Chapter 16 — ZAY
The training room at the visitors’ end of Prudential Center is the same as every visitors’ training room.
Portable table, tape station, the ultrasound unit positioned at my right hand without thinking about it.
Same routine. Same order. Same distance between tools.
The routine is what keeps the space mine even when the building is different
Except tonight the building doesn’t just belong to someone else. It belongs to Teo’s entire family.
He mentioned it after morning skate, casual, like it was weather. “My family’s coming tonight. Ma, Nonna, the girls.” Then, checking the hallway, quieter: “Dinner after. You should come.”
I should not come. That is the correct professional assessment. I should go back to the hotel with the rest of the staff, order room service, review my notes.
I am going to dinner. With the Marchettis.
The game is unremarkable. We win 4-2 and Marchetti has an assist on the third goal, a net-front redirect that he celebrates with Thompson in a way that suggests they’ve rehearsed the celebration longer than the actual play.
I watch from the bench area. I track his shoulder through the motion, note the follow-through.
I do not look at the section where his family is sitting because I have already identified that section and I am choosing not to look at it.
Teo texts an address and a time. Twenty minutes after the bus drops us off.
I’ll be at the table already.
He is managing. The logistics, the timing, the routing so that nobody from the team sees us leave in the same direction. This is his city. His geography. His family and his risk to navigate, and I am following his lead for once, which is not a position I usually occupy.
I put on the navy henley that Guy told me makes me look like a person and not a medical chart. Take an Uber to a restaurant I’ve never heard of on a street I’ve never been on.
The hostess points me toward the back room. I hear them before I see them.
The table is round, which means there is no head and no escape route. Ma is the center of gravity regardless. Teo is between one of his sisters and an empty chair, and when he sees me his whole face goes still for a half second before the grin arrives.
I scan the table the way I scan every room. Who is looking where. What the energy is. Whether my presence has changed the temperature or whether it was already set before I walked in. I know they know what I look like but I still navigate the uncertainty.
Teo's dad is the first to greet me. "Hi, I'm Tony. It's nice to meet you." He holds out his hand for a firm shake.
“Isaiah. Call my Mary.” Teo’s mother is on her feet before I’ve finished shaking Tony's hand. She is shorter than I expected and the energy coming off her could run a generator. She reaches up and puts both hands on my face. “Look at you.” She holds me and studies me and she is not asking a question. She is rendering a verdict. “Sit. Eat. You’re too thin.”
“Ma, you said that to me two hours ago,” Teo says.
“You are also too thin. Everyone is too thin. Sit, Isaiah.”
She lets go. I sit. The chair is close to Nonna’s.
Nonna turns to me, slow, deliberate, and puts her hand on my forearm.
One squeeze. She doesn’t say anything. She decided at the team dinner in Atlanta, and the decision was apparently final.
Teo makes the introductions, though we all know each other’s names
“So.” Jackie leans forward, both elbows on the table. “You’re the one doing his shoulder.”
“I’m the assistant athletic trainer, yes.”
“The assistant.” She holds the word like she’s entering it into evidence. “Not the head guy.”
“Gary Miller is the head athletic trainer. I handle the clinical work. Rehab protocols, manual therapy, return-to-play assessments.”
“He has a DPT from South Carolina,” Teo says.
“I wasn’t asking you, Matteo.” Jackie points at him.
“I’m providing context.”
“I don’t need your context. I’m getting his context.” Jackie turns back to me. “South Carolina.”
“Yes.”
“And before that?”
“Georgia State. I worked with the football program.”
“Football to hockey.” She tilts her head. “That’s a jump.”
“The bodies are different. The principles are the same.”
Ma waves her hand once. The gesture has the authority of a gavel. “Let the man eat. He just sat down. Have you eaten today? Eat.”
The bread basket is in front of me because someone moved it while I was being interrogated, and I realize it was Nonna, who pushed it three inches toward my plate without a word.
The waiter arrives and Ma orders for the table without consulting anyone including her husband.
It's been clear from the first minute who was really in charge of this family. She does this in a mixture of English and Italian that I follow maybe sixty percent of. Nicole adds a modification about the sauce. With a nod, Ma confirms that Nicole’s modification was already implied.
Gina orders more wine. Nobody asks if I have preferences.
Teo here is not the Teo from the team. His hands move more.
His voice is louder. He argues with Jackie about an incident from 2019 and his whole body leans into the argument, shoulders forward, palm flat on the table, gesturing with a bread roll.
These are the only people on the planet who know him this way.
“Matteo tells us you’re from Georgia,” Ma says.
“Born and raised.”
“You still have family there?”
“My parents are in south Georgia. My grandmother’s in Atlanta too.”
“Your grandmother.” Ma’s face shifts. Softens. “She’s close by?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“Good. A man should be close to his grandmother.” She says this like she’s issuing a municipal ordinance.
Teo catches my eye. The look is brief and says I know and I’m sorry and are you okay in a single glance.
I give him nothing back because I am not going to communicate with him while five women with investigative instincts are watching every angle.
The food arrives in waves. The restaurant knows this family. The waiter doesn’t explain dishes. He sets them down and Ma nods or doesn’t nod, and the ones she doesn’t nod at go back to the kitchen without discussion. I watch this happen twice. Nobody at the table seems surprised.
Jackie has not stopped between courses. Each question builds on the last. Each one a degree more specific than it needs to be.
“The players are good to you? The environment is good?” She asks this with a different weight.
There is a weight under it, a directness that has nothing to do with whether the guys are polite in the training room.
I clock it. I wonder how much she sees, whether she’s asking about what I think she’s asking about or just asking.
In my experience, people either read that layer in a room or they don’t, and Jackie strikes me as a woman who reads every layer available.
“Great group,” I say. “Good environment.”
She holds my eyes for one beat past comfortable. Then she nods and picks up her fork.
Nicole looks up from her plate for the first time since food arrived. She points her fork at Teo.
“He talks about you.”
“Nicole.” Teo’s voice carries a warning that bounces off his sister without making contact.
“He talks about everyone. But he talks about you differently.” She says this to her sauce, fork lowered. “Since Christmas.”
The table goes quiet. I look at Teo. He is looking at Nicole with an expression I have never seen from him in the facility or the apartment or anywhere.
Jackie is watching me. Gina is watching me. Ma is watching me watch Teo. Nonna is eating her bread.
“He has good taste,” Gina says finally into her wine. “In general.”
Teo puts his face in his hands. “Can we talk about literally anything else.”
“We can talk about the eggplant parmigiana,” Nicole says. “It needs more salt.”
“The eggplant is fine,” Ma says.
“The eggplant needs salt, Ma. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it needs salt.”
And just like that the table pivots, all five of them, from the thing none of them needed to name to the eggplant, and the shift is so fast and so total that I understand this family differently than I did two minutes ago. The decision to move on was collective.
“The eggplant is actually undersalted,” I say.
Five heads turn.
“It is.” I don’t know why I’m still talking except that Nicole is right and I have been eating undersalted eggplant in silence when I do not eat undersalted food in silence in any room where I’m comfortable. “And the crust needed another minute. Maybe ninety seconds.”
Teo stares at me but his grin starts. “You have eggplant opinions.”
“I have opinions about most things. I just don’t usually share them at work.”
Gina sets her wine glass down. “He has opinions.”
“He has opinions,” Nicole confirms to her plate.
“Berger would be thrilled,” Teo says, and the laugh that comes out of me is not the professional one.
It is the full one, from my chest, the one that belongs to Guy and Nan’s kitchen and nowhere in the facility.
Jackie’s eyebrows go up. Gina grins. Ma is watching my face the way she watched it when I sat down, except now whatever she was looking for, she found it.
“Who is Berger?” Jackie asks.
“Teammate. He ranks everything. Restaurants, bartenders, airline pretzels. He has an entire methodology.”
“I like him,” Gina announces to the table.
“We knew we would,” Nicole says.
Teo’s phone buzzes on the table. He picks it up, reads it, and his face tightens by a degree that nobody here would catch except me. I know that tightening. The half-second calculation.
“Berger’s asking where to eat near the hotel,” he says. Casual. Too casual. “I’ll send him somewhere.”
He types for three seconds. Sets the phone face down. Meets my eyes for half a beat. The restaurant is fifteen minutes from the hotel. The team is scattered across Newark. The probability of someone walking through that door is low but not zero.
Nonna touches my arm. “Isaiah. More bread.”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“You’re not fine. You barely ate.” She pushes the basket with the same three-inch precision she used earlier, and I take a piece because I am not going to argue with this woman tonight or, I suspect, ever.
Nonna leans toward me near the end of the meal. Her hand finds my wrist. Her voice is low, pitched just for me, and her eyes are the same eyes that studied me across Avi’s kitchen two weeks ago.
“You are patient,” she says. Two words. She pats my wrist once and turns back to her water.
The sidewalk outside is February in New Jersey.
A different cold than Atlanta. Sharper. The kind that finds the gap at your collar.
The family left first. Ma kissed Teo on both cheeks and then kissed me on both cheeks before I could prepare for it.
Gina squeezed my arm. Jackie gave me a nod that felt less like a goodbye than a ratification.
Nicole said “the eggplant was undersalted” to no one in particular as she walked out, and I respected that.
Nonna held my hand at the door. Both of hers around one of mine. She looked at me the way she looked at me at Avi’s house. Steady. Then she let go and walked out with her cane and her daughter’s arm and her coat buttoned to the throat.
Teo and I stand three feet apart on a sidewalk in Newark. We are not touching. The three-foot gap, representing perception versus reality, is what we always navigate.
“Your family is a lot,” I say.
“I know.”
“Jackie is going to run a background check on me.”
“She already did. In December.”
I look at him. He looks at me. The grin is there but it’s the quiet one, the one from his apartment when the lights are low and he thinks I’m not paying attention. The one that means something he hasn’t said with words yet.
“Thank you,” I say. “For managing all of that.”
“That’s what you do for your people,” he says. Simple. Not a confession. Just a fact, stated the way he states all his facts, plainly, with the full weight of meaning underneath.
I carry it back to the hotel. Along with the cold at my collar and the warmth of his mother’s hands on my face and the weight of five women who knew my name before I sat down and decided I was worth feeding.