“Then after the tournament he can find me in it and ask. I’m here to play, Davide. Everything else waits.”
“It’s been a year,” he says. He doesn’t pick his fork back up. “A year since you’ve been drinking it alone, and I’ve never once gotten the story about the guy or why it ended. I’ve only known there was a guy.”
“There’s no story.”
“Enzo.”
“There’s a dinner going cold. That’s the only tragedy at this table.” I point at his plate. “The basil was perfect and nobody is honoring it.”
He looks at me a moment longer. Then he lets it go. That patience is why he gets nine dinners and Theo gets a no.
Both phones go off at once. Mine buzzes against the fruit bowl. Then the squad chat starts stacking notifications, whichmeans it’s real. Nothing wakes the squad chat like the federation posting a graphic.
Davide reaches his phone first. “Bracket’s out.”
“Read it.”
“Round of sixteen against Austria.” He scrolls. “Win that, quarterfinal next week. Also here.”
“Against?”
“Winner of the Czech-Mexico match.” He keeps scrolling. “Czechia should take it. They topped their group. Organized. Mean at the back. And they’ve got that right-back from Roma, the one who—“
“There’s more sauce in the pan,” I say. “Take it before it tightens.”
My hands have stopped.
Something in my chest has already done the math. I give the hands a job instead. Plates, stacked. Glasses, gathered. In my family, a pair of stopped hands is a headline, and I’m not printing one tonight.
Davide gets up and serves himself without a word. The squad chat is doing what squad chats do. Gallo has posted a gif of a man praying. Somebody is complaining about a referee for a match that doesn’t exist yet. Ricci wants to know if anyone has seen his headphones, which has nothing to do with anything, which is why I love Ricci.
When Davide sits back down, he’s watching me the way he watches film. No hurry. All attention.
“You can tell me things,” he says. “The real things. Even the boring ones.”
“I know,” I say.
He nods. Then he gives me a full report on Tyson, his neighbor’s dog, who got a haircut yesterday and is so furious about it he spent the entire afternoon sitting with his back to thewindow. I ask three follow-up questions. The situation deserves rigor. Davide knows exactly what he’s doing, and I let him do it.
“The quarterfinal. We might never make it happen,” I say later, over the sink. “We have to win.”
“You say that like it’s unlikely.”
“I say it like a man doing dishes.”
“Sure,” he says. He takes the pan I hand him and lets that go too.
My sister’s voice note lands while I’m drying my hands. Four minutes, eleven seconds. I put her message on speaker and let it fill the kitchen.
Gianna’s exam went fine, and I should stop asking about it. Carlo, our brother, fell one meter off a scaffold onto a stack of mattresses and is telling the whole street he survived a construction disaster, complete with a limp that changes legs depending on his audience. Mamma is at war with the neighbor’s cat over the basil planter, and she’s losing on purpose because she likes the cat. Papà changed the Thursday menu, three regulars staged a sit-in, and he cooked them the old dish anyway while giving a speech about democracy. He’s thrilled. He’ll change the menu again next month just for the theater of it.
Then, with no pause at all: “And I saw the bracket. If you win and they win, I know what that quarterfinal is. You know the match I mean. Message me back, I have class. Answer the real question. Ciao ciao.”
She never asks the real question out loud. She leaves the space where it goes. She interrogates like a customs officer. She gets it from Mamma.
I record mine with the towel still over my shoulder. “Tell Carlo a meter is a curb, not a disaster. Tell Mamma to stop negotiating with that cat. She represents this family. Tell Papà the regulars were right, he knows it, and I’m counting the days until he admits it. The exam I never doubted. And Gianna…” I stop bythe window. The tomatoes sit on the sill in a row, going nowhere slowly. “Austria first. We win Austria. Then I’ll count that far.”
I play it back before I send it. I sound fine. I send it.
