Chapter 3 Ash
The Stanley Cup arrives at our house at nine in the morning for my official day, and the keeper looks at me the way substitute teachers used to.
“One day,” he says. “It travels in the case. It does not go in pools, lakes, or oceans. Food contact requires approval.” He glances toward the kitchen window, where Kerimore is sitting on the counter eyeing him, as if she has unfinished business with the cup.
Or the keeper. It’s hard to say. “The cat is grandfathered.”
“She’ll be pleased.”
I have a list. Of course, I have a list. It’s written on a napkin, because a year ago it worked out so well that I no longer trust any other stationery.
Avi read the list over my shoulder at seven this morning, coffee in hand, hair wrecked, wearing my shirt, which he claims is an accident of laundry and which I have chosen never to investigate.
“Six stops,” he’d said. “Ambitious.”
“It’s my day. My day has a route.”
He tapped one line. “This one first. The owner deserves the quiet version.”
So the first place the Stanley Cup goes on my day is a seven-seat Ethiopian restaurant in the Old Fourth Ward with no sign, where the owner fed two hockey players all through October and asked exactly zero questions about why we always took the corner table.
We knock on the door. She sees the case, then the Cup, then us.
She pulls us in and locks the door behind us.
She feeds the keeper until he stops being a keeper and becomes a man having seconds.
The Cup sits on table three with injera steam rising past it, and she rests her hand on the rim like it’s the shoulder of somebody’s kid who did well.
Nobody takes a picture at all. Avi tears the bread and hands me the good piece. Some things stay off the feed.
The rest of the day goes like the parade nobody planned.
The coffee place with the good cortados, where the barista writes CHAMP on Avi’s cup and STANLEY on the Cup’s, because yes, obviously the Cup got a cortado, the keeper approved it with a face like a notary.
The farmers market, where a nine-year-old in a Firebirds shirt spots the case and goes completely rigid, and has to be revived by peach sample, and then stands on a crate to look inside the bowl while his mother takes eleven photos and cries a little into her tote bag. “Is it heavy?” the kid asks Avi.
“Yes,” Avi says.
“Even with one hand?”
“Especially with one hand,” Avi says, which is not an answer, and the kid looks at him like scripture.
The kid nods like he’s just received the entire meaning of sports. He has.
In the car between stops, the Cup rides belted into the back seat like a carpool kid. Marco calls from San Francisco. I put him on speaker.
“Today?” is how he answers his own call.
“Today. We’ll post it in a couple of hours. His idea, my day, our terms.”
A pause with a lot of miles in it. Marco has held this with me and never once pushed. “Okay,” he says, and his voice has gone rough and businesslike at the same time, which is the whole man in two words. “Don’t read the replies or the quote tweets. Either of you. Ryan. I mean it.”
“Love you too.”
Avi does administration while I drive. By which I mean he opens the app store, downloads Instagram, and builds an account in four minutes with the ruthless efficiency of a man filing taxes.
“Handle,” he says.
“IkonenOfTheNorth. AviGotHands. BigFinnEnergy. I have more.”
“Antero Ikonen,” he types, all business. For the bio he considers the entire sum of himself, everything a man is, the full span of a life, and types: Defense.
“Incredible. The brand is unstoppable.”
“I follow one account today,” he says, and looks at me until I understand it’s mine, and then keeps looking while I find something urgent to do with the radio. Being known still short-circuits me, ten months in. He knows that too. He enjoys it.
We save Mae’s for last on purpose.
It’s a Tuesday late-lunch kind of empty.
The smell of butter and pepper that hit me the first week I lived here, back when Atlanta was just the place my fresh start happened to be parked.
The keeper takes a booth by the window with a sweet tea and pretends not to watch.
We take our table. The same one. Avi folds himself into the chair across from me the exact way he did in September, back when he sat as if he was being interviewed. He doesn’t sit like that anymore.
The Cup goes on the formica between the hot sauce and the napkin dispenser, and it has never looked more like itself.
I order the shrimp and grits. He orders the shrimp and grits. Ten months ago I had to talk him into that like a hostage negotiator.
“Okay,” I say, and lay the napkin on the table. “Caption drafts. It’s a tree structure. Branch one is jokes. Branch two is sincere. Branch three is jokes that turn sincere at the end, which I think is the strongest branch.”
“Read me the tree.”
I read him the tree. “Number two: ‘He shoots, he scores.’ Retired immediately, don’t look at me like that, it’s a draft.
Number six: ‘Some trophies you win. Some you lean into.’ Number nine: ‘The cat knew first.’ Which is true, and factual accuracy matters.
Number eleven: ‘Ranked list of things in this photo, worst to best: me, the Cup, the cat’s paw, him. ’”
“There’s a fourth branch,” I add. “Sincere jokes that stay jokes. It has one draft. It’s just the word ‘FINALLY’ in caps.”
“Berger will comment on that one second after you post it.”
“Berger is why the branch exists.”
He listens like he watches film, start to finish, no reactions, filing. Number six gets an eyebrow. Number eleven gets the corner of his mouth. When I finish, he’s quiet for a second, looking at the Cup, at the window, at the keeper’s sweet tea, at me.
“None of those,” he says. “Use the words you already said.”
“Which ones I already said?”
“October. First press conference of the season. Someone asked what it’s like playing with me.” He recites it verbatim, like a line he’s been keeping folded in his wallet. “He makes me better. Simple as that.”
The grits arrive. I look at this man through the steam. Everyone in the world heard me say that sentence months ago. Exactly one person in the world knew what it was.
“I love you,” I say, grabbing his hand.
He smiles back, squeezes my hand briefly. “I love you, too.”
The photo is the photo, gold light and the paw on the rim and nobody performing anything.
The caption is a quote the league already owns, in a frame that tells them what it always meant.
Photo credit where credit is due: B. Fontenot, who was aiming for the cat.
One tag, on a brand-new account with one follower and a bio that says Defense.
My thumb hovers.
“Loudly,” Avi says.
I post it.
Then I turn my phone face down on the table next to his, and we eat.
I know what is happening while the shrimp and grits do their quiet perfect thing.
Somewhere, a forum with about forty users who have been frame-by-framing our Cup-night celebration since June is having the greatest afternoon in the history of forums. Somewhere, Marco is opening the fridge and pouring champagne in a toast for us.
Somewhere, group chats are detonating in sequence like a fireworks finale, and one of them is a book club I am not in, and they can read about it.
The phone buzzes against the formica. Buzzes again. Goes to a soft continuous churn while we eat.
“Verdict?” I ask, when he’s halfway down the bowl. Same table. Same question. Ten months later.
“Acceptable,” Avi says. Same answer from ten months before. Then he sets down his spoon and amends the record for the first time in the history of the scale. “Better than acceptable.”
He said it out loud. In public. He picks his phone up exactly once during lunch.
Face stern. Thumbs deliberate. A man conducting business.
Across the table my own phone gives one specific buzz among the thousands, and later, in the car, with the Cup belted in behind us and the whole loud world waiting down the road, I’ll find it.
First comment on the post. One account. One follower. Bio says Defense.
Adequate.
Full sentence, by his standards. Punctuation and everything. The top of a scale whose ceiling I still haven’t found, deployed in public, under a photograph of him kissing me behind the Stanley Cup.
The room used to end at a hotel door. Inside real, outside real, never let them touch. We let them touch today. On purpose, on our terms, on my day. I keep waiting for the crash and it doesn’t come. It’s just bigger in here now.