Chapter 32 Riley - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal
Rosalina found the tie on a terrace chair at eight in the morning where I had left it, because I'd come down at midnight for water with it over my shoulder and then forgotten it entirely.
She did not ask. She took it into her own house and she ironed it.
She brought it back at nine and put it on the table folded flat as paper, pressed to within an inch of its life, and said something about the state of a good thing left outside in the damp, and went and started on the coffee, and I sat there and looked at it.
What I did was put it on. Over a t-shirt, with shorts, at breakfast.
He came out at twenty past nine and stopped in the doorway. "No. That is not yours."
"It's mine now. Rosalina laundered it, which under maritime law establishes a new chain of custody." I poured his coffee. "Also possession is nine tenths and I'm wearing it, and you'd have to take it off me in front of a witness."
"She's not a witness. She's making eggs."
"She is a witness who is making eggs, Nate. Those are not mutually exclusive."
He sat down across the table and looked at me in a t-shirt and a formal necktie for about four seconds, and then he did the thing where his mouth went at one corner and he refused to let it go anywhere else.
"You look like a man who lost a bet," he said.
"I lost a series."
"You threw a series."
"I have never in my life thrown anything," I said, "and I'd like that objection noted in the minutes."
"Noted," he said. "Overruled."
Then we did the negotiation, and we did it properly, because that is the only language either of us has ever been fluent in and because for the first time in seven years every clause was real.
Terrace table. Two coffees. A notepad from the drawer with a chemist's name printed on it, and the carpenter's pencil, and Rosalina moving around inside with a radio on.
"Motion to convene."
"Seconded."
"The chair recognizes the delegate from Philadelphia."
"There's no chair."
"There's a chair and I'm in it, because I called the session and I've got the pencil.
" I wrote the date at the top. "First business.
Offseasons. Motion: all offseasons taken together.
Not most of one, not when it works out. All of them, standing, non-negotiable, from the end of one season to the start of the next, rotating between Camden, Hibbing, and one place a year with no rink in it. "
"No rink in it."
"There has to be one, Nate. Every single place either of us has ever been in our lives has had a rink in it. You've done twenty-eight years on this earth and you have never once stood in a town where nobody plays."
"Seconded," he said. "Passed."
I wrote it down.
"Second business," he said. "The key. It's a spare key, and that's the category it's in, and a spare key is a thing you hand somebody to water a plant.
" He turned his cup a quarter turn. "I'd like it entered as permanent.
Not spare. It's your key, it stays on your ring, and if we're ever in a situation where somebody asks whose key it is, it is yours. "
I did not write that one down straight away.
"Chair notes an unopposed motion," I said, after a second. "Passed."
"You're not writing."
"I'm writing." I wrote it down twice, once in the minutes and once at the bottom of the page where it did not belong, and he watched me do both of those and said nothing at all.
Holidays got split by schedule like custody of a sport, because that was exactly what they were.
Thanksgiving and Christmas were both impossible, because both of us played.
The break in February was the only real one and we split it in alternate years, and the summer covered the rest, and we wrote all of it down like two men who had been handed a court order.
Then the constitution.
"Amendment," I said. "The Kowalski-Sinclair Invitational is hereby declared permanent. Article nine is repealed in full and cannot be reintroduced. There is no withdrawal mechanism and there is no dissolution clause."
"Seconded."
"Further. Relegation is abolished in perpetuity."
He looked up.
Because that was mine. That was the line I put on the end of every communiqué for seven years, in the joke register, in lowercase, where it was safe. Relegation is reinstated. There's still nowhere to go.
I wrote that the first time in a hotel in Tampa in 2018 and I wrote it in a notice of withdrawal in January of 2019 at 11:51 at night, and every single time I typed it I meant the same thing, which was that there is nowhere to go and there has never been anywhere to go and I am not going anywhere, and I hid it in a joke about a fake sports league for six years because it was the only place it fit.
"Passed," he said. "Unanimously."
And then we did the hard one, and we did it for two hours, and neither of us flinched and neither of us lied.
"The world," he said. "I'm not ready."
"Neither am I, and I want that on the table before you say another word, because I am not going to let you carry that on your own the way you carry everything else. Not one part of me is ready."
We traded reasons like line changes. He had the captaincy of a storied franchise and a father in a booth and a family in Camden that had not been told a thing. I had a negotiation inside a year and a city that decided who I was before I got there, and two pieces of paper taped inside a stall door.
We did the sport. We did the era, which is not the same as the sport.
We did the locker rooms, both of them, honestly, name by name where names mattered, and there were guys on both those lists who would have been fine and guys who would not, and the ones in the middle were the whole problem and always had been.
We did Grant Sinclair for about twenty minutes and that part was ugly and neither of us enjoyed it. And we did the arithmetic of the single photograph, which was the only real number in the whole thing.
"So here's what I've got," he said, finally, "and I want you to take it apart if it's wrong.
Every version of secrecy I have ever been inside of renewed itself automatically.
Nobody ever decided to keep going. It just kept going, because not deciding is free and deciding costs something, and I did that for seven years, and it cost us both a great deal more than the deciding would have.
" He put his hand flat on the notepad. "So the clause isn't about a date. It's about the renewal."
I wrote it down as he said it, and then we argued about the wording for forty minutes, and this is what it says.
The Someday Clause.
One. The parties will tell the world on their own clock. Together or not at all. Neither party may be told by anybody else, at any time, for any reason.
Two. Secrecy does not renew automatically. It expires. The question is reopened, in a session, out loud, after the Pittsburgh negotiation concludes, and at every offseason thereafter for as long as this document stands.
Three. The circle grows only by unanimous consent of both members. No exceptions. Not for a good night, not for a bad one.
Four. One shared answer shall be drafted and held in both telephones, in the event that the world finds us first.
We wrote number four that afternoon and it took an hour and it is four sentences long, and neither of us has read it since, and both of us know exactly where it is.
"That's not a promise," he said, when it was done.
"It's a promise with conditions on it."
"It's the first one I've ever made that I'm certain I can keep."
Then the first unanimous motions, and they went through without one word of debate.
"Denise and Walt Kowalski."
"Aye."
"Eleanor Sinclair," he said.
"Aye. Obviously aye."
"John Sinclair." He stopped. "He's got pre-existing knowledge. He's had it since 2018."
"Then he's grandfathered in."
There was about one second. "No."
"He's grandfathered in, Nate."
"Objection. On the grounds that you have been sitting on that word since the terrace and I've watched you hold it in your mouth for two hours."
"I've been holding it since you told me on the stairs last night and I have suffered for it." I put the pencil down in front of him. "The chair sustains itself. He's grandfathered in. Write it down."
And Nate Sinclair, captain of a storied franchise, wrote the words grandfathered in on a chemist's notepad with a carpenter's pencil, and did it with his jaw set, and I have never enjoyed anything more.
Bo and Michael went in as founders, whose clearance predates the constitution. Penelope and Astrid the same. Four names entered into the record with a note beside them saying they were there before there was a record.
And then I did the last thing, and nothing compelled me to do it.
"One more piece of evidence," I said.
"The session's closed."
"Reopen it."
I got my phone out of the kitchen drawer, which was a violation of our own bylaw and which I noted for the minutes, and I scrolled up in the thread to the 16th of February and turned it around and put it on the table in front of him.
There is a message box in that thread with a draft still sitting in it, because I never sent it and never cleared it, and the app keeps a timestamp on when a draft was last touched. 11:59 p.m.
Riley: formally offering my entire roster, all picks, both goalies, the constitution, and the commissioner's office which I don't hold and never have, for one conversation tonight.
I'm on eleven. I've been lying in a room on eleven since eight o'clock.
this isn't an insult and I've never sent you one that wasn't. I don't know how to do this any other way and I'm out of
It stops there, mid-word. His arrived at 12:03.
He looked at it for a long time. "Four minutes," he said.
"Four minutes. I was composing that when the flare came in and my thumb was over send." I took the phone back. "And then yours landed, and I read it, and I closed mine, and I went up eight flights of stairs furious, and I let you think you'd gone first."
"You've had that for six months. Why didn't you show me in February?"
"Because in February I was still keeping score."