“It’s my table too,” Jules says.
“It’s your mother’s table. We’re allowed to sit at it.”
“He’s not wrong,” his mother says to me. She puts bread on my plate. I didn’t ask for bread. “About either thing. The table or Matty.”
“Which word,” Jules says.
“Ask your brother.”
“He won’t tell me. He’s polite to me.”
“Nobody in this family is polite,” his mother says. “We just aim differently.”
Jules eats the three crackers from the blue-rimmed bowl, one at a time, in order, and his mother watches him eat the third one and something in her shoulders settles, like a thing she was holding has been set down.
“How’s the series feel from your end?” his father asks me. He leans forward, elbows on the table, the same full-face attention Jules gives a crossword. The question isn’t small talk.
“Honest answer?”
“I don’t want the other kind.”
“We’re better than anyone outside our room thinks. Our defense plays heavier than our size, and Jules reads entries earlier than any goalie I’ve found on tape.”
Jules’s spoon stops for half a second. Then it keeps going.
“You’re sitting next to his father,” his mother says, “and you’re going to tell him his son is the best.”
“I’m going to tell him what the tape says.”
Jules’s father looks at Jules, who’s looking at his stew. Something passes between them that I’m not inside of. Then his father looks at me.
“He got that from his mother. She sees everything early. I just stand where she tells me.”
“That isn’t true,” his mother says. “That’s the version he tells so he doesn’t have to take credit for anything.”
“True enough.” His father picks up his spoon. “Jules, eat.”
Jules is already eating. He’s been eating the whole time. But he adjusts his grip on the spoon as you do when someone has reminded you of a thing you were already doing, and I watch him become, for one beat, the version of himself that gets told to eat and eats.
The door gets checked twice. His father does it first, standing between the main course and the coffee, walking to the front of the house and turning the lock and rattling the handle without a word. His mother does it again on the way to the coffeepot,the same sequence, the same silence. Neither of them looks at Jules. Jules doesn’t react. The door is checked the way the bowl is placed and the water is poured before the glass empties, and none of it’s asked for because none of it has to be.
His mother takes me down the hallway while the coffee cools. Jules follows, cup held in both hands. At the rink he lifts a water bottle one-handed without thinking. Here, everything goes in both hands.
The hallway is narrow and full of framed things. Team photos, school shots, two boys on a frozen backyard rink who can only be Jules and Matty, a height chart on the doorframe that stops at sixteen.
“This one,” she says, pointing to a team photo. A boy in too-big goalie pads standing at the far end of the row, looking directly at the camera while every other kid looks at the coach. “Peewee. He was better than the starter but they didn’t play him because he wouldn’t talk to the other players.”
“Maman.”
“What? It’s true. You talked to the net.”
“I talked to both posts. There’s a difference.”
She turns to me. “He named them.”
“I know. I have their current names.”
“Gertie and Quessa,” Jules says, and in this hallway, with his mother’s hand on the photo frame and the height chart behind him, the names sound different than they do in the crease. They were born in this house. The version that lives here is the one he made before anyone took them seriously.
