Chapter 27
Night Ten
Zeke
In Zeke’s defense, if he had full use of both of his limbs and had been better rested, he would have punched that motherfucker back.
He would have dodged his fist in the first place and then flattened him onto the fancy hardwood floors that Sybil had told him, a few nights ago over chamomile tea while they were both in their pajamas, she had taken two weeks to select and now had grown to resent.
“Two weeks,” she had said flatly. “Do you know how bored I must have been to obsess over such things?”
“And you were top of your class at Harvard Medical School,” Zeke had said. He liked that they now had this inside joke, something only the two of them shared.
“That’s going to go on my grave. My highest achievement.”
“You’re a very good mom,” Zeke had said.
“That’s true,” Sybil had acknowledged, and blew on her mug. “But they’re gone. And Charlie never calls, and Eloise seems to hate me even when she does call. I worry…I worry I may have pressured her into becoming me.”
Zeke had grown too fond of her to tell her what his first coach always told him: That no one takes anything from you that you don’t give them.
That you don’t lose a game unless you’re the one who makes a mistake, and even if you’re flawless, they might still get the better of you.
Years later, he didn’t think his coach was quite right, but also, he didn’t think he was entirely wrong.
Instead, Zeke reached over as she sipped her tea and squeezed her knee.
When her smile met her eyes, he let his hand linger.
She did that thing again: reached around, rubbed her shoulder that he knew ached, and he was close, so so close to inching nearer and offering to work the knot out, but then she stood to pour more water from the kettle.
But he liked his hand there, on her knee, maybe up her back, too, as if it was something solid to hold on to when everything else around him felt so tenuous.
Tonight, Mark, the taker of what was hers, had literally just punched him in the jaw.
Simone had gasped, “Not Zeke Rodriguez’s face!
” like that was the important part. She and Zeke had been discussing women’s college sports when Zeke felt a blow and stumbled back into the stainless steel refrigerator, which, thankfully, broke his fall.
Because if he had fallen on his throwing arm, already so damaged, he would have strangled Mark with his left hand alone.
“Jesus Christ, Mark!” Sybil yelled. “What is wrong with you?”
Mark was staring at his fist like he couldn’t believe what he’d done, like his fist had a mind of its own, completely separate from his brain. From what Sybil had told Zeke about him, maybe this was true. Or maybe this was Mark’s excuse about the whole mess he’d created in general.
“Dad! Oh my god,” Eloise said.
“Holy shit,” Charlie muttered, and started to leave the kitchen but then reconsidered, as if maybe he didn’t want to miss his father taking another swing at the pitcher whose baseball cards he used to collect.
“Okay, okay, let’s all calm down,” Zeke’s dad said. Zeke hadn’t even introduced them yet to Julian or Betty, who had been outside. They’d barely been there for five minutes when Mark had walloped him. “I’m Daniel, Zeke’s father.”
“Dad—” Zeke started. He didn’t need his father to treat this like a scuffle on the middle school playground, even though in many ways, that’s exactly what it was.
A timer went off, and Sybil, who Zeke only now noticed was the hue of an extremely ripe eggplant, said, “Oh fucking shit, that’s the turkey!”
Eloise said, “Oh my god, Mom. Dramatic?”
So Sybil snapped, “You’re an adult now, Eloise. You can handle me saying ‘fuck.’ I say it all the time. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
And Charlie started laughing so hard that Mark, who had started all of this chaos, said, “Charlie, maybe you should excuse yourself until you have calmed down.”
“I don’t think he’s the one who needs to calm down,” Lani interjected. God, Zeke loved his little sister.
“I don’t know what got ahold of me,” Mark said.
“That’s not an apology,” Sybil said. “That is not even in the ballpark of an apology.” She was now trying to wrestle an enormous turkey out of the oven, and Zeke moved to help her out of instinct until he realized that with only one arm, he was impotent.
The turkey was perilously close to teetering toward the floor when Simone stepped in.
Julian had mentioned that he thought he’d been a pretty absent father, but from what Zeke could tell, he’d done a better job than he gave himself credit for.
“Well, this is an extremely exciting first Thanksgiving for me!” Betty said. Zeke hadn’t even noticed her there, but Betty had a way of slipping into rooms and into conversations unnoticed.
“Wait,” Eloise said. “You’ve never had Thanksgiving? Are you, like, not from here?”
“It’s a long story,” Betty said, and Zeke wondered how long a story it could actually be. Then he wondered why he didn’t know this about her, how she’d been living in his apartment for over a month now, and actually, he still knew so very little about her.
“Can you two sit at a dinner table amicably?” Daniel said to Mark and his son. He really was a middle school principal. “Or is there something we need to discuss further?”
Mark was flexing his hand like he’d broken his knuckles, which, Zeke thought, was absurd.
He hadn’t hit him that hard, not that Zeke had ever been in fistfights before and not that Zeke would have minded if Mark had broken his knuckles.
Sybil could probably swoop in and cover all of his surgeries, though Zeke was well aware this wasn’t actually how it worked.
But he thought it should have worked that way.
There wasn’t much that he thought Sybil couldn’t actually do.
“I can,” Zeke said. “Though I think I am owed an apology.”
“Well, I just have an issue with the fact that Zeke Rodriguez is sleeping with my wife,” Mark said, and this time, whatever Sybil was holding—it turned out to be a tureen of gravy—landed on the floor.
“What the actual fuck?” Charlie squealed, but not with any sort of rancor.
“Oh my god,” Eloise said.
“I’m not—” Zeke started, but Sybil cut him off. He wanted to defend himself because, of course, they weren’t sleeping together. But also? It’s not like Zeke hadn’t thought about it. It’s not like Zeke hadn’t thought about it a lot.
“Mark Foster,” she snapped. “Zeke is a friend. A dear friend. And he has been here for me while you have been busy getting anesthetized”—she said this like he had been getting dipped in venom—“and I won’t even dignify your comments.
” She shook her head, and only then seemed to notice the gravy all over her seagrass runner. Her entire body slumped.
“I can make an excellent gravy,” Zeke’s mom said, and he smiled at her, grateful, because she could. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh,” Sybil said. “No, I can—”
“Syb,” Zeke said, knowing full well what he was doing, baiting Mark. “Stop. Let her. You’ve done enough. Come on, let’s go sit outside, let everyone else take care of this for once.”
As if on cue, Pluto bounded into the kitchen and began cleaning up the gravy with his tongue.
Zeke watched Sybil soften, relax under his gaze, even with the surrounding chaos.
“Okay.” She nodded at him, then opened the freezer and grabbed a bag of peas for his jaw.
“Okay,” he replied.
They slipped out the sliding glass doors as the rest of them, or at least Zeke’s family and Simone, got to work doing everything that Sybil had put on herself. Zeke pulled out a chair at the outdoor table for Sybil.
“Thank you. That was very chivalrous,” she said.
“You know me, ever a white knight,” he replied, pressing the bag of peas against his chin.
She looked at him for a long beat and then erupted in high, staccato laughter. She laughed so hard that she had to double over to stave off a cramp, and when she finally got ahold of herself, her cheeks were tear-streaked, and then she started up all over again.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I don’t know if I am so tired that I’m delirious or if this is actually the funniest thing that has ever happened to me.”
“This is definitely just what our forefathers envisioned at the Thanksgiving meal,” Zeke said. “Chaos and fistfights.”
“They all died at like, thirty-five,” Sybil said. “That made marriage much easier.”
“I’m thirty-four. Jesus,” Zeke said. What if he’d lived in a time when he had only a year left?
What if the only thing his obituary said about him was that he was once a Hall of Famer, but now all of his records had been surpassed by someone younger, better, harder-throwing, harder-working?
He swore to himself that as soon as Thanksgiving was over, he was going to actually try to give a fuck about his rehab, about returning for spring training.
“And I refuse to tell you exactly how old I am,” Sybil said.
“Whatever it is, I like it.”
“It’s old.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.” She held his gaze and heat grew in his chest.
“Did you know that Betty had never celebrated Thanksgiving?” she said. “That makes me sad. But also, isn’t that…I don’t know, odd?”
“It does seem like she’s not telling us…everything,” he replied.
“And you know that I don’t do well with loose ends.”
“Aren’t all your unsolved true crimes loose ends?”
“Precisely,” she said. “That’s probably why I’m addicted. That’s definitely why I can’t let them go.”