Chapter 15 Jamie
JAMIE
Wes Chen appears at my stall on a Thursday morning holding a paper bag.
"Eat it," he says. "Don't ask questions."
He places the bag on my shelf and walks away.
The entire interaction lasts four seconds.
In four seconds, Wes Chen has delivered a sentence, a bag, and a directive, and has departed without waiting for acknowledgment because Wes Chen does not require acknowledgment.
Wes Chen operates on a communication frequency that is below the threshold of most human conversation, and the frequency is sufficient.
I open the bag. Inside is a loaf of bread.
Sourdough. Still warm. The crust is dark and crackled and the weight of it in my hands is substantial, the dense, satisfying heft of a loaf that was made by someone who understands that bread is not a product.
Bread is a process. Bread is time and attention and patience converted into something you can hold.
I tear off a piece. The interior is open-crumbed and tangy and soft, and the crust shatters and the crumb gives and the flavor is layered in a way that suggests the starter has been alive for years, developing complexity through daily feedings and nightly rests, and the person who made this bread cares about it in a way that goes beyond cooking.
I eat three pieces before anyone else arrives.
The bread is the best thing I've eaten since I moved to Atlanta.
The bread is the best thing I've eaten possibly ever, and I grew up with my mother's kitchen, which is not a low bar.
I fold the bag closed and put it in my stall and go to morning skate and the bread sits on my shelf like a small, warm monument to a conversation I don't yet understand.
After practice, Wes finds me again.
He's in the equipment room. The equipment room is where Luca works, but Luca is on the ice doing post-practice gear checks, and the room is empty except for Wes and the racks of skates and the smell of leather and tape.
Wes is sitting on a folding chair near the sharpening station. He looks like he's been waiting.
"You ate the bread," he says. Not a question.
"I ate the bread. It was incredible."
"Sit down."
I sit. The folding chair across from him is the kind of chair that exists in every equipment room in every rink in every city, metal and uncomfortable and designed by someone who did not prioritize human comfort.
I sit in it and Wes looks at me and the look is not the neutral expression.
The look is something else. The look is the face of a man who has decided to say something and who is marshaling the words the way he used to marshal his fists: deliberately, with full awareness of the damage they can do.
"I bake bread," he says. "This is a thing about me that the team knows. What the team doesn't know, or didn't know until Luca, is why."
He pauses. The pause is not hesitation. The pause is structural. Wes Chen's pauses are load-bearing.
"I bake because my hands shake after fights.
I used to fight. That was my job. I hit people and they hit me and then I sat in the penalty box and then I went home and my hands shook and I stood in my kitchen at 2 AM and I kneaded dough because the kneading was the only thing I found that made the shaking stop. "
His hands are in his lap. I look at them. The knuckles are scarred and misshapen, the fingers slightly crooked from breaks that healed without proper alignment. These are the hands of a man who spent years converting violence into a paycheck and who converted the aftermath into bread.
"I carried that alone for a long time," he says.
"The shaking. The baking. The fact that the thing I was paid to do was destroying me.
I carried it alone because carrying it alone felt like strength.
I was the enforcer. I was tough. Tough guys don't ask for help.
Tough guys don't sit in kitchens at 2 AM with flour on their hands and tears on their face wondering how long they can keep doing this before the doing breaks them. "
He looks at me. The look is direct and unguarded and carrying a weight that I can feel physically, the gravity of a man who has been where I am and who is choosing, at cost to himself, to say so.
"I'm not saying your thing is my thing," he says.
"I don't know what your thing is. I haven't asked and I'm not going to ask because it's not mine to ask.
But I know the alone part. Whatever the thing is, the alone part is always the same.
The alone part is carrying something by yourself and believing the carrying is courage when the carrying is actually the thing that's killing you. "
The sentence lands in my chest like a fist. Not a violent fist. A precise one. The fist of a man who knows exactly where to hit because he's been hit in the same place.
The alone part is what kills you.
I am alone. I have been alone since before I had the name for what I was alone with.
Alone in Duluth with a feeling I wouldn't name.
Alone in the draft process with a smile I wore like a uniform.
Alone at the bar with a Sprite and a roster of couples.
Alone in Philadelphia with a search bar and a ceiling.
Alone in a celebration pile where my body told the truth and I pulled away because the truth was the thing I was alone with.
The alone part. The alone part. The alone part is the wall I built and the monosyllables I hide behind and the floor-watching and the checkpoint and the cursor I close and the history I delete.
The alone part is the architecture of my life, and Wes Chen just identified it in a sentence and the sentence is the truest thing anyone has said to me since Mik said the walls were optional.
"I don't know how to stop," I say. My voice is not steady. The unsteadiness is the first crack in the wall that I've produced out loud, in the presence of another person, in daylight.
"You don't stop all at once. You stop with one person. The first person is the hardest. After the first person, it gets easier. Not easy. Easier."
"Who was your first person?"
Wes looks at the door to the equipment room. The door where Luca will eventually reappear, carrying someone's skates, talking about something, filling the room with warmth and noise and the specific, relentless, solar-powered kindness that broke through Wes Chen's walls when nothing else could.
"I think you know," Wes says.
He stands. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
The hand is heavy and warm and scarred and the weight of it on my shoulder is the weight of a man who carried his thing alone for years and who is telling me, through the hand and the bread and the six minutes of conversation that just rearranged my internal architecture, that I don't have to carry mine for as long as he carried his.
He leaves.
I sit in the equipment room. The metal chair. The leather and tape smell. The racks of skates arranged by number, each pair the specific tool of a specific man, each one maintained by Luca with the attention to detail that is Luca's love language.
I cry.
Not a controlled cry. Not the silent, internal, nobody-can-see-this crying that I've done in hotel rooms and cars and showers.
This is a full, body-shaking, hands-over-face cry that comes from a place I didn't know was pressurized until the pressure released.
The tears are not about one thing. The tears are about all of it: the name, the walls, the alone, the search bar, the half-second, the goal, the parents who love me and don't know, the sister who knows and is waiting, the journalist who sees the thing underneath the thing, the Russian who said the walls are optional, the security guard who said the hearing comes first, and the enforcer who just told me, in six minutes and one loaf of bread, that the carrying is the killing and the stopping is the living.
The equipment room door opens. Luca.
He sees me. He stops. He does not ask what happened. He does not ask if I'm okay. He does not say "talk to me" or "what's wrong" or any of the things that a person might reasonably say upon finding a teammate crying in the equipment room at ten in the morning.
Luca Moretti sits down on the floor next to my chair. He stretches his legs out in front of him. He leans his back against the skate rack. And he talks about nothing.
"My nonna makes these things called pizzelle.
They're waffle cookies. Italian. She uses an iron that's been in the family since, I swear, the Medici era.
The thing weighs eight pounds and it has a crack in the handle that she refuses to fix because she says the crack is 'character.
' I've been trying to replicate her recipe for three years and I can't get the anise right.
She says I use too much. I say she uses too little.
We've been having this argument since I was fourteen. "
He talks about a penguin documentary he watched last night.
He talks about whether Wes's sourdough starter deserves a name ("I vote Dough-anne.
Wes says starters don't get names. I say everything alive deserves a name.
"). He talks about the time he tried to make croissants and the butter leaked during the lamination and his apartment smelled like a French bakery that had been set on fire.
He talks and talks and talks. The words are warm and funny and meaningless and essential.
The meaninglessness is the point. Luca is not trying to fix me.
Luca is not trying to understand the crying.
Luca is sitting on the floor of his equipment room and filling the space with warmth because warmth is what Luca does, and the warmth is not a strategy or a technique.
The warmth is who he is. The warmth is the biscotti in the stall on Day 1 and the sticky notes and the tea he's somehow producing now (from where?
I didn't see him make tea) and the fact that he's sitting on a concrete floor in his work clothes talking about penguins because a teammate is crying and the crying does not require diagnosis. The crying requires company.
The crying slows. The breathing normalizes.
The pressure in my chest recedes to a level that is manageable, if not comfortable.
I wipe my face with the hem of my shirt and look at Luca, who is still on the floor, who has not moved, who is holding out a cup of tea that is warm and present and offered without conditions.
"Thanks," I say. My voice is rough.
"For the tea or the penguin lecture?"
"Both."
"The documentary is on Netflix. Episode three will make you cry harder than whatever just happened in here. Fair warning."
I laugh. The laugh is small and wet and real, and Luca smiles at it, the full Luca smile, the one that makes rooms warmer, and the equipment room is warm, and the bread is on the shelf in my stall, and the alone part is, for the first time in my life, slightly less alone.