That's the whole story of this team. The part Grayson says out loud now that there's a Cup to say it over.
It's been making the rounds. The Cup. A day apiece. Each of us getting it for twenty-four hours to do something undignified with. Tikh took it to the shelter where he helps with the cats. Berger slept with it and won't confirm or deny that he talked to it. Marchetti's grandmother filled it with something that took three days to wash out.
I am counting everyone who came. Everyone who stayed. The number keeps going up and the door stays shut and nobody is looking for it but me. Even I have mostly stopped.
Baz is at the counter watching Gaspard in the Cup. “The Bugs are going in the Cup. The kittens will be in the Cup when we have it. There will be pictures."
"Leave them be," Tikh says.
"We're putting the kittens in the Stanley Cup, Tikhon. This is a core memory."
"...okay. One picture."
Berger has appointed himself judge of the cookout. "This is an eight-nine. Maybe a nine-one when the brisket's ready. Wes, back me up."
"It's whatever number you want it to be, Luca," Wes says, from the chair he hasn't left, with the patience of a man who has heard every number Berger owns.
"See," Berger says, delighted, "that's why I keep him."
Marchetti is holding a beer in the hand that's supposed to be icing. "Zay says I have to ice my shoulder. At the Cup party. Tell him, Lundy."
"Ice your shoulder, Teo."
"Thank you," Zay says.
"You two are in a cult. I'm telling everyone about the cult."
Thompson appears at my elbow with a plate he built himself. He surveys the yard, the couples and the Cup and the kitten and the noise, and says, to no one, to me, "Fish food."
"What?"
"Nothing. Just saying it. Fish food. Works every time."
"...thank you, Thompson."
"Took you long enough, both of you. I'm getting too old to drive getaway cars." He says it into his plate, satisfied, the matchmaker who never once made a speech, watching the whole thing he nudged into being eat brisket in my backyard.
Grayson finds me in the kitchen because Grayson always finds exactly who he needs to talk to. "Team of castoffs. People that no one in this league expected anything from."
"Best money anybody ever spent, Grayson," Bodie says, passing through with the Cup, the cat relocated to his shoulder.
"Don't repeat that. I have to sit across a table from these people in July and negotiate contracts with them."
Soucy's family came down for it. Of course they did.
The people who loved him before any of us got the chance. His brother Etienne has cornered him by the cooler with the specific intensity of a man holding a spreadsheet in his mind.
"I ran the numbers on your save percentage across the final three games."
"Of course you did, Etienne."
"Statistically what you did is not supposed to be possible. I am not saying that as a compliment. I am saying it as a problem. The model is broken."
"Some things don't go in the model."
"...that's the least-you thing you've ever said. Maman, he said a feelings thing, write it down."
I watch him with them, his mother keeping an invisible list of his rare and precious feelings-things, Etienne translating loveinto spreadsheets because numbers are the only dialect the two of them have ever shared. I wait for the old thing to arrive. The one that flickered in Montreal in the worst week of all of it. The fear that I was a guest in a life that was already complete before me, a life with no chair that had my name on it.
