“Ma, this is too much,” I said.
“Sit down and let me feed you,” she said, in the tone that meant arguing was futile.
We sat. Taz somehow ended up at the head of the table, which seemed to amuse him. Max sat to his right, then Cinder, then me. Cole and Phoenix took the other side with Keegan and Ash. My mom presided from the kitchen doorway like a general surveying her troops.
The lasagna came out first—two massive pans of it, layers of pasta and cheese and meat sauce that made Taz close his eyes on the first bite like he’d found religion.
“Mrs. Russo,” he said seriously, “this is the best lasagna I’ve ever had.”
“It’s Gina, and you’re sweet,” my mom said, beaming. “There’s more in the kitchen.”
The chicken came next—roasted with lemon and herbs, falling off the bone. Then the salad, then the bread, then more bread because apparently my mother thought we were training for an eating competition. I watched my teammates demolish two months’ worth of groceries in about twenty minutes, and my mom looked happier than I’d seen her since before the trade.
She’d been horrified the first time I’d taken over the bills. All my signing bonus had gone toward all the repairs on the house she refused to leave, even though it would have been cheaper to start again. Not that my brothers didn’t help where they could, but I was the only one who could afford the new roof, windows, and the rewire.
Max was telling her a story about his grandmother in Montreal, something about a Christmas dinner that had gone catastrophically wrong, and my mom was laughing so hard she was crying. I watched the way he leaned in when he talked toher, the way his whole face transformed when he smiled, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t realized was tight.
Then I caught Ash watching Max with an expression I recognized because I’d been wearing some version of it all morning when I thought about Kincaid. That sort of attention that wasn’t quite staring but was definitely cataloging, memorizing, trying not to be obvious about it.
Oh.
I looked away quickly, because if I’d noticed it then someone else might notice it, and that wasn’t my business to notice or comment on. But I filed it away in the part of my brain that was apparently collecting observations about people being attracted to people they probably shouldn’t be attracted to.
“Dante tells me you’re rebuilding,” my mom said to Max, passing him more bread that he definitely didn’t need but took anyway because you didn’t say no to Italian mothers offering food.
“We are,” Max confirmed. “It’s been a process. But we’ve got good people. Your son included.”
I stared at my plate and tried not to feel the way my face heated.
“He’s tough,” my mom said, with pride that made me want to sink through the floor. “Always has been. Even when he was little, if he fell down, he’d get right back up. Never cried.”
“Ma,” I said.
“What? It’s true. You remember that time you broke your wrist at practice and didn’t tell anyone for three days?”
“I was twelve and stupid,” I muttered.
“You were twelve and determined,” she corrected. She looked at Max. “He gets that from his father. Stubborn as hell, both of them.”
There was a brief silence. My dad had died when I was sixteen—heart attack, sudden, the kind of thing that rearranged your entire understanding of how the world worked. My mom didn’t talk about him much, but when she did, it was always with a mixture of love and exasperation that made him feel present even though he wasn’t.
“He would’ve loved watching you play professionally,” she said quietly.
I swallowed past something in my throat. “I know.” He’d gotten me there. All the diving me to games. All the hours watching me play. Never once complaining at how much money they spent. Money they didn’t have but spent it anyway.
Max reached over and squeezed my shoulder once, brief and grounding, and I was grateful he didn’t try to say anything because there wasn’t anything to say.
The tiramisu came out after, because apparently my mother had decided we needed dessert despite the fact that we’d already eaten our body weight in pasta. It was perfect—layers of espresso-soaked cake and mascarpone that made Cole make a sound that was borderline inappropriate.
“You should come to Denver,” he told my mom seriously. “Open a restaurant. You’d make a fortune.”
“I’m too old to start over,” she said, but she was pleased.
“You’re not old,” Phoenix said. It was maybe the third thing he’d said all meal, and my mom turned to him with focused attention, the type she gave students who were quieter than the rest.
“And what do you do, Phoenix? Are you a player too?”
“No, ma’am. I work for Mr. Steel. Administrative stuff.”
