Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Toni Amato
Three months later, Piper Maddox’s kitchen is chaos, which is how I know it’s Sunday.
Max is on the floor with Christopher, who has decided that the correct activity for after dinner is demanding that Max demonstrate every hockey move in slow motion, including a full stop, in socked feet, on hardwood, which is how you get the particular sound of a six-foot-two NHL enforcer sliding sideways into a kitchen cabinet at low speed and announcing that’s called an edge, bud, very important with complete dignity.
“Again!” Christopher demands.
“I’m going to need more floor,” Max says.
Chase appears in the doorway holding Luke. “My floor.”
“Your floor is very good floor.”
“Thank you. I maintain it.”
“I believe you.”
I am at the kitchen table with Elena, who arrived this afternoon with wine and absolutely no intention of leaving until she has assessed every dimension of the situation.
She has been watching Max with Christopher for seven minutes with an expression I recognize from the night she told me I was completely gone.
“Okay,” she says, not looking at me. “I see it.”
“You see what.”
“Why you’re not cautious about him.”
Max catches Christopher mid-launch. The boy has decided that edge drills mean running at full speed and being caught. Max spins him once, sets him down, and ruffles his hair.
Christopher holds up his hand. The rubber bracelet is on his little wrist. His.
Max has a new blue one superstar printed on it. Won at the same Chuck E. Cheese six weeks ago because Christopher wanted to match.
“It’s basic etiquette,” Max had told me when I found it on his nightstand. “You don’t refuse a gift from a three-year-old.”
“You already have one,” I’d said.
“He wanted to match.” A shrug. Completely serious. “Basic etiquette.”
I reach across the table and fill Elena’s glass. “Don’t say it.”
“Gone,” she says. “Completely gone.” She raises her glass toward Max and Christopher on the floor. “Welcome.”
Outside, the city goes on. Inside, it’s garlic and chaos and Chase demonstrating that retired goalies can, in fact, do an edge stop in the kitchen if sufficiently motivated, and Piper appearing from the hallway with the specific expression of a woman who knew how this was going to end before any of us did.
She catches my eye across the room.
Raises her glass.
I raise mine.
Max stands up from the floor, Christopher attached to his back like a small, determined barnacle, and finds me across the kitchen.
Blue eyes. Dark hair wrecked. The real smile, the one I’ve spent months learning to tell from the other one.
The ticking biological clock that I lack suddenly resounds like a pot clashing against prison bars.
Well, he mouths. I shake my head.
He grins adding the eyebrow waggle. And I am, as it turns out, completely done being careful.
Elena invites my father to dinner a second time. I find out when he texts me a photo of the pasta she sent him home with in a container after the first dinner, asking if she uses a particular brand of San Marzano tomatoes because his comes out differently.
My father. Texting me about tomatoes. Because of Elena Russo. Let me consider this information for a short while. Then I call her. “You gave my father your pasta recipe.”
“I gave him the beginning of my pasta recipe.” She sounds deeply satisfied. “The rest requires another dinner.”
“You’re holding San Marzano tomatoes hostage.”
“I prefer to think of it as a continued relationship.”
“Elena.”
“He’s lonely, Toni.” Her voice gentles. Real now.
“Not dramatically. He wouldn’t openly admit it.
But he’s been alone for twelve years, and he works constantly, and his idea of a social life is airport restaurants between officiating assignments.
” A pause. “He deserves somebody who makes him laugh.”
I stare at my kitchen ceiling. “You make everyone feel like they’re the most interesting person in the room.”
“He actually is.” She means it. That’s the thing about Elena. The warmth is never performed. “Come to dinner Saturday. Max too.”
“Max.”
“He’s your person, Toni. Frank knows it. The sooner those two are in the same room voluntarily, the sooner your father stops carrying it like an unresolved call.”
She’s right. I hate when she’s right before I’ve finished my coffee. “I’ll ask him.”
Saturday arrives with the specific energy of a thing I cannot control. Max picks me up at six-thirty in a jacket I’ve never seen. It’s dark navy, fitted, the kind of thing a man wears when he’s trying without admitting he’s trying. His hair is combed. Actually combed.
“You look nice,” I say.
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird.”
“You’re making a face.”
“I’m observing your hair.”
He glances in the rearview mirror. “It’s fine.”
“It’s very neat.”
“Toni.”
“I like it,” I say. He clears his throat, fidgeting. I look out the window so he doesn’t see me smiling.
Elena’s apartment smells like Sunday with gravy.
She argues that the red sauce you put on pasta is called gravy to anyone who will listen.
Good thing my family has always said the same.
And underneath all of it the specific warmth of a space that has been lived in and loved.
My father is already there when we arrive.
Of course, he is. He’s sitting at Elena’s kitchen island with a glass of red wine.
The ease of a man who has been here three times, by himself.
While I was at practice. He stands when we come in.
Looks at Max with the assessment I’ve watched him use on players forever, quick and complete, arriving at a conclusion before the other person realizes they’ve been read.
Max looks back. He doesn’t flinch or perform. He meets my father’s eyes directly and holds them and says, “Mr. Amato. Good to see you again.”
“Stevens.” Dad’s voice is neutral. But not cold. The distinction matters.
Elena appears from the kitchen with a wooden spoon and zero intention of letting anything stay tense for longer than thirty seconds.
“Frank, stop intimidating my guests.” She points the spoon at him.
“Max, he does this to everyone. It’s a reflex.
Sit down.” Max sits. My father sits. I stand in Elena’s entryway with my coat half-off, watching two of the most important men in my life occupy the same space without casualties.
Relief settles. Dinner is Elena’s doing, which means it’s loud, abundant, and impossible to be guarded through.
She serves three courses and asks questions that sound casual and aren’t.
By the second glass of wine, she has extracted from my father a story about his worst officiating night in his career.
By the third, Max is leaning forward with his elbows on the table, listening the way he listens to film and not waiting for his turn to speak, actually tracking every word.
The story is this: a playoff game, a disputed goal, a wrong call.
The only wrong call Frank Amato made in three decades that he knows was wrong, confirmed by video review three hours after the game ended, after the outcome had already been decided.
He tells it without apology. With the specific honesty of a man who has had twenty years to sit with it and choose truth over pride.
When he finishes, the table is speechless.
Then Max says, “How long did it take you to stop replaying it?”
Frank looks at him. Not the assessment look. The other one. The one I’ve seen maybe four times in my life. “Three years,” he says.
“Does it still come back?”
“Sometimes.” A pause. “Around playoff time.”
Max nods. Just nods. Like that’s the only answer that makes sense, and he respects it.
“I had a hit,” he murmurs. “Two seasons ago. Toronto. Rookie. I told myself it was clean for six months.” His subtle jaw shift suggests something’s costing him.
“It wasn’t.” My father is very still. “What happened to the player?”
“Fine. Back on the ice in three weeks.” Max looks at the table. “Didn’t matter. I still knew.”
Elena is watching this conversation with her wine glass held completely still, which means she is paying more attention than she wants anyone to notice.
Frank says, “Knowing is how you stop making the same call.”
Max looks up. “Yeah.” A beat. “That’s what Toni said.”
Something crosses my father’s face. Small.
Real. That expression, familiar from Elena’s hallway during his initial visit, close to pride.
I've seen it maybe four times. He picks up his wine. “She usually says the right thing,” he says. “Gets it from her mother. They were very close; Antonia still wears her mother’s ring on a chain around her neck.”
I press my mouth together. My father has not mentioned my mother casually in as long as I can remember. I take the chain out of my collar and hold up my mom’s wedding band. Elena catches my eye across the table. Raises her glass a fraction of an inch.
After dinner, while Elena makes coffee in the kitchen and I carry plates and successfully eavesdrop without trying to, my father and Max end up in the living room together. I don’t hear all of it. I hear pieces.
Frank: “She told you about the rules. When she came back two years ago?”
Max: “She told me why she left. After the fact.”
Frank: “And now?”
Max: “Now I know where she parks. That she drinks oat milk lattes with honey no sugar. That her left shoulder tells me when she’s struggling before her face does.
” A pause. “And that the two years she spent building something she was proud of. I'm not in the business of taking that from her. That’s not what this is.”
Silence. The specific silence of my father receiving information and deciding what to do with it.
Frank: “She’s worked harder than anyone I’ve watched in this league.”
Max: “I know.”
Frank: “She got that from me. The need to prove it.”
Max: “I know that too.” Another pause. “I think she’s done proving it. She's just good at it now.”
I set down the plates. Stand in Elena’s kitchen with my hands on the counter and my eyes closed and my heart doing the thing it does when something true settles in and stays.
Elena appears beside me. She has somehow crossed the kitchen without making a sound, which I’ve accepted as one of her supernatural abilities.
She leans her shoulder against mine. Says nothing.
He’s right. I don’t say it out loud. I don’t have to.
Elena pours the coffee. We stay until ten-thirty, then Max and I leave them to be alone. My father shakes Max’s hand at the door — not the three-second assessment grip. The other one. Firm. Brief. A concession disguised as a farewell.
He kisses my cheek. Says discreetly into my hair, “He sees you.” We leave.
Max stands in my place with his jacket over his arm and then looks at me with an expression that has no performance in it anywhere. “Was that okay?” he asks.
“That was better than okay,” I say.
He runs his fingers through his hair. “Your dad is terrifying.”
“I know.”
“I had a very specific plan and abandoned it in the first five minutes.”
“What was the plan?”
“Be very professional.” I look at him. At the combed hair that’s come slightly undone, looking more like usual, the jacket over his arm, the bracelet on his wrist with the neon word SUPERSTAR catching the light. Twenty-two years old. The most emotionally prepared person in any room he enters.
“You were better than professional,” I say.
He pulls me toward him by my wrist — not forcefully, but certain when his mouth meets my hair.
“What did he say to you?”
Max grins. “Told me your terrible parking skills come from him.”
“Max.”
He softens. “He loves you a lot, Toni.”
And that breaks me a little. The two men I love most are beginning to see each other clearly.