Chapter 16: Lundy
The house is on a street that curves where it shouldn't, a row of duplexes with shared walls and separate stairs, and Jules takes the left set without checking which side.
“Shoes,” he says on the landing. “Off. On the mat. Before she sees.”
I unlace mine while he checks the front door. Handle down, handle up, pulls, pushes, opens it. The hallway smells like garlic and something slow-cooked and years of both.
His mother is already coming down the hall. The sound she makes when she sees him isn’t a word in either language. She holds his face in both hands and looks at him like she’s taking inventory, and then she kisses both cheeks, left, right, and says something in rapid French that I get the shape of but nothing inside it. Jules hasn’t let go of his keys.
“She says you look thin,” he tells me. “She’s talking to me but she says you look thin.”
“Merci,” I say to her.
“He speaks,” she says, in English that arrives with the weight of someone who saves her second language for when it counts.She reaches up and holds my face the same way she held Jules’s, both hands, and the appraisal is identical. What’s here, what’s changed. “You’re bigger in person.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Don’t be charming. Sit.”
His father is at the stove, wearing an apron with something written in French I suspect isn’t polite. He doesn’t turn around.
“Soren. You eat everything?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He eats everything,” Jules says, pulling out a chair.
“Good. Because everything is what I made.” He turns and points the wooden spoon at me. “Diane, he’s polite. I don’t trust it.”
“You don’t trust anyone.”
“I trust you. I trust the stove. I trust the Canadiens when they have a lead, which is never.” He turns back to the pot. “Jules, the table.”
Jules opens the drawer and sets the table, and I watch the sequence. Placemats, napkins, cutlery, water glasses, the order practiced enough that his hands never pause to decide what comes next. And then a bowl. Ceramic, off-white with a blue rim. It goes to the left of his place setting, between the fork and the edge of the table, and he sets it down without looking at it and nobody else looks at it either. It arrives in its place the way a word arrives at the end of a sentence it was always going to finish.
His mother brings the bread and sets it down and then, in the same motion, puts three crackers in the blue-rimmed bowl. She doesn’t ask. Jules doesn’t react. I’m the only person in the room who noticed.
His father brings the pot to the table. Stew, serious steam. He serves Jules’s mother first, then me, then himself, and then starts to serve Jules, but his mother has already movedthe serving spoon, adjusted something about the portion in a gesture too quick for me to read, and by the time the bowl reaches Jules the stew has been calibrated in some way that happened between two people who have been doing this longer than I’ve been alive.
Jules says thank you and picks up his spoon.
“How’s the ice in Tampa,” his father says.
“Sir?”
“The ice. I watched the second period. The puck was sitting. Humidity?”
“Humidity. Late in the game especially. Southern buildings.”
“Southern buildings.” He says it the way a person says a thing they’ve been saying for thirty years and have been right about every time. “Montreal, the puck moves. You’ll see.”
“He’s seen Montreal ice,” Jules says.
“Not in a series. In a series the ice is different because everyone is heavier.” He tears bread. “Matty says your backup reads like he’s been watching tape for forty years.”
“That was nice of him.”
“It wasn’t nice. He was complaining.” His father grins. “He called and said ‘this backup reads like he’s been watching tape for forty years’ and then he said a word I’ll not repeat at Diane’s table.”
