Chapter 6 Lundy
Tikh picks the coffee place. That’s the first thing that hits me. Tikh doesn’t pick things.
He goes where he’s taken. Drinks what’s put in front of him. Has opinions about none of it.
So when a man like that texts you a specific address on an off day and is already at the back table when you walk in, two coffees down, one of them yours, you start reading the room before your coat’s off.
So I read it. I just don’t like the first thing it tells me, so I sit down and let him say it instead.
He’s chosen the corner with its back to the wall and a sightline on the door. That’s the seat Soucy takes. I wonder for a second if Tikh did it on purpose, and then I remember Tikh does most things on purpose and stop wondering.
“A few months ago,” he starts, “You made me look at a thing I didn’t want to see, about a man I hadn’t said out loud that I wanted.”
“I remember that.”
“I’m giving it back.” He turns his cup a quarter turn.
The tell I’ve watched him use for a season when he’s about to spend words he’d rather keep.
“I’ve been watching you the way you used to watch me.
I’m going to tell you two things, and then you can do anything you want with them. Including nothing.”
“Tikh, is this about you? You and Baz good?”
He looks at me. Something almost moves at the corner of his mouth. “We are good. And do not do that. Do not turn this around so it lands on me instead. I know that move. I learned it from you.”
That shuts me up, because he’s right. That’s exactly the move. The hand on the other person’s shoulder so they never notice you’ve stepped out of the light.
“The first thing,” he says. “Soucy maps every room he walks into. You know this. The doors, who’s behind him, where the loud is going to come from. He does it before he does anything else, every room, all season.”
“That’s how he sees. It’s not careful, it’s how his brain takes in a room.”
“He does not do it in rooms you are already in.”
He lets it sit between us for a beat before he continues.
“He comes through a door you’re behind like someone went ahead and checked it for him. He mapped my kitchen, my hall, both exits. He didn’t map you. You were the one thing in that room he didn’t check twice. And yet you’re the most dangerous-looking man any of us know.”
“We’re partners. He knows my patterns. That’s a depth chart, not a tell.”
“That isn’t what I said, and you know it isn’t.
” He takes a sip of his coffee. “The second thing. Every hand in that locker room lands on him and he steps out from under it. Marchetti takes his neck, he corrects. Davis claps his back, he corrects. The half-step, the small redraw. You’ve seen it a hundred times. ”
I don’t say anything.
My coffee’s going cold in front of me. I haven’t touched it. My hands are flat on the table with nothing in them. That’s the part my body already understood. A man can take the floor out from under you one board at a time, and the hands always know before the rest of you signs the paperwork.
“Not yours,” Tikh says. “You put a hand on him and nothing moves. Not the half-step. Not once, the whole year. Every other hand is a problem he solves with his body. Yours isn’t a problem at all.
” He sets the cup down square. “You’ve seen that too.
You’ve just kept it somewhere you don’t have to examine. ”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I am not saying anything.” He spreads his hands, palms up, empty.
“I am handing you two facts. You are the man who reads people. You read me before I could read myself. You read every couple on that team like a crossword you’re doing in pen.
So read these two things. I am not going to do it for you. That was never the favor.”
“Then what’s the favor, Tikh?”
“You told me once you could see the whole shape of a thing before the other person said a word about it.”
He’s quiet a moment, picking the words like he’s paying for them, and I watch the kindness cost him something. Tikh spends warmth the way other men spend savings.
“I almost ran out of road. Every reason I had was also a wall, and no one made me look over it until you did. I had a whole season to figure stuff out. You have less than that. We’re in the playoffs.
The thing about the playoffs is they end, and they end fast, and they don’t tell you in advance which game was the last one until it’s already gone. ”
“And if I look and there’s nothing there?”
“Then there’s nothing there, and you’re out an afternoon of bad coffee.” He shrugs, one shoulder. “But you don’t read rooms wrong. You read mine. You’ve read this one for months. You’re just standing in the doorway of it telling yourself you can’t see in.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Nothing tonight. Maybe nothing ever. That part is yours, and I am not going to push you through a door, because nobody got to push me.”
He picks his cup back up. The conversation already loosening in his hands.
“I am here so that later, whatever you do, you cannot tell yourself no one ever showed it to you. That is the whole favor. It is the one you did me.”
I have nothing.
There’s always something. A warm thing to hand across a table, a way to make a hard moment breathable. I’m sitting here with my hands empty and my coffee cold and nothing in the chamber at all.
“Okay,” I say, which isn’t a word that means anything right now.
“Okay,” he says, and lets me off the hook the rest of the way, same as I once let him. We spend twenty minutes on the next game in our series and whether Baz’s sequel casserole counts as a war crime. Whether Mishka needs a second opinion on his attitude.
Tikh doesn’t bring it up again, he already did the only thing he came to do. He’s enough of a craftsman to know that saying it twice would only give me something to argue with.
I drive home the long way, except I don’t decide to, I just look up and I’m three exits past mine with the radio off.
An off-day hands you too much room and nothing to put in it.
I wipe down my kitchen counter that’s already clean. I text my mother back. I do the things a settled man does on a quiet afternoon. The whole time the two facts sit with me where I can’t quite see them but can feel the weight. Like someone next to you with their eyes on the side of your face.
I’ve been learning his routine the way I learn a shooter's tendencies. By watching. What I haven’t learned is how to stop. I know his count before he knows I'm counting it, and that knowledge sits in me like scouting notes I can't unfile.
That night I do my twenty-two minutes of meditation.
I built them plank by plank. Years of them. The breathing and the sequence that take the day off me one layer at a time and leave me somewhere I can sleep from.
People think I came out of the box like this. Settled, the guy the room leans toward.
I didn’t. The calm isn’t something I was handed. It’s a room I rebuild every night. It’s never once not been there when I opened the door.
I count the breath out to four, the count that empties my head. Tonight it just delivers me back to the same lit room with the same two things sitting right there.
I run the whole thing to the end. Land exactly where I started.
The letting-go that usually comes as easy as the next breath is gone.
The snag that’s always slipped loose on its own is still there in the morning where I left it.
And the morning before that. It’s been sitting there longer than I let myself count.
I start the twenty-two minutes over.
The second time through I quit pretending the breathing is the problem.
I sit on the floor of a room I built on purpose to be calm in. The facts stay where they are. I can’t make them leave. I don’t put a name on it.
Naming it is a door I’m not ready for. A friend left it standing open across a table this afternoon, and I’m not going to walk through it tonight just because somebody held it for me.
But I don’t get up either. I don’t reach for the release again.
For the first time in years the calm doesn’t come when I call it. I stay down there on the floor with the thing that’s keeping it away. I let it be in the room with me. I don’t look straight at it. I don’t look away.