Chapter 3 #2
“Mine wasn’t.” Varga set plates on the kitchen table. “The kid asked me three questions in seventy minutes. Three. He spent the rest of the time watching me do edge work and nodding. I think I’m being studied, Rook. Like a—like a specimen. A Saskatchewan biologist on skates is studying me.”
“He’s learning.”
“He’s absorbing. It’s not the same.”
“It’s better.”
“You always take his side.”
“He’s not on a side.”
“Everyone is on a side.” He walked over to the stove and sniffed the sauce. “He asked me on the way off the ice if I thought you liked him.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said you don’t like anyone for the first eighteen months and then you do, and that he was on month two.”
“That’s accurate.”
“I know it’s accurate. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet.”
“You have not been keeping a spreadsheet.”
“Rook. I have a folder on you.”
“You don’t.”
“You don’t know what I have.” Varga sat at the table. “Rafe asked me a fourth question at the end. He asked me what you’d do if he asked you to take him out for a beer.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you’d say next week, and then it would be next week for six weeks, and then one Thursday in November you’d text him at 4:30 and tell him to meet you somewhere at five, and you’d buy him exactly one beer and ask him three questions, and he’d remember the conversation for the rest of his life. ”
I looked at the floor. He was right.
“What did he say to that?” I asked.
“He said thank you, Lucas.”
“Lucas,” I said.
“Lucas.” Varga leaned back in his chair. “First time he’s used the first name. I almost cried into my glove.”
“You didn’t cry.”
“No, but I almost did. It’s been a long week. I’ve been carrying a lot of feelings about that Saskatchewan rookie.”
I strained the cooked pasta and tossed it in the pan with the sauce.
“What did you do?” Varga asked. “Office? Laundry?”
“Some paperwork.”
It was the same answer I used when something was too complicated, or I hadn’t decided yet how to describe it.
He didn’t push. He never pushed in the kitchen. He pushed at the rink, and he pushed at the meat counter at the Jewel-Osco.
We ate at the kitchen table.
“The kid is figuring out edge work,” Varga said. “Did I tell you that? It’s a Saskatchewan problem. They skate on rivers. The rivers are straight. He’s twenty years old, and he’s never had to turn properly in his life.”
“He turns fine.”
“He turns fine on television. In drills, he apologizes. During the first crossover at the voluntary skate, he apologized to me. In the second one, he apologized to himself. The third one I made him stop apologizing.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I told him, Rafe, you don’t apologize on the ice. If you’re going to apologize, do it in the parking lot, where the coaches can’t see you. And he nodded.”
“He didn’t say yes, sir?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes he nods like my father. My father nods at things he completely disagrees with, all the way through the disagreement, and then at the end he says one sentence in Hungarian that ruins your life. This kid is going to be a problem in fifteen years.”
“He’s not going to be a problem.”
“He’s going to be a problem for some general manager who isn’t us. We’ll be retired. We’ll be in a cabin somewhere watching him on television and saying, that kid, we taught him that nod.”
“You taught him that nod.”
“I taught him the nod. You taught him the silence. Between the two of us, we’ve created a monster.”
I told him about watching the baking show episode again. Then I asked why he didn’t watch cooking shows that weren’t about baking.
“The sugar,” Varga said, “is the whole thing. The sugar is what makes baking shows work. Cooking shows don’t have sugar. Cooking shows have salt. Salt is a fight. Sugar is a—sugar is friendship.”
“Sugar is friendship?”
“Sugar is friendship. I’m telling you this for free. You can write it down. Bread shows are the highest form of baking show because bread is the most patient form of sugar. Bread is sugar that has been waiting.”
“Bread has almost no sugar.”
“Bread is made of sugar, Rook, biochemically, every bread person knows this. The yeast eats the sugar; you are wrong about bread —“
“I’m wrong about bread.”
“Why aren’t you arguing?”
“I’m eating.”
“You always argue at the sugar part.”
At the end of the meal, he reached across the table and put his hand over mine for two seconds before he got up to clear his plate.
I did the dishes and turned off the kitchen lights. Then I went upstairs.
The bedroom was dim, and Varga was already in bed on top of the duvet. The reading lamp on my side was on. He had his eyes closed and one arm flung over his head on the pillow.
I pulled my shirt over my head and looked at him.
He made a small sound when the bed took my weight. He shifted to make room. I turned off the lamp.
I lay on my back. He turned without opening his eyes and put his hand on my chest.
“My sister asked again,” he said into the pillow.
He said it three-quarters asleep. He had told me about the first time she’d asked it, in February, and then he had not mentioned it since. I didn’t know what the question was.
His breathing slowed. The hand on my chest grew heavy.