Chapter 14 Wes
The retirement announcement went out in June. Two paragraphs. Kyle wrote them and I added the thank-you. My phone was loud for three days. Then it was quiet, and the quiet didn’t scare me the way everyone said it would. I’d already found the thing that comes after.
Dinner is the same place. Same outside table.
It’s ours the way things get to be yours when you come back enough years in a row.
The owner doesn’t know who we are but knows our order.
On this island, that’s the better kind of famous.
The keeper sits two tables over with a beer and the case at his feet.
Off duty, in every way a man like that gets off duty.
Luca has the Cup with us, because it’s his day and his rules. It sits on the third chair wearing the sunset like it was born here. The owner looks at it for a long moment when he brings the fish.
“Big cup,” he says.
“The biggest,” Luca agrees, and that is the entire press conference. I could live here. And in fact, now we can.
He rates the ceviche an eight-four. The highest score in history.
He explains the margin to me with a raised finger.
The lime tree gets partial credit. The new landlord’s citrus program is apparently already showing returns.
I sit there with my chin in my hand, watching him build the case like a Swiss prosecutor.
I think about the first spreadsheet. Midnight in my living room, a twenty-two-year-old with wet hair defending his 6.
8 against my 7.1 on principle. I knew even then.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“I’m off duty. Staring’s allowed now.”
We walk back the long way, on the beach, because the light is doing the thing. I have photographed this water on four visits now. I brought the camera tonight. Old habit. It hangs off my shoulder, and for once I don’t reach for it.
Luca stops walking at the edge of the dry sand.
Sets the Cup down. It stands there on the beach like a lighthouse someone shrank.
Luca looks at it, then at the water, then at me.
I watch him line something up. I know the face.
It’s the face from the top of the face-off circle.
The one he wears when he’s about to put a puck somewhere the goalie has personally never considered.
“I need to tell you about the plan,” he says.
“The plan?”
“There’s a spreadsheet. It has columns.” He says it the way other men say I love you.
From him, it is. “Location options, weighted. Dates, cross-referenced with the schedule. A contingency tab. I started it in April. I was going to do this in three weeks. In Zurich, at the rink where I learned to skate, because the weighted composite rating was a nine-eight and my sister Sina could be nearby. There was a column for what I would say.”
The water comes in and goes out. I don’t say anything. I have never once interrupted him mid-build. I’m not going to start on the most important build of my life.
“And then you bought us a house,” Luca says.
His voice does something at the edges. “You retired from hockey. You bought the only place we never had to hide. You left the lock broken because it’s ours.
And the plan is obsolete, Wes. The document is dead.
I can’t wait three weeks. I can’t wait three days. ”
He doesn’t kneel. He steps in close instead, the way he did on a balcony in Miami before either of us was brave.
He takes my hand and turns it over. There’s nobody on this beach but a cat person whose cat is holding down an apartment in Atlanta, a retired winger, a man in white gloves pretending not to watch, and the heaviest trophy in sports.
Luca Berger looks up at me with the whole Atlantic behind him.
“Nothing is a ten,” he says. “That’s the rule.
A ten implies perfection, and perfection implies there is nothing left to want.
There is always something left to want. I have been saying that for years, and it has always been true.
” His jaw sets. His eyes are wrecked and certain at the same time.
“You are the something, Wes. You have been the something the entire time. Marry me, and I’ll finally have to retire the rule. ”
Hockey teaches you to keep your feet through anything. I lose mine anyway. Some interior version of them anyway. Whatever a man stands on when he’s been steady for other people.
“Yes,” I say. Nothing else comes out. I should be able to give him all the words I have ever thought of and here I am at the big moment, holding one word.
“Yes?”
“Luca. Baby. Yes, I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Then, the rest comes out of me. “I want mornings here. I want to learn the fish market before the tourists find it. I want to teach you the camera, and I want one full season of watching you play from a seat instead of a bench. I want to cook for Sina at Christmas.”
“You’ve been thinking about a lot of things,” he says, wrecked, his eyes glassy.
“So many things.”
He exhales, and it shakes on the way out. Then he laughs, and I catch it with my mouth and pull him in close to me. The wave comes in over both our feet and neither of us moves. The Cup stands witness on the sand, between the wet and the dry. Right on the line. Exactly where everything changes.
Later, on the balcony, with the two glasses and the limes and the deed in a kitchen drawer where he insists important documents live now, I set the camera on the railing and put the timer on and get in the frame.
Both of us. The Cup between the chairs. The bougainvillea photobombing from the left, structural ambition and all.
“Who do we tell?” I ask him, his head on my shoulder, the island turning purple.
“Nobody,” he says. “Not yet. It’s ours. We just got it.” Then, after a while, in the voice he uses for verdicts: “The team can have it soon. There’s a group chat with a book club that thinks it knows everything.” I feel him smile against my shoulder. “It’s going to be a very good chapter.”
The engagement is unrated. He never says why, and I never ask. But I know the rule and I know the man. Some things you don’t put a number on, because the number would be a ceiling.
We sit on the balcony of our house until the stars come out over the water. No part of me is trying to catch the second everything changes. I’m in it and see it’s never just one change. It’s a series that gets better and better.