was the street address for every story he told in the room. We’d done our job well.
He stopped by every couple of weeks to collect the mail and water a plant that was, as far as either of us could tell, immortal. After a road trip, the visit was mandatory: collecting ten days of envelopes and letting the building staff see his face.
Tonight he was going to ask me for something. He’d been building toward it for at least ten days, probably longer. Somewhere over Lake Erie that morning, four rows behind him, I’d decided. Whatever he asked for, the answer was yes.
I’d drafted the entire conversation, both sides of it, and looked at the finished thing in my head. He would ask. I would say yes. I would even get there a little ahead of him, soften the road in, and make it easy. It was something I could give him.
I stirred the pot and felt the road trip lingering in my body. The ankle had gone from purple to a yellow-green that looked worse and hurt less. Right on time, the garage door started to grind.
He came in talking.
”—so the kid at the pro shop, the new one, Brendan, Brandon, he’s holding my skate up to the light like he’s appraising a diamond, and he goes, when did you last replace this holder, and I said I don’t know, June? And he looked at me like I told him I don’t believe in flossing.”
He always came in talking, but this time he was off by a degree only I would ever measure. The story was fine. It was his delivery—a half-beat faster than usual.
“So now I’m getting a new holder Thursday, which, whatever, but he wants to talk blade profiles—“
He set his bag down by the laundry room door and saw the pot. It stopped the narration.
“You’re making the chowder.”
“Yes, Mom’s recipe.”
“Okay,” he said, and he stopped talking.
I watched him take his jacket off and hang it up . We sat at the kitchen table with two bowls. Varga didn’t pick up his spoon. He pressed both hands flat on the table and said, “I love the life you’ve built for us.”
And for a reason only the gods understand, I cut off the rest he was planning to say. “I know,” I said. “I know what this is, and I want you to know I’m already ahead of it.”
His mouth hung open, still trying to form his next words. I kept going, certain that I was handing him a gift I’d been carrying since Buffalo. “The Kovac piece. You’re out of it. No call, no quote, nothing with your name near it. I took care of it.”
The kitchen was quiet. He didn’t move or speak for a full thirty seconds.
“Say that again,” he said.
“You’re out of the piece. I asked him to leave you out, and he agreed.”
“When?”
“Buffalo. The first night.”
“Did he come to you, or did you go to him?”
“I went to him.”
“You texted him.” He was putting the pieces together.
“The first night in Buffalo. The night I asked you for the hour.” He leaned back as he continued to calculate.
“You answered me at 2:30 in the morning. Okay. I was awake; I saw the time.” He looked back at me.
“You handled me first. You got my name pulled out of a reporter’s notebook, and then you texted me back. ”
“Luki—“
“Don’t.” The word came out at full volume, like a slap to the chest. “Don’t Luki me right now.
I want to understand the order of operations.
You decided a reporter couldn’t talk to me, and you didn’t ask me if I wanted to talk to him.
You didn’t ask me what I’d say, and you decided what I’d say was dangerous, removing me from the conversation, and then you came home and made chowder and wanted me to thank you. ”
“It’s my mother’s chowder,” I said, which was the stupidest sentence of my life.
“Five years,” he said. He stood. “Five years, Rook. I just got home from the apartment I visit to collect my mail. It’s an entire apartment, furnished, so there’s an address with my name on it that isn’t this one.
The cleaner signed an NDA even though she’s never seen a photograph of us together because we don’t have photographs. You decided we can’t have photographs—“
“To protect you—“
“The garage door.” He pointed at it through the wall.
“You taught me to lower it before I was all the way inside. You taught me that, Rook, like it was a hockey drill, edge work at home. I’ve used the front door of my own house exactly twice.
We have two separate Christmases—five years of that.
My mother cooking for a son who has nothing to say about his life—“ His voice cracked.
“And I let it all mean love. Every piece. I told myself, this is what love from a careful man looks like.”
I sat there, and the worst part was that under every item he listed, I felt the original reason glowing like a coal.
I had him set up the apartment because a beat writer in our first year had asked around about who lived where.
The NDA happened because I heard about a cleaner who sold a story about a player on another team.
Every brick had a reason, and that reason was love, but it still built a wall.
“This isn’t about Kovac and Toronto,” he said. “Don’t reach for that. We’ve covered it.” He put his knuckles on the table and leaned on them. “This is the thing under Toronto. You’d rather handle me than trust me, and you’ve been doing it ever since.”
I scoured my brain for a counterexample.
He watched me searching. He knew exactly what I was doing.
“Yeah,” he said, softer. “That’s what I thought.”
“I was protecting you,” I said.
“From what?” He spread his arms. “Name it. Heath has known for three seasons. Pratt’s known longer, you can see it in him, and don’t tell me you can’t.
Kovac sat across a table from you and asked if you really thought nobody could see.
The league has Heath and Kieran sitting on a bench with rings on, Rook, so name it.
Name the thing. What are you protecting me from? ”
And I reached for it. I reached all the way down, but I couldn’t quite get there. It was a room inside me with no handle on my side of the door. What came out instead was:
“From what happens, and what the league does to—“ I stopped. “From what happens.”
“You don’t know,” Varga said. “You built all of this, and you don’t actually know why.”
“I know enough.”
“Tobbet akarok ennél.”
I looked back at him. It couldn’t mean what he’d said it did.
“Buffalo,” he said. “We were lying in bed with the snow coming down. You asked me what it meant, and I told you it meant go to sleep.” His voice flattened.
“It means I want more than this. I said it to your face, Rook. I said the truest thing I’ve ever said to you, out loud, in the room with you, and I put it in a language you couldn’t read because that was the only place it was safe.
You’re not the only one who built a locked room.
Mine’s just smaller. Mine’s in Hungarian. ”
I stood. I reached toward him and the back of his head, the place my hand had landed a thousand times. It would be the cue, the come here, you’ve been loud enough. It was the only language I had left in my body.
He stepped back from me.
“Don’t.” His eyes were glistening with unshed tears.
“That’s the thing. That’s the exact thing.
You put your hand there and I go quiet, and the quiet feels like peace, but you’ve been mistaking it for agreement.
I go quiet because I love you, not because we settled anything.
We have never settled anything together.
You decide, and then you touch me, and I stop talking. ”
I put my hand down.
“I’m sorry about Kovac,” I said. “I should have asked you first.”
He exhaled as he opened and closed his hands.
“You’re sorry about the smallest thing in the room.
You’re apologizing for the one thing I can point to.
Okay.” He nodded slowly. “I’ve let you do this.
That’s on me. I know that. I let you run all of it and never pushed or asked because asking felt like—“
He stopped. I watched him swallow the end of the sentence.
The chowder went cold on the table between us, both bowls full.
“Luki.” I said it the way I’d said it a hundred times; the way it worked.
“Don’t.” He didn’t raise his voice this time. “Not that. Not tonight.”
“Lucas—“
“That’s no better. There’s no name that fixes this. You’ve had five years of nights to talk about this, and now you’re acting like the problem is which name you use.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I didn’t have an answer.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“No. It’s not.” He took his glass to the sink, rinsed it, and set it in the rack. “I’m going to bed,” he said.
“I should have told you—“
“In the guest room.” He said it evenly. The argument was over. He stopped in the doorway, not turning around. “I’d have carried it with you if you’d ever asked me. That’s the whole thing. You never shared enough for me to offer.”
I heard him climb the stairs and then close a door we never closed.
I locked up the house alone, turning off the lights over the sink and the stove. Upstairs, the guest room door was closed, but there was light under it.
I stood in the hallway for a moment and then went into our bedroom because I didn’t know what else to do.
Varga’s nightstand still held the usual chaos—chargers and the book he wasn’t reading, but the carved bird was gone.
The little wooden bird that he’d slept beside every night of his life in three countries crossed the hall with him to the guest room.
I went back to his door and raised my hand to knock.
I heard him in there. He wasn’t crying. He was moving around, making a strange bed acceptable. Finally, I pulled my hand down. I thought we should both sleep. It would look better in the morning.
But I didn’t go to bed. I went downstairs to the office because the office was where I went when I needed to handle something, and my body still believed there was something to handle.
I unlocked the filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. It held the folder of paperwork, the lawn service agreement, and the cleaner’s NDA. At the back, behind all of it, was the small velvet box.
I touched the lid, but I didn’t take it out. It had been in the drawer for four months, waiting for the right moment.
The NDA came out instead. I’d had it drawn up because a cleaner in Dallas sold a story about a player once. I sat at the desk, holding it with both hands. The urge to tear it in half rose into my arms.
I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the cleaner, or the lawyer who’d want a phone call, or any practical thing. My hands couldn’t do it. I put the page back in the folder, and the folder back in the drawer, locking everything away as always.
The living room was dark except for the clock on the cable box.
I sat down on my side of the couch and turned the TV on without thinking.
It opened where it always opened—Varga’s Netflix profile.
A show was paused on the fourth episode.
It happened the night before the road trip.
He had his head in my lap, saying don’t let me fall asleep.
He fell asleep, and I let it play for five minutes more.
My throat constricted.
I turned the TV off and sat for a while, and then I went upstairs.
Sleep didn’t come. I lay flat on my back on my side of the bed. The light under Varga’s door went off at 1:30. It came on again twenty minutes later.
Somewhere around three, I tried to imagine what asking would have looked like, how it would have turned out if I had asked any question. Do you want the apartment? Do you want the curfew? Do you want this?
I couldn’t think of any other possible answers than the “yes” he gave by default.
Something was over. I didn’t yet know what came next. I had no plan, and the absence of a plan was entirely new.