Chapter 17 Soucy
Matty picks the place because Matty always picks the place. A diner off Saint-Laurent that hasn't changed its menu since we were teenagers, where the booth at the back has a tear in the vinyl that I put there with a house key when I was fifteen and angry about something I don't remember.
He's already sitting when I get there. He's ordered for both of us, which means I'm getting the smoked meat whether I want it or not, and he has his elbows on the table and his phone face-down and the particular expression he wears when he's pretending he hasn't been waiting.
"T'es en retard."
"I'm not late. You're early."
"I've been here twenty minutes."
"Which is early. Not the same as me being late. Different problem, same clock."
He flips the phone over, checks it, puts it back. "You look like shit."
"Merci."
"I mean it. You look like you haven't slept."
"I slept."
"When."
"Recently."
The food comes fast because the food always comes fast here, and the woman who brings it calls Matty by his first name and calls me le tranquille, the quiet one, which is what she's called me since I was sixteen and sat in this booth doing homework while Matty argued with the owner about hockey and ate fries off my plate.
We eat. Matty eats like he plays, which is fast and with intent and too much energy for the space available. He takes up the whole side of the booth. His knees hit the underside of the table twice before the sandwich is half gone.
"How's the series from your side," he says. It isn't a question. The way Matty asks about hockey is how other people tell you about their day. He already has the answer and is checking whether you've caught up.
"We're fine."
"You're better than fine. Your defense is playing twenty minutes over their weight class and your goalie is standing on his head."
"You watch a lot of tape for a guy on the other bench."
"I watch everything. It's called preparation." He steals a fry off my plate. "Papa says the same thing. He says your goalie reads entries earlier than anyone he's seen since the guy in Winnipeg, the one with the bad hip."
"He said that?"
"He said it to Maman and Maman said it to me. Same thing." He shrugs. "Lundy's good. I'm not being nice. I need him to not be good for four more games, but he's good."
Hearing Matty say Lundy's name feels like two rooms colliding. The room where I grew up and the room I've been building, and they aren't the same architecture.
"He went to the house," I say.
Matty's hand stops over my plate. "Lundy went to the house."
"For dinner. Maman wanted to feed him. You know how she is."
"I know how she is." He pulls his hand back. "How'd that go."
"Fine. She fed him. Papa interrogated him about ice conditions. They liked him."
"Of course they liked him. He's likable. That's his whole thing." Matty says it flat, the way he says things that are observations and not compliments, and takes a bite. "Did he do the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where he already knows what you need before you ask for it. The showing-up-with-the-right-answer-before-the-question thing. Did he do that at the house."
I look at him. He is not looking at me. He is looking at the sandwich, which is the Matty version of looking at the thing he is talking about.
"He was a guest in our parents' house, Matty."
"I'm not asking about the house. I'm asking if he ran the room."
There it is. The thing he came here to say, arriving sideways, the way everything arrives in this family.
"He didn't run the room. He was polite. He dried the dishes."
"Because you handed him the towel."
"Because I handed him the towel. That's how dishes work."
"That's not what I'm asking, Jules."
He puts the sandwich down. When Matty puts food down, the conversation has changed weight classes, because Matty doesn't voluntarily stop eating for anything less than a fire or a feeling he can't talk around anymore.
"He's at the house," Matty says. "Fine. Maman's got the bowl out and Papa's checking the door and the whole system is running, the whole production, and Lundy's sitting there and he sees all of it, right? He sees how it works."
"He's observant. That's not a crime."
"It's not a crime. I'm not calling it a crime." Matty leans forward. "I'm saying he sees how the house runs and he slots right into it. He knows the system because he's already running one. His own version. For you."
The count ticks once in my right hand under the table. Once is nothing. Once is just the door opening.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Maybe." He picks up the sandwich again. "But you brought him to the house and he fit, and the reason he fit is because he already knew every step of the choreography before he walked in. That's not fitting in. That's running the same play."
The fry I'm holding has been in my hand for too long and I set it down because my fingers need to do something else and there's nothing else for them to do. The count ticks again. Twice is the door opening and someone standing in it.
"He is not running a play," I say, and my voice is flat when the precision is load-bearing, when the words have to arrive exactly right because the feeling behind them is not precise at all.
"He is kind to me. There is a difference between being kind and running a play, and you don't get to sit in this booth and make them the same thing because it's easier for you to read it that way. "
Matty is quiet. Matty is almost never quiet.
"I didn't say he wasn't kind."
"You said he runs a system."
"I said he sees the system and already knows the steps. I didn't say what that makes him. I'm asking what it makes you."
The diner is loud around us. Plates, voices, the kitchen bell. I hear all of it how I hear everything, which is completely, and the count is at three now, which is the door open and someone standing in it and the draft coming through.
"It makes me someone who has a partner who pays attention," I say. "That is what it makes me."
"D'accord." He picks up a fry. "D'accord, Jules."
But the d'accord is the Matty d'accord, which means I hear you and I am not agreeing and I am not fighting and I am putting this down now because I said what I came to say.
He eats the fry. He eats another one. The conversation is over, not with resolution but with one person setting the weight down and the other person knowing it has been set down and both of us deciding, separately, not to pick it up again.
He is wrong about Lundy. I know this the way I know anything that matters, which is all the way through, structurally, load-tested.
Lundy is not managing me. Lundy is not running a system.
Lundy dried the dishes because I handed him the towel and he took it and that is what kindness looks like when it is simple, which it almost never is, but sometimes, with him, it is.
Except Matty did not say the word I would need him to have said in order to dismiss it cleanly.
He did not say controlling. He did not say managing.
He said Lundy already knew the steps, and the reason that will not sit flat is not because it is true but because it is the exact shape of the thing I have been afraid to look at, and Matty, who has never once in his life articulated a feeling when he could throw it sideways instead, put his hand on the exact outline of it without knowing what he was touching.
The count is at four. I close my hand around it under the table and hold it there, not because I want to but because four isn't a number that lets go on its own. I breathe. The count stays. I'll walk it down later, in the hotel, in the order I walk things down. Not here.
"You want the rest of those," Matty says, pointing at my fries.
"Take them."
He takes them. He eats them how he eats everything, which is like someone who believes the food might leave if he doesn't get to it fast enough, and I sit across from him in the booth with the torn vinyl and the kitchen bell and the woman who has called me the quiet one for half my life, and the fear Matty put his finger on sits in the space between us like a glass nobody wants to pick up because picking it up means looking at what's in it.
He is wrong about Lundy.
He is wrong about Lundy, and the reason I will keep saying that to myself between here and the hotel is not because I need to convince myself but because Matty said it in the family's language, which is the language that gets past every wall I know how to build, and a thing said in that language takes longer to set back down than a thing said in any other.
We pay. We split it how we always split it, which is Matty puts down cash and I put down a card and the waitress takes whichever she gets to first and neither of us keeps track.
On the sidewalk he puts his hand on the back of my neck the way he's done since we were kids, the grip that means I love you and I'll hit you and both of those are the same sentence in this family.
"Bonne nuit, le tranquille," he says.
"Bonne nuit."
He walks north. I walk south. The count lets go on the second block, and by the third I'm breathing right again, and by the time I reach the hotel the only thing left of the conversation is the shape of the thing Matty touched, sitting where he left it, waiting for me to decide whether to look.