A pause arrives with something folded inside it. Damián went to the same school of pauses as Šíma, he just graduated kinder. “You good?”
“I’m fine, Mareš.”
“Okay.” Easy. No push. His phone buzzes, and he reads it. “Tomáš says brisket either way. If we lose, nobody is allowed to discuss football for twenty minutes.”
“Either way it goes,” I say. He pushes off the frame and goes. I look at the empty doorway for a moment.
I lie on my bed and run the checks twice. Twice there is a drawer in the middle of the cabinet that was shut for months and is now ajar, no matter how hard I try to close it. It’s a condition I don’t recognize, because in this system, a thing is either closed or it’s a crisis. Doors are allowed to be ajar. Drawers are not. A drawer that won’t close means the thing inside has changed size, and things that change size while filed away are the exact things the system exists to prevent.
I said his name in front of a barista. I ordered his coffee with my own mouth. The tape last night was eleven minutes of fullbacks and one minute of him repeated over and over, and the ratio is going the wrong way.
The air conditioning hums. Four blocks east, the grinder is off and the chairs are up. Somewhere west of that, a kitchen I have never seen has peaches on the sill. I know it the way you know a thing you have no right to know.
Chapter 5: Enzo
Davide waits until I’m elbow-deep in the ragù to tell me.
“Damián’s coming tonight. Czech centre-back. Atlanta’s been circling him, and the club wants us being friendly in case the circling turns into paperwork. I figured a dinner beats a golf day.”
“That sounds nice.”
“He’s bringing Kovár.”
My spoon keeps moving. I make sure it keeps moving.
“Then we need another chair,” I say. “And more bread.”
“That’s it? At the market you barely said four words to the man. Now it’s chair math?” He raises an eyebrow at me that speaks louder than his words.
“At the market I hadn’t started a ragù. Tonight there’s a ragù. Priorities.” I taste it, add salt, and taste again. “Call Damián. Tell him if they bring supermarket wine I’ll know.”
The sauce has been on since two because a sauce goes on at two no matter who’s coming. But somewhere along the way, my hands started pulling out the good plates Davide forgot he owned, and I didn’t tell them to do that. I watch them do it andI let them, and I keep one eye on them the whole time, the way you watch a teammate you don’t fully trust yet. The first night a Czech right-back crosses this threshold, they go straight to the shelf where the wedding china would live if Davide were the type, and lay it out for him like a verdict.
They arrive at eight. Damián first, holding the wine out with both hands.
“From the wine store on the corner,” he says. “The man made me describe the sauce before he’d sell it to me. I had to call Kovár from the shop for the details.”
“He called me from a wine shop,” Marek says, coming in behind him with a pastry box, “to ask what six hours of onions smells like. I told him to buy the second cheapest thing and apologize.”
“He told me that. I didn’t do it.” Damián hands me the bottle. “It felt wrong for the occasion.”
I like him in the first minute of meeting him. He has that look I’ve seen on maybe three players in my life, a man carrying a big decision around as if it hasn’t stopped surprising him.
Marek has no cap on tonight. The light brown curls are worse without it, which is to say better, refusing whatever discipline he tried to give them before he left the hotel. He looks too tall for Davide’s doorway and too composed for a man carrying pastries like an apology he has not admitted to yet.
He hands me the box. “From a place near the hotel. It’s the almond thing. The croissants are for tourists who need their pastry translated.”
It’s a good line, and it’s a researched line, because you don’t learn what a bakery does best in one visit. It takes three. Minimum. I hand the box to Davide and go back to the stove without laughing. The not-laughing takes work.
I do the work.
Dinner runs long, which is the point of dinner with two men from Italy.
Davide walks Damián through the club that keeps orbiting him. The fitness coach everyone hates for two weeks and then defends to strangers. Which physio to trust with an ankle and which one to trust with gossip. Damián takes notes for a life he has not decided to admit he wants yet.
“Can I ask you something?” Davide says, refilling his wine. “You have offers in Europe. Everyone knows you have offers in Europe. Why even look here?”
Damián turns his glass once. When he answers, he answers the whole question.
