Niko
Chapter six
Icarried a chair into my mother’s house by the side door, where the storm door swung out and caught me across the back of the arm.
“Ma. Hold it.”
“It’s open.”
“Open isn’t held.”
She caught it with her hip and held it. I came through sideways with the chair’s back rail riding my collarbone.
The kitchen smelled like a spice rack, cumin blending with nutmeg and cinnamon.
It told me Ma had pulled her favorite pastitsio out of the freezer even though she’d lost the vote to tacos.
“Is that the chair?”
“It’s the chair.”
“You’ve had it for two years, Niko.”
“And I finished it two years ago.” I set it down in the front room and pressed a thumb against the back rail where the tenon fit into the mortise. It was solid and had been since the afternoon I’d glued it. “You could have come and gotten it any time.”
“He says this like I’m the one who owns a truck.” She helped me out of my coat the way she’d been doing since I was six. “Gus, Niko fixed the chair.”
“I heard,” my father said. “I’m right here.”
I followed Ma into the kitchen. There was a line of taco fillings set out along the counter: meat, warm shells, shredded cheese, and a bowl of shredded cabbage because Ma thought it was healthier. At the far end was a steaming dish of pastitsio.
Max was filming the counter.
He had his phone low, tracking down the line of bowls, doing his slow sideways camera walk, narrating along the way.
”—and what you’re seeing here is a house divided. Somebody in this house said Mexican, and somebody else said fine, and then went to the freezer instead—“
Ma entered the shot with a dish towel and slapped him across the shoulder.
“Ow.”
“Put the phone away.”
“That’s an assault on a working professional.”
“Put it away; we’re going to eat.”
He stuck the phone in his pocket and started moving bowls four inches to the left. “Can I say one thing about the arrangement of this?”
“No,” Ma said.
“On the diagonal. That’s all. If the bowls go on the diagonal, the eye travels—“
“The eye can walk around the table like everybody else.”
“Yiayia, back me up. Diagonal.”
“It’s food,” my grandmother said from the table, where she had been sitting with her hands folded, watching the two of us like we were a favorite TV program. “You put it in your mouth. It doesn’t matter where it sits.”
Max held up both hands and surrendered the point.
I pulled a plate out of the cupboard and started stacking shells while Max drifted back in beside me and stole a piece of the meat straight out of the pan with two fingers.
“Is he coming?” Ma asked. “Rafe. Or is he busy? Hockey players must be busy.”
“He’s busy on the road,” Max said, chewing. “It’s Denver, I think. Somewhere out west.”
They’d been in Denver Friday.
Tonight was Dallas. Five o’clock our time, which meant the puck had dropped while I was parking the truck.
I put the plate of shells on the table.
“Denver,” Ma said. “Does he wear a proper coat? Max never wears one that’s actually warm.”
“He’s from Saskatchewan. I think he has a coat. I think in Saskatchewan they give you a coat when you’re born, it comes with the—“
“Don’t be smart,” Ma said.
We set the table as she walked past us with the pastitsio.
The interrogation began before Max assembled his first taco.
“So,” she said. “Tell me about this boy.”
“You’ve seen him,” Max said. “You watched the videos.”
“I’ve seen the videos. I’ve seen Kelly Ripa on TV.” She pointed the serving spoon at him. “That doesn’t mean I know what they’re like. Tell me about him.”
“He’s a sweetheart. He’s the easiest person I’ve ever worked with.” Max built a taco while he talked, cabbage first. He always did that wrong. “He shows up early and thanks the driver.”
“Does he eat properly? On the road, with the travel.”
“Ma, he’s a professional athlete. I’m sure the team feeds him like he’s a racehorse. There are people hired to make sure he eats.”
Ma put a big spoonful of pastitsio on his plate next to the tacos, uninvited. Max ate it without comment.
My father finished chewing, set his fork down, and wiped his mouth.
“Who wrote the contract?” he asked.
“Lawyers on both sides,” Max said. “Rafe’s agent went through it line by line, and his agent’s good. There’s a walk-away clause. Either of us can end it with a text—no penalty and no explanation owed.”
“And when it ends.” My father picked his fork back up. “What happens to him?”
“It gets announced that two nice young men decided they’re better as friends. Everybody’s sad for a weekend, and it does neither of us any harm at all.”
I said nothing. I ate, listened, and passed the dishes asked for.
“Twenty years old,” my mother said, half to herself, working on her plate. “And he stood up in front of everybody.”
“He stood up in front of his team when he came out,” Max said.
“What did they do?” Ma asked.
“Changed their power-play plans,” I said.
The words tumbled out without thinking. Everyone looked at me. I spooned more meat into a taco shell.
“It’s in the coverage,” I said. “His captain moved the meeting along. I saw it somewhere.”
Yiayia had asked nothing yet. She’d eaten one taco, slowly, with a knife and fork, and she watched Max the entire time.
“Does he laugh?” she asked.
Max blinked. “Does he—“
“You’re funny,” she said. “People laugh at what you do all day. They push the button, and you make them laugh. Does he laugh?”
My brother was never at a loss for an answer, but Yiayia’s question stopped him.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice a little unsteady. “He doesn’t laugh out loud much, but he’s got this one where the corner of his mouth goes up just a bit, and then he’s serious again, fast.” Max demonstrated badly. “It’s better than an actual laugh, honestly. I have to work for it.”
“Hm,” my grandmother said, and picked her fork back up.
I had spent two hours with the man, and I could have told her about Rafe’s shoulders and the handshake and the care he took when holding one of my pieces for the first time. Still, I couldn’t answer the question about whether he laughed. I saw him smile—once.
“Okay, but what’s he actually like?” Ma asked, leaning in, with both elbows on the table. “Not in front of the cameras. Him.”
Max smiled and reached for his phone.
“He sent this before the game,” Max said. “This afternoon.”
He began reading. Sorry to miss taco Sunday. Tell your mom thanks for inviting me even though I—“
He cleared his throat, and all the surrounding conversations ended.
“Tell your mom thanks for inviting me, even though I couldn’t make it.
I’ll fix that. Question for your grandmother — the cedar chest at the shop, is there a maker’s mark under the lid?
Rook told me a lot of the old shops burned one into the underside where nobody looks.
I didn’t want to open it. Anyway. Game at 5. Tacos for me next time.”
Max stuffed the phone back into his pocket.
“He asked about the chest,” my grandmother said.
“Yes, he did.”
“How does he know about my chest?”
“It was at Niko’s workshop. It’s such a beautiful piece. I pointed it out.”
“Is there a mark?” Yiayia asked. “Inside the lid.”
“Yes,” I said. “There is.”
I’d found it four years ago, the week the chest arrived at the shop. It was burned into the underside of the lid, left of center, a little oval with a name in it and Racine, Wis. underneath. I’d looked the shop up that same night and learned they’d closed in 1961.
He’d been in my shop for two hours, and he remembered the chest.
When we finished eating, dinner broke up into stations. Ma washed the dishes by hand because she didn’t trust a dishwasher to get them clean. Max dried. Yiayia supervised from her chair. Dad grabbed a beer out of the fridge and leaned on the counter as he pulled out his phone.
“Theo sent this,” he announced. Theo was my uncle in Milwaukee. “It’s the boy. Your boy. Look at this.”
Max leaned over while he was drying a plate. On the screen was a hockey clip. It was Friday night’s Denver game. I watched over his shoulder as Rafe moved past defensemen to bury a shot in the net.
“Strong boy,” Dad said, approving, and drank. “He’s one of the fighters?”
“He’s—no, Dad, he doesn’t fight,” Max said. “He’s a skill guy.”
“Tall boy with broad shoulders like that, they teach them to fight.” My father had maybe watched a dozen hockey games in his life, all of them while Uncle Theo was visiting. “That’s why they’ll keep him.”
“He’s scored in six straight games,” I blurted out.
The kitchen was suddenly silent.
I lowered my voice. “He’s second on the team in scoring since December first,” I added.
“They don’t put him in to play rough. They put him on the ice when they need a goal.
He kills penalties too, which is unusual for a rookie, and he hasn’t taken a penalty himself since November.
Over seven weeks. That’s the longest active streak on the team. ”
My father looked at me over the phone.
“Since November,” he said.
“The twenty-third.”
Ma turned the water off.
Max stood there with the towel and the plate, mid-wipe. He was silent.
Ma asked the question on everyone’s mind. “How do you know that?”
I could have escaped the question by assigning it to Max talking about Rafe. Everyone would believe that. Max’s mouth never stopped, but that wouldn’t be me. I never gave evasive answers.
“I looked,” I said.
“You looked?”
“The scores are public, Ma. It’s not the archives of the Vatican. You Google it.”
“Every night?” Yiayia asked.
Max broke in. “The penalty thing is honestly funny because there’s a reason he doesn’t take penalties. We talked about it at dinner. He said, and I quote, ‘The penalty box is boring. I have to watch four other guys do my skating for me.’”
He was on a roll. He moved his hands as he continued talking. Ma laughed and returned to finishing the dishes.
Max had rescued me in front of the family without even glancing my way. When he finished the story, he folded the towel over the rack and tipped his head toward the back door. I followed him out.
My parents’ back steps had been the official location for brother business since before I could drive. Max sat on the second step. I sat down beside him, and the cold bled upward through the concrete.
Max said nothing about what happened in the kitchen. I’d been bracing for it, but he left it alone. He started talking about Rafe, not about me.
“He asked the driver’s name,” Max said. “That first night. Before we’d gone a block. It’s Dmitri. Rafe remembered it the second time we used the car. He asked about Dmitri’s nephew and his youth hockey team.” Max shook his head. “I’ve worked with so many people who just call every driver ‘boss.’”
“Sounds like Rafe.”
“Yeah, and he’s okay—with everything. He’s easy. Truly easy. When I’ve worked with other people, there’s always a moment they disagree. It’s the lighting, the billing, or who stands on which side. Rafe hasn’t questioned anything.”
“Does he ever say no?” I asked.
Max looked at me.
“Why would he?” Max said.
I didn’t have an answer for that. “Forget it,” I said.
“So the shop footage had good numbers, by the way. The unboxing shots. The Ironhawks’ PR flagged it, and that nearly doubled the views I expected. They suggested we make a video in the shop. You don’t have to be in it. Just the shop.”
“No.”
”—and I told them no,“ Max said. “Already. I’m on your side.”
I looked at him.
“I knew your answer, Niko. I’ve been able to read your mind since I was fifteen.”
He was probably at least half right. “The shots were good, though.”
“They were great,” Max said. “The light in there at two o’clock. I’ve been telling you about the afternoon glow for at least three years.”
“Don’t.”
”—one video—“
“This conversation’s done, Max.”
He laughed, stood, and gathered his coat tighter around himself. At the door he paused, hand on the latch.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “he asked about you. In the car after the shop. What you were like when we were kids.” A beat. “Nobody asks me that. They ask what you charge for restorations.”
The storm door clapped shut behind him, then the inner door, softer.
I sat on the steps by myself in the cold and pulled out my phone. The app was already open—third period, Ironhawks up by one, two minutes left.
I sat out there and watched the clock run another minute.
When I came back inside, everyone had settled into their evening patterns.
Dad was in his chair, drifting in and out of sleep.
Yiayia had her TV program on, sound down to almost nothing, because she watches it for the faces.
Ma was at her little desk in the corner with a drawer of photographs open in front of her.
Max had folded himself sideways into the loveseat with his phone, editing something, thumbs moving fast.
I sat on one end of the couch. “This one,” Ma said, holding a photograph up and out. “Max, look. It was your first haircut. You cried so hard the woman gave you a sucker just to breathe.”
“I remember the sucker.”
“You don’t remember the sucker,” I said. “You were two.”
“It left an emotional imprint.”
I pulled my phone out. The game was over. The Ironhawks won.
“Yes,“ I said.
It was out loud, but I didn’t intend it that way. I started to raise a fist but caught it and pulled it back down. Dad opened his eyes, and Yiayia looked away from her program at me.
“Yes, what?” Ma asked.
“Nothing.”
“Niko.”
“It’s nothing. It’s a—I remembered something.”
“Something?” Dad asked.
“For the shop. It’s a thing for the shop tomorrow.”
Max was quiet. “You said yes about the shop with a fist?” Ma set the photograph back inside the drawer.
“There was no fist.”
“There was a fist,” Yiayia said, as she turned her attention back to her program.
“The Ironhawks won,” I said. “In Dallas. Just now. Four to three.”
“The hockey,” Ma said. “You were checking the hockey game.”
“The score. It’s public. People check scores.”
“You’ve been checking it all night.” I heard delight in Ma’s voice. “Gus, he’s a hockey fan now. He knows the numbers, the penalties—“
“It’s Max’s friend,” Dad said.
“Did the boy score?” Ma asked. “Rafe? Is that why the yes?”
“Twice, Ma.”
My phone buzzed, and everyone looked at me.
Rafe: I want to see the drawer. Thursday work?
Four people looked at me, expecting a response. “Rafe wants to see my drawer,” I said.