The food arrives in waves. The restaurant knows this family. The waiter doesn’t explain dishes. He sets them down and Manods or doesn’t nod, and the ones she doesn’t nod at go back to the kitchen without discussion. I watch this happen twice. Nobody at the table seems surprised.
Jackie has not stopped between courses. Each question builds on the last. Each one a degree more specific than it needs to be.
“The players are good to you? The environment is good?” She asks this with a different weight. There is a weight under it, a directness that has nothing to do with whether the guys are polite in the training room. I clock it. I wonder how much she sees, whether she’s asking about what I think she’s asking about or just asking. In my experience, people either read that layer in a room or they don’t, and Jackie strikes me as a woman who reads every layer available.
“Great group,” I say. “Good environment.”
She holds my eyes for one beat past comfortable. Then she nods and picks up her fork.
Nicole looks up from her plate for the first time since food arrived. She points her fork at Teo.
“He talks about you.”
“Nicole.” Teo’s voice carries a warning that bounces off his sister without making contact.
“He talks about everyone. But he talks about you differently.” She says this to her sauce, fork lowered. “Since Christmas.”
The table goes quiet. I look at Teo. He is looking at Nicole with an expression I have never seen from him in the facility or the apartment or anywhere.
Jackie is watching me. Gina is watching me. Ma is watching me watch Teo. Nonna is eating her bread.
“He has good taste,” Gina says finally into her wine. “In general.”
Teo puts his face in his hands. “Can we talk about literally anything else.”
“We can talk about the eggplant parmigiana,” Nicole says. “It needs more salt.”
“The eggplant is fine,” Ma says.
“The eggplant needs salt, Ma. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it needs salt.”
And just like that the table pivots, all five of them, from the thing none of them needed to name to the eggplant, and the shift is so fast and so total that I understand this family differently than I did two minutes ago. The decision to move on was collective.
“The eggplant is actually undersalted,” I say.
Five heads turn.
“It is.” I don’t know why I’m still talking except that Nicole is right and I have been eating undersalted eggplant in silence when I do not eat undersalted food in silence in any room where I’m comfortable. “And the crust needed another minute. Maybe ninety seconds.”
Teo stares at me but his grin starts. “You have eggplant opinions.”
“I have opinions about most things. I just don’t usually share them at work.”
Gina sets her wine glass down. “He has opinions.”
“He has opinions,” Nicole confirms to her plate.
“Berger would be thrilled,” Teo says, and the laugh that comes out of me is not the professional one. It is the full one, from my chest, the one that belongs to Guy and Nan’s kitchen and nowhere in the facility. Jackie’s eyebrows go up. Gina grins. Ma is watching my face the way she watched it when I sat down, except now whatever she was looking for, she found it.
“Who is Berger?” Jackie asks.
“Teammate. He ranks everything. Restaurants, bartenders, airline pretzels. He has an entire methodology.”
“I like him,” Gina announces to the table.
“We knew we would,” Nicole says.
Teo’s phone buzzes on the table. He picks it up, reads it, and his face tightens by a degree that nobody here would catch except me. I know that tightening. The half-second calculation.
