Chapter 33 Lundy
The Cup is on Avi’s kitchen counter next to a bag of ice and three beers, because that’s where the most famous trophy in the world is in July. And there is a cat asleep inside the bowl. I am at the stove because I want to be, helping cook for the crowd. That still catches me. The wanting.
"Make mine the spicy one," Soucy says, leaning on the counter where he can watch the pan.
"You want the spicy one?"
"I want the spicy one. The whole way spicy. Don't tone it down."
I look at him.
For a full season I made him the version without the heat. Every time. Without being asked. How I breathe.
"You've never once asked for the spicy one."
"I'm asking now. I've decided I like my food the way you actually make it. Stop protecting me from your own cooking."
So I make it how I make it for me. He eats the whole thing standing up at the counter. Doesn't flinch.
I file it. The asking. The way he reached across and took the thing he wanted.
Avi’s yard is full of people who were nobody's first choice.
That's the whole story of this team. The part Grayson says out loud now that there's a Cup to say it over.
It's been making the rounds. The Cup. A day apiece.
Each of us getting it for twenty-four hours to do something undignified with.
Tikh took it to the shelter where he helps with the cats.
Berger slept with it and won't confirm or deny that he talked to it.
Marchetti's grandmother filled it with something that took three days to wash out.
I am counting everyone who came. Everyone who stayed. The number keeps going up and the door stays shut and nobody is looking for it but me. Even I have mostly stopped.
Baz is at the counter watching Gaspard in the Cup. “The Bugs are going in the Cup. The kittens will be in the Cup when we have it. There will be pictures."
"Leave them be," Tikh says.
"We're putting the kittens in the Stanley Cup, Tikhon. This is a core memory."
"...okay. One picture."
Berger has appointed himself judge of the cookout. "This is an eight-nine. Maybe a nine-one when the brisket's ready. Wes, back me up."
"It's whatever number you want it to be, Luca," Wes says, from the chair he hasn't left, with the patience of a man who has heard every number Berger owns.
"See," Berger says, delighted, "that's why I keep him."
Marchetti is holding a beer in the hand that's supposed to be icing. "Zay says I have to ice my shoulder. At the Cup party. Tell him, Lundy."
"Ice your shoulder, Teo."
"Thank you," Zay says.
"You two are in a cult. I'm telling everyone about the cult."
Thompson appears at my elbow with a plate he built himself. He surveys the yard, the couples and the Cup and the kitten and the noise, and says, to no one, to me, "Fish food."
"What?"
"Nothing. Just saying it. Fish food. Works every time."
"...thank you, Thompson."
"Took you long enough, both of you. I'm getting too old to drive getaway cars." He says it into his plate, satisfied, the matchmaker who never once made a speech, watching the whole thing he nudged into being eat brisket in my backyard.
Grayson finds me in the kitchen because Grayson always finds exactly who he needs to talk to. "Team of castoffs. People that no one in this league expected anything from."
"Best money anybody ever spent, Grayson," Bodie says, passing through with the Cup, the cat relocated to his shoulder.
"Don't repeat that. I have to sit across a table from these people in July and negotiate contracts with them."
Soucy's family came down for it. Of course they did.
The people who loved him before any of us got the chance. His brother Etienne has cornered him by the cooler with the specific intensity of a man holding a spreadsheet in his mind.
"I ran the numbers on your save percentage across the final three games."
"Of course you did, Etienne."
"Statistically what you did is not supposed to be possible. I am not saying that as a compliment. I am saying it as a problem. The model is broken."
"Some things don't go in the model."
"...that's the least-you thing you've ever said. Maman, he said a feelings thing, write it down."
I watch him with them, his mother keeping an invisible list of his rare and precious feelings-things, Etienne translating love into spreadsheets because numbers are the only dialect the two of them have ever shared.
I wait for the old thing to arrive. The one that flickered in Montreal in the worst week of all of it.
The fear that I was a guest in a life that was already complete before me, a life with no chair that had my name on it.
It does not arrive.
His mother has already put a plate in my hands twice without asking. Etienne has already cornered me with a question about our breakout that he'd clearly written down beforehand.
There's a chair. There has been a chair for a while. I just had to stop standing long enough to notice somebody had pulled one out.
And there's Matty. The other brother, the one who ran my crease in Montreal and got jumped for it. He apologized weeks ago, but he's standing a little apart with a beer, watching M?kinen the way you watch a dog you haven't decided about yet.
M?kinen is watching him back.
"So you're the one who jumped me," Matty says.
"You ran my goalie," M?kinen says. "Somebody had to."
"I was defending my brother."
"Lundy's my goalie."
Neither of them moves off. Soucy comes to stand beside me, follows my eyes to the two of them.
His jaw does a thing. "I don't like the way those two are looking at each other. Do we need to be prepared for another fight here?"
"Maybe." I've seen that exact look. Usually on ice. They are circling each other, seeing who blinks first. Eventually, Matty walks away and I watch Makinen’s shoulders drop an inch.
Later, when the light goes long and half of them have drifted to the couch and the cat has claimed the Cup for good, Soucy slides a folded paper across the counter to me.
"Seven across."
"We're having a party, Soucy."
"There's a paper on the counter and it's a Saturday and Saturdays are themeless. Seven across."
“Homecoming.”
"You didn't even look."
"I don't have to look anymore. I know what you're going to need before you need it."
He goes still, the pen between two fingers. "That used to be the problem."
He looks at me for a beat longer than the question needs. Running something behind his eyes that I've learned not to finish for him. Then he nods, once. The way he does when a number lands where it should.
"It's not the problem now."
"No," he says, and writes HOMECOMING in the grid. Every letter pressed firm enough that I can hear the pen on the newsprint. The full weight of a man who's choosing this. "It's not."
I have been on my feet for eight hours on a leg that is six weeks out from coming apart.
I am rinsing a pan I do not need to rinse.
Protecting a routine that no longer protects anything.
Doing the thing I have done my whole life to make sure a room could not afford to lose me.
This room could not lose me if it tried.
It has told me so in every way a room can.
I keep rinsing the pan anyway because it turns out I just like a clean pan.
Soucy takes it out of my hands.
"Sit down," he says.
"I'm fine. I've got the brisket."
"The brisket's done. Everybody's fed. You've been on that leg eight hours. Avi says sit down, I'll bring you a plate."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to. That's the whole point." He steers me by the shoulder to the good chair. The one I always give away. He puts the cat in my lap on his way past. The cat, who does not like anyone, stays. "Sit down, Soren. Let me."
So I sit.
The yard hums with the people I built a family out of without ever once saying that was what I was doing. Soucy comes back with two plates and folds down onto the arm of the chair against my good side. Somewhere Berger is rating the sunset. Baz is photographing a kitten.
I do the thing I have never in my life let myself do at one of these.
Nothing. I hold nothing up. I fix nothing.
I sit in the middle of the loud warm wreck of everything I love. A plate I did not make in my hands. A cat that is not mine in my lap. A man who came after me when I was worth the least I have ever been worth pressed warm against my side.
For the first time in twenty-nine years I let the family I built do the holding.
It holds.