Page 96 of Puck You Both

Again. Full voice. Front half holds. The middle holds. The ending wobbles a bit.

Green chime.

I sit up straighter. Again, because once is luck.

Green chime. The streak counter ticks to two, and the screen prints out cartoon confetti. Great job!

I’m hiding in my car outside my mother's house, a grown man with a new letter on his jersey and a shutout column in the league's top five, genuinely warmed by cartoon confetti.

There's an urge to run it once more, for margin, but I know better. You don't re-test a save that worked. I pocket the earbuds, and walk to the door.

The door opens before I ring the bell, which means she’s been watching me from the window.

“Hi, mom.”

She greets me with a stern nod and looks me up and down, twice, before letting me in.

I’ve been triaged.

The house smells like pot roast. She points me at the cabinet with the plates without turning around from the stove, and I set the table the way she taught me before I could skate, forks left, knives blade-in, glasses at one o'clock. Her systems predate my systems.

We sit. She lets me get three bites in.

"That second goal Tuesday," she says. "You guessed."

"I was screened, mom," I answer around the food in my mouth. "I had a read."

"You had a hope."

She picks one save a game to hate, and she's never wrong.

I eat my green beans like I’m seven, because she’s watching me like a hawk. Then, she adds more to my plate without asking. "Cholesterol.”

My phone buzzes on the table and I make a grave mistake of checking it.

Theo has sent a photo of the gas-station flowers, still standing in the protein shaker on his counter, captioned day two. thriving. My mouth curls up into a smile before I can stop it.

I glance up to find Linda Wallace watching me over the rim of her glass. If she noticed, she keeps it to herself.

The dinner continues mostly uneventfully. She tells me the neighbor two doors down put his house up for sale and priced it like it has a view. I tell her the season's going well. She says she knows, she watches, which I knew, and there's half a minute where it's just forks, and it's comfortable, and I make the mistake of relaxing into it.

My phone buzzes again and I silence it without looking.

But it doesn’t matter. My mom spent decades reading vitals off faces for a living, and I've just handed her a chart.

She takes another bite, chews, swallows, and doesn't look up from her plate when she finally says, "Bring her over next time."

My fork goes down and I take a long, steadying breath. My mom isn’t Becker, no denial ever survives with her. I swallow around the lump in my throat and say exactly as much as I have the courage for. “Him.”

I don’t have it in me yet to tell her the truth. That there are two of him.

She takes a sip of water, considers it, and then, her lips curl into a rare, wide smile. "Finally, something interesting."

Chapter 19

PATRICK

MY EDGES ARE fine. They were fine this morning, and they were fine five minutes ago when I last checked, but I drag my thumb along the blade anyway, because the alternative is looking at the television above the door, and I already know it by heart.