“They’re good,” Zay says to me. “I could eat a lot of these.”
“Good is not a sufficient descriptor for what is happening in this polpette, Brooks.”
“It’s a meatball, Marchetti.”
“How dare you relegate my nonna’s polpette to simply meatballs.”
Jensen is sitting in the chair by the window with a plate balanced on his knee. He has eaten four polpette and said one thing since arriving. I heard it from across the room, delivered to Mueller, who had been explaining the ideal diameter of a meatball with the conviction of an engineer filing a patent.
“These are the right size.”
Mueller stopped talking. Jensen went back to eating.
Nonna is back at the stove, stirring the sauce, her cane hooked over the counter edge within reach. With fifty years spent cooking, she navigates Avi’s kitchen, much like her own, with unhurried certainty, knowing precisely where everything belongs without needing direction.
Ash passes behind Avi at the counter and puts his hand on Avi’s back. Brief. Familiar. Avi doesn’t react except to tilt his head slightly toward the contact, a motion so small that if you weren’t watching you’d miss it.
I am watching.
They’re standing together in the kitchen and the team is around them and nobody is looking at the hand on the back because nobody needs to look at it because it’s just what they are, visible and known and held by this room full of people who care about them. The ache is brief. It moves through my chest like a held breath that releases itself. I want to be standing next to Zay with my hand on his back. I want my grandmother to see us the way the team sees Ash and Avi. I want it to be ordinary. But the line between player and staff is a different line than the one Avi and Ash crossed. The wanting lasts three seconds and Ilet it pass because it has to pass, because the version of my life where that’s possible is not the version I’m living in yet.
Nonna calls me over near the end of the night to sit next to her in the living room. The team is spreading out. Zay is talking with Mueller by the bookshelf.
“Matteo. Come.”
I go to her. Her hands found mine, a familiar gesture, one she’d offered since I was nine, when the world felt vast, and her touch stabilized it. She looks at me for a long time.
“He is wonderful, caro.” Her voice is quiet. Just for me. “And you are different when he is in the room.”
She pats my cheek once. I sit with my grandmother’s words sitting in my chest and the sounds of my team filling the rooms around me. I can see Zay at the bookshelf, his head tilted toward Gary, his hand wrapped around a glass, the sleeve of that blue shirt caught at the forearm. He glances up, spots me in the opposite part of the room. That look lingers briefly before his attention goes back to Mueller, and resumes their discussion. But the second happened. The second is ours.
The team is loud and the feeling is warm and my grandmother called it wonderful, and she is right.
Chapter 16 — ZAY
The training room at the visitors’ end of Prudential Center is the same as every visitors’ training room. Portable table, tape station, the ultrasound unit positioned at my right hand without thinking about it. Same routine. Same order. Same distance between tools. The routine is what keeps the space mine even when the building is different
Except tonight the building doesn’t just belong to someone else. It belongs to Teo’s entire family.
He mentioned it after morning skate, casual, like it was weather. “My family’s coming tonight. Ma, Nonna, the girls.” Then, checking the hallway, quieter: “Dinner after. You should come.”
I should not come. That is the correct professional assessment. I should go back to the hotel with the rest of the staff, order room service, review my notes.
I am going to dinner. With the Marchettis.
The game is unremarkable. We win 4-2 and Marchetti has an assist on the third goal, a net-front redirect that he celebrates with Thompson in a way that suggests they’ve rehearsed thecelebration longer than the actual play. I watch from the bench area. I track his shoulder through the motion, note the follow-through. I do not look at the section where his family is sitting because I have already identified that section and I am choosing not to look at it.
Teo texts an address and a time. Twenty minutes after the bus drops us off.
I’ll be at the table already.
He is managing. The logistics, the timing, the routing so that nobody from the team sees us leave in the same direction. This is his city. His geography. His family and his risk to navigate, and I am following his lead for once, which is not a position I usually occupy.
I put on the navy henley that Guy told me makes me look like a person and not a medical chart. Take an Uber to a restaurant I’ve never heard of on a street I’ve never been on.
The hostess points me toward the back room. I hear them before I see them.
The table is round, which means there is no head and no escape route. Ma is the center of gravity regardless. Teo is between one of his sisters and an empty chair, and when he sees me his whole face goes still for a half second before the grin arrives.
