Chapter 21 Riley - March 2020, Hibbing #2
Nate: I'm going to say it once, properly, and then I'm going to be extremely rude about the money.
Congratulations, Riley. They watched you for years and then they bet a decade of their own future on you, and they were right to, and I'd like you to sit with that for exactly as long as you can stand it.
Riley: okay. that was longer than once
Nate: Now. The number is absurd, the term is irresponsible, and your franchise has mortgaged an entire decade on a man who cannot cook rice.
Riley: there he is
We ratified it in bylaws inside the hour, and I laughed out loud alone in a garage.
My mother had four months of me at close range for the first time since I was seventeen, and she used every day of it.
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"That." She put a bowl down in front of me. "You look at that phone and your whole face goes somewhere. And then it comes back, and it's a different face than the one that left."
"It's the league."
"Mm." Denise did not ask one single question. She got up and did the dishes and put another day into an account she had been compounding since 2017.
The second thing was in the thread on a Tuesday.
Nate: My mother asked whether the man from the fantasy league might like to come to a lobster bake sometime.
Riley: the man from the what
Nate: I told her he's complicated. She said complicated people also eat lobster.
I sat on the end of my bed and typed tell her yes and got as far as the s.
Riley: tell her the man from the fantasy league has a very restrictive schedule and an agent who reviews all invitations
Nate: I'll pass it on.
Riley: what did you actually say to her. and don't give me four words
Nate: I said I'd ask. Then she wrote a date in August on the calendar in her kitchen, and I watched her do it, and I did not correct her.
Then he sent a listing.
Nate: Formally proposing a facilities review. [property listing: four-floor brick brownstone in Philadelphia]
Riley: what is this
Nate: It's a trade proposal. My condo, plus a conditional pick, for this.
Riley: you're buying a house
Nate: I'm reviewing facilities.
I spent a week on it. I took the floor plans off the listing and went through that house the way I went through a video package, room by room, at night, with a notepad.
Riley: okay. findings. the second floor is wrong
Nate: How is a floor wrong?
Riley: you've got a sightline from the stairs straight through to the back window. anybody on the street can see all the way through your house. that's a lane, nate. you've left a lane open
Nate: Nobody is standing on the street.
Riley: somebody is always standing on the street. next. the wall between the middle rooms is load bearing and whoever staged those photos hung a mirror on it to make you think it isn't
Nate: You can't know that.
Riley: I can know that because I've spent my entire life around a man who says the phrase load bearing at parties
Nate: Fine.
Riley: third. and this is the one. the kitchen
Nate: What about the kitchen?
Riley: whoever specced that kitchen hung a hood over the range rated for open flame work. that is a professional piece of equipment. that's not a hood for a man who owns one bowl
Nate: So it's excessive.
Riley: it's insane. it's an insane kitchen for one person and it's the only good room in the building
Nate: Then I should pass on it.
Riley: no
There was a pause there long enough that on that thread it counted as a geological event.
Riley: don't pass on it. buy the house for that room. every other room in that building was built to be photographed and that one was built for somebody standing in it at midnight making something for somebody else
Nate: Noted.
Riley: I'm serious. don't be reasonable about this one
Nate: I've already sent the offer. I sent it while you were on the second floor.
He closed in the middle of June and sent one photograph of the empty front room with the light coming across the floor in a stripe, and there was art in it, leaning against the wall in a row, still wrapped, exactly the way it had leaned in a hallway in Rittenhouse since 2017.
Riley: hang the art, nate
Nate: I don't own a hammer.
Riley: I know you don't own a hammer! that's why I said it. you have four floors and a professional range hood and a stack of framed art on the floor like a man waiting for somebody to give him permission
Nate: Then buy me a hammer.
Riley: I'm not buying you a hammer. you'd frame it
Nate: Goodnight, Riley.
There was a stream in May. The league paired athletes across sports for charity and put Nate on with the tennis player.
Penelope Ostrander, two majors, split screen, both of them extremely good at it, which was the problem.
"The part nobody warns you about," she said, "is that they discuss you in the third person while you're sitting right there."
He did the quarter breath in. "They do it to your face and then they ask you how it felt."
It was funny. Not media funny. She laughed, and he watched her do it, and his face did a small thing I had personally worked two and a half years to produce.
There was a needle. It went in under the ribs on the left side and stayed. I filed it under competitive analysis, a category I invented in a hotel gym in Tampa in 2018, and ate my dinner and told my mother the sound quality was bad.
Dex and Kayla moved the wedding, and best man duty went remote, which meant cake. Kayla mailed samples in a box with dry ice in it and I mailed back pages of commentary. Then she called.
"Riley, this is the most serious document anybody has produced about this wedding, including the permits."
"It's a wedding, Kayla. Somebody has to take it seriously."
"You gave the lemon one a four."
"The lemon one is a garnish that got ambitious."
I gave the almond one a nine. There was no ten.
I went back to Pittsburgh in June when the club opened for small groups, and Bo and Michael converted Sunday into a thing where I stood at the bottom of the driveway and Michael set a container of soup on the step and backed away from it.
"How's the conditioning?" Bo said from the porch, with his arms folded.
"It's fine. I built a rack."
"I heard about the rack. I've heard about nothing else," Michael said. "There's a man in Minnesota who welded it and by all accounts he is a treasure."
"The conditioning's fine, Bo."
"Sure." He looked out at the driveway for a while. "Long spring."
"It's been long for everybody."
"It has," Bo said. "Some longer."
Then he asked about my hip flexors for a while, and I drove home with the soup on the seat and my ears hot.
On the 9th of July they sent the return to play protocols, and I read them standing up in my kitchen at one in the morning with the fridge running.
Then I opened the thread and typed the true thing.
I did not draft it. It said that these four months had been the closest I've ever come to living with somebody, and that he had turned out to be a rack in a garage and a submarine movie and a man saying turn it down to two.
It said that in a pool in Bratislava I told him I'd been lying since October, like it was a confession, and had gone right on doing it every day since, in daylight, with both hands.
It had the word doors in it. It said I did not want a door anymore. It said I wanted a Tuesday.
It took a long time, because I kept going back, taking a paragraph out and starting again and putting half of it back.
And I knew exactly what that looked like on the other end. For all that time, on a screen in Philadelphia, three dots came up and went away and came up again, from a man who had not sent a real sentence in a very long time.
I read it back once. My heart was going like the last two minutes of a one goal game.
Then I selected the whole thing and deleted it, character by character, held down, until the box was empty.
Riley: heard the toronto hotels have a pillow menu. this whole thing is a resort and I'm going to say that publicly
Nate: There's no pillow menu.
Riley: there's a pillow menu, sinclair. I've seen the packet
Nate: Goodnight, Kowalski.
The hub assignment came four days later. Eastern conference, Toronto, both teams, one hotel.
And a protocol memo. Cohorts may not mix. Cohort A uses the north elevators, Cohort B the south. Meals in shifts. No shared corridors. No contact of any kind between cohorts, at any time, for any reason, for the duration.
I read it twice and then got up and stood at the window.
We wrote that. February of 2018, on a notepad with a hotel logo on it, sitting up against a headboard at one in the morning, six rules and a gap where the seventh should have gone.
A league office in another country had just sent me our own document with the license plates changed and a crest on top.
I packed for a postseason with no families, no fans, no home ice and no way out of the building, and I did it fast, because there was a bus.
And at the bottom of the inside pocket of the suit carrier, where it had ridden since 2018, packed by hands that stopped consulting me somewhere around Las Vegas, was a champagne cork with a bit of wire cage still on it. I did not take it out. I zipped the bag.