Chapter 4 Lundy
Atlanta in April does a thing where the evening comes in gold and low. The drive back from an off-day skate between games is fifteen minutes of it through traffic I don’t mind, because Soucy’s in the passenger seat not talking. That’s a quiet I’d pay for.
We split the drive most days. His place is four blocks past mine, and neither of us has ever said out loud that we go the long way so it’s one trip instead of two.
“Tikh’s got the early game on tonight,” I say at a light. “Baz is making something he won’t tell anyone the name of. You should come.”
“I’ve got film.”
“You’ve always got film. Film keeps.” The light turns green. “Bug figured out how to open the treat cabinet. There’s video. Baz has theories.”
“How does a cat open a cabinet?”
“Come find out.”
He watches the window for a block. “What’s Baz making?”
“He said, and these are his words, a project.”
“That’s not a food.”
“It’s Baz. Come eat the project. Worst case you watch a man fail at dinner, which is its own entertainment.”
Another block. Then, to the glass and not to me, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“For the cabinet video.”
“Sure,” I say, and leave it there, because making it a thing is the fastest way to watch him change his mind. “For the video.”
Baz opens the door, already mid-sentence. “...the recipe said forty minutes and the recipe has never met my oven, my oven is a documented liar, I’ve filed complaints. Oh. Soucy. Hey. You came. Tikh, Soucy came.”
“Heard,” Tikh says from the couch without turning around. He lifts a hand. “Soucy.”
“Volkov.”
“Shoes wherever. Don’t let Bug into the hall, she thinks it’s a frontier.”
The place is warm and smells like whatever the project is, and there’s a game already up on the TV, the late series out west, two teams we’d both happily watch lose.
Soucy does the thing he does in a new room.
The half-second map. Then he takes the armchair in the corner where the sightline covers the door and the screen at once, and nobody comes at his elbow.
I clock him picking it without picking it.
I’ve watched him pick a chair the exact same way in eleven rooms this year.
Baz hands me a beer and Soucy water without asking either of us, the one thing Baz does without noise. “Sit, sit. The project needs eight more minutes, it’s at a delicate stage.”
“Show them the video,” Tikh says. “He’s been waiting all day to show someone.”
“I’ve been curating.” But Baz is already shoving his phone at us, dropping onto the couch arm against Tikh’s shoulder. “Watch her little paws. Watch the commitment.”
On the screen Bug stands on her hind legs and hooks one paw under the cabinet door. She works it open with the patience of a safecracker.
“She’s been planning that,” Soucy says.
“For weeks,” Baz says. “Tikh thinks it’s a phase.”
“It is not a phase, it is a security problem,” Tikh says. “I have moved the treats twice. She finds them. She is smarter than the latch.”
“She’s smarter than you and that’s all she needs,” Soucy says, flat. Baz howls.
Tikh points at the dark screen of his own phone without any heat in it. “She is smarter than all of us. That is the actual problem. The cat has a plan and I do not.”
On the TV, the western goalie gives up a soft one, glove side. Tikh makes a low, disgusted sound.
“He’s cheating his glove,” Soucy says.
“He has cheated his glove his entire career,” Tikh says. “It is a personality, not a flaw.”
“It’s a flaw he decided to keep.”
“That is what a personality is.”
Soucy’s mouth does the almost-thing, and Baz aims a wooden spoon at him. “See, this is why you have to come more. He’s funny. Lundy, did you know he was funny?”
“I knew.”
“Everyone knew,” Tikh says.
“I’m the last to know everything.” The oven goes off. Baz vaults up and comes back carrying a dish that’s either a triumph or a crime, steam rolling off it. He sets it down like a verdict. “Okay. It’s viable. I’m naming it. It’s a deconstructed thing.”
“It’s a casserole that fell over,” Tikh says.
“It’s deconstructed.”
“You dropped it.”
“I plated it with intention.” Baz passes out forks. “Eat before you judge. House rule. Judge with your mouth full.”
We eat. It is, against the odds and Tikh’s face, good.
“Huh,” Soucy says, looking at his fork.
“Huh good or huh bad.”
“Huh, it’s good.”
“HE SAID IT’S GOOD.” Baz points the spoon at the ceiling like he’s thanking somebody up there. “Tikh, mark it down. April. Soucy liked the project.”
“I will remember it,” Tikh says. “It will not happen again.”
The game runs. The room settles. A bad no-call on a crease scramble, and Tikh sits forward. “That is interference.”
“It’s not,” Soucy says. “Their own D pushed the guy into the crease. You can’t whistle a team for its own push.”
“It should be.”
“Should be and is are different rules. Lundy. Back me up.”
“He’s right,” I say. “Own-team contact, no whistle. Garbage rule, but it’s the rule.”
“Everything’s a garbage rule until the night it helps you,” Baz says around a mouthful of project.
“They’re going to lose this series,” Soucy says, eyes on the screen.
It’s more words in a row than he’s spent all night, so the room turns toward him a little.
“Not tonight. But they lose it. Their goalie’s fine, the glove tell doesn’t matter, you can win with a tell if your team protects you.
Watch their breakout instead. They ice it or they cough it up.
Three times this period. They built a whole system on one pass. The other bench solved it in game one.”
“That is a lot of words,” Baz says, delighted.
“You told him to come more,” Tikh says. “This is what more is.”
“I love it. Who else loses?”
“Everybody, eventually. That’s the playoffs.”
And he goes quiet again. I sit there watching a room that isn’t the locker room get the loose, unspooled version of him. The one I’ve had to myself this season in a car and a goalie corner. I like watching it get more air than I give it.
“Seconds on the project?” Baz asks. “It develops as it sits, I think.”
“It congeals,” Tikh says.
“It develops.”
“I’ll have more,” Soucy says, and Baz nearly comes out of his chair.
The cats arrive the way cats do, without crossing the space in between.
Mishka, the gray one, lands on the back of the couch and surveys the room like a customs official.
Bug goes straight for the stranger. Bug has never once read a room.
She scales the side of Soucy’s chair and stands on his thigh and stares up into his face with her entire heart.
Soucy looks down at her.
I’ve watched Soucy’s hands all season without deciding to.
The pattern, thumb to each finger and back.
The speed of it tells me the rest of him before his face will.
Quick means something’s wrong. Slow means the routine’s holding.
Fully stopped, I’ve seen one place. The crease.
His whole brain goes somewhere clean and the rest of us quit existing for him.
I’ve never once seen it somewhere a person could reach.
Bug climbs into his lap and turns around twice. Folds herself down.
Mishka, deciding the stranger has cleared customs, pours off the couch into the same lap. Soucy’s hands come to rest on warm fur and stop.
Just stop.
And the rest of him goes with it. The shoulders come down.
The spine gives in to the chair. The closed face I’ve spent seven months failing to read doesn’t open, exactly, but it unlatches.
He isn’t mapping the room. He isn’t arranging anything.
For the first time off a sheet of ice, I’m looking at a version of him that isn’t holding something in place.
It lands somewhere I don’t have a word ready for. I don’t go hunting one down.
I hold onto it. I don’t know what else to do with it, so I keep it.
Baz comes back in talking. I catch his eye. Tip my head a half-inch at the chair. Baz, who misses most things, gets this one and drops his voice to a stage whisper still louder than my regular voice.
“Oh my god, Bug picked him. Bug never picks anyone. Bug bit a vet.” He sits. He lets the cat have the room. It might be the kindest thing I’ve ever watched Baz do, and he will never know he did it.
Soucy’s thumb moves once over Bug’s ear. Slowly. Nothing like the pattern. Just a hand being a hand on something small and warm. Bug makes a sound like an engine that loves him.
I look up. Tikh is looking at me.
Not at Soucy. Not at the cats. At me, watching Soucy and the cats.
It’s a flat, patient look that takes its time.
I know it because I used to wear it months ago when he was sitting very still beside a man he hadn’t worked out yet.
I was the one on the outside then, seeing the whole shape before he’d say a word about it.
He holds the look a beat. Two. Then he goes back to the game like he never left it.
I don’t know what he thinks he saw. I let it go. There’s a viable project on the table and a goalie on the screen still cheating his glove. A soft April night in the window. A cat asleep on a man who doesn’t go soft around people. That’s plenty for one room to carry.
On the drive to his place, Soucy is quiet again, but it’s a looser quiet. The quiet from two cats riding out with him into the car.
“Bug’s a menace,” he says, around my block.
“Bug loves you. That’s worse.”
“It’s the same thing, with cats.”
“It’s the same thing with a lot of things.” I pause before adding the thing I was thinking earlier. “You should get one.”
“I travel.”
“So does Bug. She has a bag. Baz made him a packing list, laminated.”
“I’m not Baz.”
“Nobody’s Baz. The world couldn’t carry two.” I pull up outside his building.
“See you tomorrow,” he says in the voice that means it, as he gets out of the car.
I watch him go inside and sit at the curb a second before I pull away. Windows down and four blocks to my place. The image of still hands in my head.