Niko
Chapter eighteen
The pins on the blanket chest were taking me twice as long as they should have. I kept working anyway, because slow work is still work, and the alternative was doing nothing at all. I struck the line, set the chisel, and took the waste out in thin, careful bites.
The block plane sat at the end of the bench, squared to the edge, where Rafe left it what felt like a lifetime ago. I had oiled around it, sanded around it, and set my square down on the other side of the vise to keep from disturbing it.
My phone buzzed against the tool tray.
Rafe: question. when you sand between coats do you go as light as the first sanding or lighter
Niko: Lighter. You’re not shaping anymore. You’re just knocking down what the oil raised.
Rafe: knocking down what the oil raised. ok. writing that one down
I settled the phone back on the tray. Before I could pick up my chisel, it rang. It was Ma.
“Have you talked to your brother?”
“Good morning, Ma.”
“Voula sent me another article. I read half of it and had to sit down. Niko, they have a photograph of Max from four years ago at a food drive, and they put it next to a headline that says duped. He organized that food drive.”
“The food drive isn’t relevant, Ma.”
“Nothing in the article is relevant, that’s my point, I’m making your point for you.
” I heard her opening and closing cabinet doors and then running water.
“And the boy, Rafe, is anyone feeding him? Or is he just alone in his apartment with the whole city writing about him? Athletes don’t cook, Niko. ”
“He eats, Ma.”
“How do you know he eats?”
I thought about Rafe bringing Italian beef.
“He’s from a farm,” I said. “They teach them to eat.”
“Don’t get smart with me.” I heard the clank of a pot. “I’m making avgolemono. You’ll come get some for your freezer and don’t tell me your freezer’s full. And when your brother surfaces, you tell him to call his mother, because right now he’s texting me one line at a time like I’m a client.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Love you, Niko.”
“Love you, Ma.” She hung up.
She wasn’t wrong about the texting. Since the leak, Max had been sending me brief messages, unlike the detailed ones he’d been sending since he got a phone.
I went back to the chest. I got one pin pared clean and was marking the next when the phone buzzed again.
Max: coming by. is the shop open?
That was a perfect example—six words.
Niko: It’s open.
I filled my electric kettle and plugged it in. Five minutes later, the bell over the door rang. Max stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, yourself.”
His clothes were conservative for Max, but better than what most men our age wore. He didn’t carry in a bakery box or coffee. Both hands were empty.
Max crossed to the stool at the end of the bench and sat down.
“I’m making us tea,” I said. “It soothes.”
“Sure.”
I dropped two tea bags into mugs and poured water from the kettle over them. When the tea was ready, I handed one to Max.
“Thanks.”
He sipped a little and didn’t say anything. Usually, we both drank coffee, but Ma always brought the tea when a serious conversation was about to take place.
“You saw Varga’s thing, right?” Max asked. “The lecture.”
“I saw it.”
“It was amazing. There aren’t words.” He tried to smile, but didn’t quite make it. “He’s a genius, you know, and he made it all look spontaneous. You can’t teach that.”
“You could.”
“I could,” he agreed.
I pulled the other stool around with my foot and sat across from Max.
“Okay,” he said, staring down into his mug. “So I need to talk to you, and I need you to let me get through it before you say anything. It has taken me days to get this in order.”
“Fine,” I said. “Shoot.”
He set the mug down and placed his hands flat on his knees.
“Before this blew up, I had 1.1 million followers,” he said. “As of last night, I have 1.6. I’ve picked up half a million people in less than a week. For scale, it took me two years to get my first half million.”
He looked across the bench at me.
“The brands that went quiet on me in January called back. All of them. There are two new ones interested in me. Up to now, they said they were the kind that didn’t work with creators my size. Apparently, now they do.”
I sensed there was a lot more beyond that.
“There’s a podcast that offered me a recurring segment called Duped, Niko. It’s a weekly segment. I’d be the host. The premise is I interview other people who’ve been publicly deceived, and we heal together. It’s all sponsored by a mattress company.”
I think he expected me to laugh. He leaned forward, and I didn’t laugh.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “What they are paying for is my victim status. I’m the nice, trusting, innocent design guy who got fed to hockey’s PR machine.”
He shook his head. “That’s the story everyone believes now. How can I be the victim, Niko, when I wrote the script? It was my idea to order walleye at the restaurant while eating with a guy who grew up on a farm.”
“So tell them that,” I said.
“How?” Max leaned back slightly. “Walk through it with me. I post a correction. It says nobody was duped. I was there every step of the way in creating the agreement. I explain to any reporter I can find that Rafe’s exactly who they thought he was. What does that look like from me this week?”
“Damage control.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It would look like the team got to me, or Rafe’s people got to me, and now I’m protecting their brands. Every word I say in his defense reads as a payoff.” He set the mug down again. “I’ve spent eight years learning how this machine runs. I can feed it better than anyone I know.”
I sat with that.
“And then there’s a morning TV show holding open a slot for me. They’ve already sent a car service confirmation. They’d film here in Chicago, and I’d interact with the hosts in L.A.”
“It’s a lot of money,” I said.
“Yeah. My manager thinks I’ve had a breakdown. She used the term legacy-defining, and I hung up on her.“ He rubbed his face with both hands. “I’m not taking any money for this.”
“I believe you.”
“I know,” Max said. “That’s why I haven’t left.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“But that’s not why I came here. I want to ask you something.”
My entire body tensed. I knew what was coming.
“I want you to know before I ask it I already know the answer. The question I’m going to ask isn’t the real question. The real question is why I have to ask it.”
I didn’t say anything. The shop was very quiet.
“So here’s the question,” Max said. “And it’s not is there something going on because I will not insult either of us. I’ve known that for weeks and never said a word because it was yours and you’re my brother and I figured you’d bring it to me when you were ready.”
I heard the first hint of tension in his voice.
“So the question is why, Niko. Why haven’t you talked to me?”
I looked at the bench. The block plane sat at the end, squared to the edge.
“I’m in love with him,” I said.
The words came out plain. After a lifetime of never saying that about anyone, the words themselves were weightless.
“It’s been weeks,” I said. “Since before the kiss.”
“The kiss,” Max said. “There’s a kiss?”
“He came here late at night, nearly midnight. Talked for an hour with his hands and ate half my lunch I was saving for the next day. He squared that plane to the bench without knowing he did it, and I’ve left it there since.
He kissed me, and I stood there like a struck post.” I sipped my tea.
“I sat at Ma’s table at that gala and watched him put his arm around you for the cameras after we’d already kissed. ”
Max was quiet. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“How long did you know?” he asked. “Before the kiss.”
“Probably since the first time we met. I didn’t know what it was yet. I knew by the ribbon stripe texts.”
“Ribbon stripe texts?”
“He found a striped board in a hotel in Dallas, and I texted with him about it when he was on a flight back to Chicago.”
“Okay,” Max breathed. Then, gently: “Does he know?”
“No,” I said.
“Niko.”
“He doesn’t know.” I got up off the stool.
I couldn’t do the next part sitting down.
“He kissed me twice. Then he came here the night the story broke, and he stayed. He knows there is something, but he hasn’t heard the word.
I tell myself the timing’s wrong. He’s twenty, Max.
His whole life is on fire in the papers. The last thing he needs—“
“That’s not why,” Max said.
I stopped.
“That’s a reason,” he said. “It’s a kind one, but I’ve watched you my whole life, and you have never once told anyone what they are to you first. You load-test it and then say it once it’s a proven fact. It’s not the timing with Rafe.” He paused. “Say the real reason.”
I planted both hands on the bench and looked at them.
“He’s the one, Max. Rafe walked into my shop with the smoothest surface I’ve ever read in my life.
Every answer pleasant, every edge sanded, and the itch nearly ate me alive.
I pushed on everything. And every time, the weight was there.
He’s not a fake, no matter how many times someone in the media says it. ”
“So that’s why you haven’t told him. Because he’s real.”
“You haven’t met yours yet, Max. It’s terrifying. I know he’s real the way I know quartersawn from flatsawn, and my gut knew it first.”
Max stood. “So, now I’m going to tell you why I drove over here. I’ve been in my apartment all week watching a machine I know better than anyone eat two of the most important people in my life, and I’ve figured out what fixes it.”
He moved around the room. He did it when he presented his best ideas.
“Walk through this with me. The media story runs on one rail: the arrangement was fake, and that means Rafe himself is fake. It doesn’t matter how many times we correct them. It will always mean to them we’re protecting a lie.”
I nodded.
“I’m the victim. Varga bought us a night, but he’s a teammate.
They won’t let him hold them back for long.
” He turned toward me. “Now, there’s a man they are ignoring.
His name is out there because my whole family is public knowledge.
Still, they know nothing about this man.
What if this man sits in his own shop, in front of his own bench, and he says who Rafe actually is?
Fifteen minutes. There is one chair and one light. I shoot it, cut it and post it—“
“On your channels,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The victim puts his brother on camera, Max. They’ll say you staged me, and the team is paying you off. Same machine, one step removed.”
He didn’t flinch. He’d been waiting for that.
“Some will say that,” he said. “For about six hours. Then two things will happen. One is they’ll check whether the carpenter has anything to sell, and he doesn’t.
Your website is basic information and a phone number.
Two, the sympathy money dies the minute it posts.
Every offer on my desk depends on me being a victim, and the video ends that.
My windfall is gone. The team can never match what national exposure on a morning show does for me.
” He spread his hands. “It costs me everything, and I’m glad to pay it. ”
The joint held. I’d pushed on it, and it held.
“No,” I said.
“Niko—“
“No. I’m not going on camera.”
He stopped for a moment. Then my brother, who in all the years he’d been asking to film the shop had never once pushed past my first refusal, pushed back.
“Why not? This matters, Niko. There are two people getting ground up in public, and the tool that stops it is standing in this room telling me no like I asked to film the wood rack.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I could tell you I love Rafe because it’s just you in this room.
It’s only us.” Miraculously, my voice remained calm and even.
“The second there’s a lens involved, it’s permanent.
It gets framed and posted to the world. You’d do all of it brilliantly; every choice would be correct.
It’s not you, Max; it’s the camera. It would take the most important thing in my life and make it a product that I can never take off the shelf. I can’t.”
“That’s—“ He stopped and pulled back. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle. “Niko. I make products out of true things every day of my life. It’s my craft. The tile video where I grouted my own hand into the wall, that happened. It’s real, and millions of people laughed at a true thing.
But it was true at that moment in time. Everything I do has a timestamp. ”
“But the audience sees it as set in stone. You know they do.”
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Yeah. Okay.”
Max’s pitch was over. He picked up his coat.
“This is your call. I know that. I just had to make the case because next week I’m going to want to know I made it.”
He crossed to the door. When he got there, he stopped, but he didn’t turn all the way around.
“Then tell him, at least,” Max said. “Not two million people on the internet. Tell the one person it matters to. You just proved you can say it out loud, Niko.” He turned the rest of the way around. “Tell him.”
The bell above the door rang as he left the shop.
The block plane sat at the end of the bench, squared to the edge, where Rafe had left it.