Victory Lap (Atlanta Firebirds)

Chapter 1 Avi

Kerimore is asleep in the Stanley Cup.

I considered moving her. The keeper considered it too.

He is a serious man in white gloves. He travels everywhere the Cup travels.

This morning he watched my cat climb the counter, assess the bowl, and pour herself into it like it had been engineered for her.

He made a phone call. He listened, looked at the cat, listened some more.

“She stays,” he said finally, with the gravity of a man amending a constitution. “There will be a form.”

“What kind of form?” I asked.

“Incident report. Non-damage. Category: other.” He looked at the cat for a long moment. “There is no box for this. I will be writing in the margin.”

I signed the form. She stays. The most famous trophy in hockey holds maybe eight pounds of cat, and she fills all of it. I am not going to be the one who tells her to leave. I have seen what happens to people who tell her things.

The caterer arrived at nine. A barbecue place from Ash’s list. I did not fight this.

There is a version of feeding thirty people that ruins your own party, and I have watched other men host that version.

What I made is on the counter next to the Cup.

Karjalanpiirakka, four dozen, started at six this morning with the radio off.

Today is my day with the Cup.

There were options. The league sent a schedule in June. I looked at the line with my name on it for longer than a line deserves. Finland was possible. A lake I know there. Helsinki, where my father’s name opens doors. Somewhere with cameras, if I wanted cameras. That has never once been true.

I wrote down my own address.

Ash found the schedule on the counter that night.

He read it and said nothing, which is not a thing Ash typically does.

So I stood in the doorway and watched him not say it.

He put his hand flat on the page. Held it there.

Then he looked up with his face doing the thing his face does.

“I’ll make a list,” he said. The day became this.

By noon the yard is full. I have stopped counting people and started counting plates. Plates are honest. People will tell you they are fine. Plates tell you who came back three times. Today that is Berger, who is standing at the food line rating my catering to anyone within range.

“This is an eight-nine,” he says. “Maybe a nine-one when the brisket’s ready.”

“The second tray comes at three.”

“Then why am I not holding the first tray?”

“Because you rated my yard a seven.”

“The yard is a seven, Cappy. The yard has no shade structure. I’m not going to lie to you on your Cup day. That’s not what we do.”

I hand him the plate I was building for myself. He closes his eyes when he eats. He does not know that he does that. I file the eight-nine under things Berger says instead of thank you.

I surrendered my kitchen an hour ago. Lundmark wanted the stove.

Soucy wanted to supervise Lundy. There is a version of hosting that means doing everything.

There is another version that means knowing when your house is being borrowed by people who need to borrow it.

I took the second one. Through the window, Lundy moves as if the kitchen is his crease.

Economical. Unhurried. Soucy leans on my counter with the settled weight of a man who has decided where he needs to be.

Whatever they are saying in there is theirs. I stay outside instead.

Grayson stands by the cooler in his mismatched sneakers, talking with a cluster of my teammates. Coach comes through carrying the Cup itself, Kerimore riding in it, overseeing everything.

“Best money anybody ever spent,” he tells Grayson, tipping the Cup at the yard like evidence.

“Say that again before arbitration season,” Grayson says, “and I will have you gone from the team.”

“You’re joking,” Coach says.

“Mostly.” Grayson watches the yard over his sunglasses. “The calls started the morning after the parade. Half this roster got expensive overnight. My whole job this summer is saying no.”

Coach laughs and carries the Cup onward. Grayson does not laugh. I file that too.

Fontenot has discovered the cat in the Cup.

“The Bugs are going in the Cup,” he announces. “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.”

I won’t hold my breath for only one picture. I have met Bastian Fontenot.

Soucy’s family arrived at two. Down from Montreal, all of them at once, which is how that family does everything. His mother has put a plate in my hands twice without asking. I understand that this is not about hunger. His brother étienne cornered me by the fence.

“Your defensive-zone exits improved 11 percent after February,” he says, by way of hello. “I have a theory.”

“Okay.”

“The theory is that your goalies started talking to you before the forecheck arrives instead of after.”

I did not confirm the theory. The theory is correct.

The other brother is watching M?kinen. Mathieu, or Matty, the one who ran a crease in Montreal and got jumped for it, stands a little apart with a beer. M?ki watches him back. Neither of them blinks. It is the exact posture two skaters take in the last second before a puck drops.

M?ki catches me watching him. He lifts his forearm instead of waving, the tattoo turned out so I can see it.

The bird, mid-flight, healed into his skin like it grew there.

The tattoo he got in February a symbol that he belongs here.

I told him that once, in a language nobody else in the room understood.

Now it is inked on him in a language everybody can read.

He has also taken five karjalanpiirakka.

I counted. It is the correct number for him. Some data holds.

In the living room doorway I stop, because the living room does a thing to me now.

Five months ago I stood up in this room with my heart going like a penalty kill and Ash’s hand in mine.

I told twenty men the truest thing I had.

The silence that came back was the kind I had spent fifteen years bracing against. One heartbeat of it.

Then Berger put his plate down. This afternoon the same room holds Davis asleep sitting up, Hájek reading on his phone, and a card game that appears to be Thompson losing to Kowalski.

Nobody is quiet. Nobody is careful. The room did not become sacred. It became furniture.

My father is at the fence line with Eero's father Jari M?kinen.

They have been there an hour. Two old men with beers, watching the yard the way they used to watch neutral-zone film. My father flew in on Tuesday. I told him I was gay in a phone call two weeks before he traveled. I was not sure what he would do, but he and my mother came.

They shook Ash’s hand at the airport and called him Ryan for one day. Then, without any announcement, it stopped. Now it is Ash, like it has always been Ash. None of us said anything about it. We are Ikonens. This is what we do instead.

I bring the men a plate of the karjalanpiirakka. Jari inspects it and says, in Finnish, for my father’s benefit and on the theory that I have forgotten the language, “The crimping is too wide. His grandmother would say so.”

“She would say it twice,” my father agrees, in Finnish, and takes one anyway. He eats it with the full attention he has given very few things in his life.

“The filling,” Jari prompts, watching him chew.

My father holds up one hand. He will not be rushed. He has never once been rushed. Jari waits the way men wait on a verdict they already know.

“Adequate,” my father says.

Jari laughs so hard he has to put his beer down.

It is the top of the scale. It has always been the top of the scale.

I learned the scale from him the way I learned to skate.

Neither of us ever named what was happening.

Someday I will tell Ash where his favorite word comes from.

Not today. Today I take the empty plate back.

My father catches my wrist for one second.

One. His thumb pressing briefly into my wrist then he lets go.

We do not hug at parties. We are working on it. The wrist is new.

The light goes soft around eight. Half the team drifts inside. The caterer’s van left an hour ago. The plates have stopped moving. Kerimore has claimed the Cup for good, curled in the bowl with one paw over the rim like a queen.

Ash finds me on the back porch. He hands me a plate he made himself. I did not ask for it. That is the point of him. He sits on the arm of my chair. His knee settles against my arm. For a while we listen to our team be loud.

“Twenty-nine people,” he says. “I counted. Also your father told Jari the potato salad was an insult and then ate three servings. I like him. He’s you with worse knees.”

“He is not.”

“He rated my playlist, Avi. Unprompted. He walked up to me and said ‘the music is acceptable’ and walked away. I’m getting it framed.”

I eat the plate he made me. He steals a piece of brisket off it. There are four pounds of leftover brisket in this yard. The piece that is mine is the one that tastes right to him.

“Verdict?” Ash says.

He means the day. My day. I spent it on nobody’s first choices, in my own grass, with my father at the fence and a cat in the Cup and this man in my house. Where he lives. Where his shoes are by my door and his name is on the mail.

“T?ydellinen,” I say. Perfect.

He tips his head. “I don’t know that one.”

“I know.”

He grins and doesn’t ask. He learned a long time ago what it means when I don’t translate. It means what it always means. I keep it in Finnish so it stays the right size.

Tomorrow the Cup is his, and he has a list. Of course, he has a list. Tonight it sits on my counter full of a cat, in my house, in the town where I built a thing nobody thought I had in me.

The pastry plate emptied first. I noticed.