Chapter 28 Riley - February 2024, Pittsburgh #2
"I have reviewed the spring. The trading activity in your fantasy league has increased substantially. There is a franchise renaissance in progress. I have always maintained that relegation is reversible and I said so in 2021 to a man who did not want to hear it."
"Ludvig."
"I am not looking," said Moose. "I am also not blind. There is a difference, and I would like credit for it before I retire."
Angelo Ricci diagnosed his captain in a stretch line in front of half the room.
"Pilates. That's what that is. Look at his face. I told him in 2018, I said Nate, it's the core, everything's the core, and now look at him. Nobody ever listens to me and I'm right every single time, about everything, including the cousin."
Penelope executed her exit like a woman who had planned it in September. A parting statement written by a professional, two paragraphs, warm, airtight. The internet mourned it for one day and by Saturday had moved on to a quarterback.
Two weeks later she came to dinner at the brownstone, and she brought Astrid.
I got there first and did the cooking, and I was nervous. I've played in front of nineteen thousand people who wanted me hurt. I stood in that kitchen with a roast in and checked the door three times.
Then the buzzer went, and Penelope Ostrander walked into that house, looked around it once and said, "Oh, thank God, there's furniture." Then she stood back a foot. "Riley Kowalski. Astrid. Astrid, Riley."
Astrid was tall and quiet with a handshake like a farmer, and she taught something at a university and did not tell me what for about an hour, and the whole time Penelope watched her talk with a look on her face I had never seen on a professional.
"She's why," Penelope said to me later, at the sink, drying a glass nobody had asked her to dry. "That's the whole of it. That's the thing I told him I'd never itemize. He never asked me once in three years and I've thought about that more than you'd think."
"Penelope."
"I watched him stand at a rail in Toronto and track you around a room, and I was never once in a position to say anything about it. Now I am. I don't recommend the feeling."
Dinner was loud, which I had not expected.
Four people at a table in Philadelphia with the lights on, and Astrid told a story about a department meeting that ran long and had a villain in it, and Nate laughed.
Not the media laugh, not the one he did at a podium with the right amount of teeth in it.
He laughed from the stomach, head back, hand flat on the table, in front of two witnesses, at a table nobody had staged, with the sun of other people's knowing all over his face.
I got up and said something about the torch and went into the kitchen and stood at that counter with both hands on it.
Then I came back with a tray of ramekins with a burnt ring around every single one, and Penelope looked at hers and then at me. "Well, that's deliberate."
"It's a signature."
Philadelphia went out in the second round on the 21st of May. Pittsburgh went out on the 30th, in six.
For seven years, elimination closed the calendar. The season ended and the schedule ended, and the schedule was the reason, and there was no reason in the summer, and rule four existed because of exactly that.
That year elimination opened it.
I spent four days on the pitch and then printed the whole thing, because a printed document is a different object than a screen. I put it on the kitchen island and slid it across like a contract offer.
"What is this?"
"Read the whereas clauses. There are six, and you're going to argue with the last one, so take your time getting down there."
Whereas the parties are, for the first time in seven years, simultaneously unemployed.
Whereas rule four of the Marriott document held that there is no schedule in the summer and therefore no reason.
Whereas the party of the second part has spent seven summers being a reason with no schedule attached.
He read the whole thing standing up and did not look up once.
Three weeks in the Azores. An island farmhouse belonging to Michael Berglund's cousin, which was not a listing and was not on anything and had been in one family since before either of our grandfathers played.
Booked under H. Baker. Separate flights out of separate cities, a connection through Lisbon, routings I'd checked twice through airports where nobody looks twice at anybody.
On the last page, a map of the coastline I drew by hand off a satellite photo, the farmhouse marked, the town marked, the harbor marked. And an hour up the coast, circled in red pen, a lighthouse, because I'd checked that before anything else.
He got to the last page and stopped. And I watched a trained refusal come up the whole length of that man and get as far as his teeth and stop there. I'd watched that machine work for seven years. It arrived on schedule and it did not fire.
"I want to go." He put the pages down and squared them, because he could not help it. "And I'm terrified, and that's not a bit, and I'd like you not to make it one."
I put both hands flat on the island. "Say that again."
"I have never been in a place where nobody knows what I am.
I've wanted it since I was eleven and I've arranged my entire existence so that it can't happen to me by accident.
" He looked up. "There's a summer already built around me.
Four commitments other people organized.
I need to clear it, and I need to decide whether the fear gets a vote, and while I'm doing that I need you to not withdraw the proposal. "
"I'm not withdrawing anything. Take as long as you want."
"Say it properly. I've had a thing withdrawn before."
"The proposal has no expiry on it. Read clause six, Sinclair, it's the shortest one in the document."
He read clause six, which said this offer does not expire, and stood in that kitchen and put his hand flat on the paper and left it there.
The itinerary stayed on the kitchen island, and then it moved. For eleven days that stack of paper traveled around that house while I was in Pittsburgh, and it got reported to me like a tracked storm.
Nate: The itinerary has moved to the front room.
Riley: on its own?
Nate: I moved it. I was reading it.
Riley: it's a list of airports, sinclair
Nate: It's a list of airports with a lighthouse on the back of it. Update. It's on the desk in the second bedroom.
Riley: nate that's the drawer room
Nate: I'm aware of what room it is. The itinerary is in the kitchen now.
Riley: it's been in the kitchen three days
Nate: I know. I've stopped moving it.
I read that last one about nine times, because I'd known that man since he was twenty-one and I knew what it meant when he stopped moving something.
It came at twenty to six in the morning on a Wednesday. I was up, because I was always up, standing at the counter in shorts with the coffee going.
Nate: Big Jack had a stroke last night.
I put the cup down.
Nate: He's alive. He's in Camden. They got him in fast, my mother found him, he was on the porch. I'm driving. I've been on the road since three.
Riley: how bad
Nate: They don't know yet. Left side.
Riley: I can be at the airport in forty minutes. I'll fly into portland and rent something
Nate: Not yet. I want you to, and that was the first thing I thought, and I want you to know it. But my father lands tonight and that house is going to be full of people I have to be a Sinclair in front of, and I can't do both of those in the same building this week. Stand by. That's the whole ask.
Riley: okay. standing by
Four minutes later it came again, from a man driving alone up the coast of Maine before dawn.
Nate: There's a navy tie folded on the passenger seat. The one with the lighthouses on it. I don't remember packing it.
I stood in my kitchen with a coffee going cold and my hand over my mouth, and I did not answer that one for a long time, because there was nothing to put on top of it and I've spent seven years putting things on top.
Riley: I'm here. boots on. say the word
I did not go back to bed. I filled the truck and put a bag by the door with three days in it, and then I sat down in a chair in my own front room like a man waiting on a dispatcher, and I stayed like that for two days.