Chapter 9 Zay
Mary comes out of the doors first, scanning like a point guard.
Tony follows with the bags, all of them, refusing help on principle.
Then the sisters, three across, Gina and Jackie and Nicole in sunglasses, moving like a unit that has been getting each other through airports since the eighties.
And in the middle of the phalanx, at the speed she has decided the day will move, Nonna.
Cane in one hand. In the other, a cooler bag that made it through security by a mechanism nobody in this family will explain to me.
“Caro,” she says to Teo, taking his face in both hands. Then she turns to me and takes mine. Same grip. “Isaiah. You look tired around the eyes. Good. It means the season was honest.”
Teo looks at me over her head with an expression that says told you. I stand in the arrivals lane of the busiest airport in the world getting my face held by Teo’s grandmother.
My nan and I had a long discussion when the schedule went around, and I told her what a Cup day was and that the Marchetti’s were coming into town.
She was quiet for a second and then said, “So I should make three pies,” and that was the entire negotiation.
What I did not fully plan, what nobody could have planned, is what happens when you put my grandmother and Teo’s grandmother on the same porch.
They size each other up for exactly one minute.
Nan in her church-adjacent Saturday best, hands folded.
Nonna with her cane planted like a flag.
Two women who between them have run multiple kitchens, four churches in two denominations, and every family decision on the eastern seaboard for half a century.
The Cup sits on Nan’s good table in her dining room, and neither of them has looked at it yet, because they are looking at each other’s boys.
“He eats at your table,” Nonna says, nodding. Not a question, knowing she would do the same if the situation were reversed.
“Every Sunday he can,” Nan says.
“Matteo sings in the hallway. All his life. You cannot stop him.”
“Isaiah hums. Thinks I don’t hear it.”
They look at each other a moment longer and settle something nobody asked the rest of us to weigh in on.
“Sit down,” they both say, to all of us, at the same time, and that is that. Détente. Alliance. Whatever it is, it involves sweet potato pie and biscotti on the same plate, which Teo eats crossed-legged on Nan’s floor like a kid, rating nothing, saying nothing, his knee against mine.
Nonna inspects the pie with the gravity of a customs official. She takes one bite. She sets down the fork.
“You will give me this recipe.”
“I’ll trade you,” Nan says, “for the boy’s bolognese. He talks about it like it’s a person.”
“The bolognese is a person. It is my mother.” Nonna picks the fork back up. “We will call each other.”
They exchange numbers. Landline to cell.
Jackie enters it for Nonna with the practiced air of a woman who has been the family’s IT department since 2004.
Beside me, Teo watches his grandmother and my grandmother form the single most powerful alliance in either of our lives.
His face is doing something that has no bit attached to it at all.
Nan catches me watching him watch them. She doesn’t say anything.
She just puts her hand on the back of my neck on her way to the kitchen. The touch I grew up under.
At five, we are at the pavilion with everyone. And by everyone, I mean everyone Teo could think to add to the list.
We rented the big one at the park because Teo made a list of people to invite and the list was, functionally, the word yes. The team comes in waves. Guy and Michael arrive with folding chairs and a cooler.
“That’s bigger than on TV,” my best friend Guy says, which is what every single person who isn’t a hockey player or hockey-adjacent says.
“It’s exactly as big as on TV,” Michael says, already organizing a photo line. “Stand behind it and you’ll see.”
My folks are here from South Georgia, my father staking out the shade with a plate before the line forms, my mother folding Teo’s sisters into conversation like she’s known them for years. Tony and Jensen discover each other near the grill and stand there in the deep, wordless comfort.
Parker attends in her carrier, is released under leashed supervision, ignores the Stanley Cup entirely, and claims the Cup’s empty shipping case within four minutes. She sits in it all evening like it was delivered for her. Honestly, by the law of this team, it was.
Nonna is given a folding chair next to the Cup and receives visitors. At some point Berger asks her, respectfully, if she wants to eat something out of it. It’s tradition. People eat out of it. Nonna looks at him the way she must have looked at the twentieth century.
“You do not eat from a trophy. You eat from a bowl. This is what is wrong with your generation.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Berger, who has faced playoff elimination with less humility.
Just before sunset I catch M?kinen at the edge of the pavilion, out of the photo line, phone in his hand. I read bodies for a living. His shoulders are doing the thing shoulders do when the news is not news yet.
Avi is beside him before I finish the thought.
“Everything okay?” I hear Avi ask.
“Summer stuff.” M?ki pockets the phone. “My agent says it’s noise.”
He goes back to the photo line and takes a kid’s picture for them, smiling like it costs nothing. Avi watches him go for a second longer than the moment needs.
The roast begins at sunset without warning, which means it was scheduled.
Thompson stands on a picnic bench and produces actual index cards.
“Good evening. Some of you may know the team has a book club. We started it as a joke, but we got invested. And the club grew. We are gathered here because our teammate Matteo Marchetti has narrated every love story on this roster like a play-by-play man with no off switch. The captain. The other captain. The goalies, at length. And it has come to the attention of the book club that there is one story he never once called.”
“Oh no,” Teo says beside me, with total delight.
“Exhibit A,” Thompson says.
Kowalski rises. Kowalski has a folder. Of course Kowalski has a folder.
He holds up a printed screenshot of a scheduling screen, the columns visible from three tables away, one name moved from one column to another.
“All season, he would only schedule with Zay, until the very end,” Kowalski says, like a man reading a verdict.
“He thinks nobody checks the audit log.”
The team howls. Teo puts his face in his hands.
“Exhibit B.” A phone, held high, playing four seconds of hallway audio: someone humming, badly, joyfully, a song I sent him in the middle of the night. “He hums them,” Kowalski says. “The whole building knows the playlist. No one hums this happily.”
“And exhibit C.” Thompson takes it back, cards level.
“The club read a book this spring. A workplace romance. Two professionals who couldn’t be together because of the rules.
We discussed it every week, at length.” He pauses with the timing of a man who has waited months to bring these receipts.
“Marchetti led the discussion. Multiple discussions. Never blinked once.”
“The themes were universal,“ Teo shouts, breaking entirely.
And then Hájek stands up, and the roast changes temperature, because Hájek does not do exhibits.
“I will say one thing,” he says, in the careful English he uses when he wants to be sure he gets the words correct.
“All season, this man narrated. A man who watches everyone’s love with that much attention, and asks for nothing back, is not making jokes.
He is taking care. We practiced with fiction first because he handed us the books.
So.” He raises his bottle at Teo, and then, deliberately, at me.
“Somebody finally narrated him. It took the whole club. He was worth the reading.”
The pavilion goes up. Teo does not have a comeback.
I watch the man who fills every room in Georgia stand there in front of his family and my family and Atlanta Firebirds teammates and staff.
Narrated. Witnessed. And he takes it. He doesn’t deflect and he doesn’t rate it and his eyes are shining and he lets it land.
Nonna is crying into a napkin. Nan’s hand is on Nonna’s shoulder.
That alliance is hours old and already running the pavilion.
Later, the light goes orange, and I find Teo at the edge of the pavilion, looking back at all of it. The Cup on the table with a line of kids waiting. Two grandmothers, one bench. His mother and Guy, deep in conversation, pointing at us.
Quiet, in the good way. The kind I used to have to work him down into, one shoulder at a time. I lean into him and put my hand in his. I feel him lean back into it half an inch, and neither of us says anything at all.
I had my day with him and the Cup already. It fit in one hour.
It fit in one word, actually. He knows which one.