“Both. Neither.” I’m already standing because the stillness broke somewhere in the last minute and my body got there first. “For me. He can attend.”
“That’s my brother. Voice note me the menu. And Enzo. The line. Does it hold?”
“The line holds. The line was never the problem. I’m going to feed the problem.”
“Feed yourself too. You cook for armies and forget you own a mouth. Ciao ciao.”
The genovese takes five hours and does not negotiate.
Onions sliced until the knife and I agree about the future. The pot Davide didn’t know he owned, scoured twice. Low heat and patience. The apartment fills up, room by room, with the smell my whole childhood is stored in, and hour by hour the anger stops being a thing that sits in my hands and becomes a thing I can put on a table.
This is the Valenti language. Not the shouting. The pot.
Davide texts that he’s eating with the goalkeepers and the apartment had better still exist when he returns. I tell him it will smell like his childhood if his childhood had been correct. He sends back a photo of a steakhouse menu, which is his way of blessing an enterprise from a safe distance.
At six I send one message. Not a question. Questions are reaches, and I don’t reach.
The genovese is ready at eight. The table will be set for two, in a kitchen, with the lights on and the door unlocked. What walks in is up to you. What it means is not.
The knock comes at eight exactly, which, from him, is a speech.
No container this time. No pretext in his hands at all, which I notice, because empty hands on that man are a foreign language he’s just started learning. He stands in the doorway in a clean shirt, and he looks at the set table, two plates, two glasses, bread in the middle, and I watch the sight of it land somewhere his face has no coverage for.
The clean shirt fits him badly in the useful way, tight across the shoulders and loose where he has not let the tournament take anything extra from him. His curls are still damp from a shower or a failed attempt at order. The grey eyes go to the table first, then to me, and neither of us pretends I missed the order.
“Sit down,” I say.
He sits.
I serve him the way my father serves people he’s decided to keep. Not asking. Plating. Pasta first, a spoon of sauce, the pause, the second spoon. The second spoon is the difference between feeding a man and making a point, and tonight I’m doing both.
It costs me something, the second spoon. Part of me wants him to eat badly at my table, just once. That part is ugly and mine, and I plate it with everything else.
He eats the first bite and puts his fork down and doesn’t say anything for a moment. His jaw works once. I’ve watched thatjaw take corners off strikers for five years, and it takes six hours of onions to make it move like that.
“You started the genovese before you sent the message,” he says.
“I started it before I decided to send the message. Learn the difference between this and a window, Marek. A window you climb through, and it’s nothing, and you can pretend it never happened. This has your name at it tonight. Nobody’s hiding it and nobody dies. You keep paying for the night version like it’s the only thing on the menu. It isn’t. This is the daylight product. One dinner, fully lit.”
He looks at me. He takes his time, and when he talks, he doesn’t pick the fork back up.
“That’s the part you wanted, no? For me to sit here and feel exactly what I’ve been driving away from all these years? It worked, Enzo.”
“Good,” I say. “Eat it while it’s hot.”
We eat. He has two helpings. He tells me the hotel eggs have developed colleagues, an entire suspicious yogurt operation. This time the laugh gets out of me before anything can stop it. I have months of practice at not laughing, and dairy is what breaks me.
He watches my hands when I serve him, and I let him watch, because this is the version where watching is allowed. It costs him to be here without a window to file it under, and the cost shows at the hinge of his jaw and in how carefully he sets the glass down after every single drink. I’m not sorry. A man should know the price of a table before he decides what he can’t afford.
The color gives him away too. He’s fair in the way that keeps no secrets, and there’s pink climbing his cheekbones that the wine only half explains. Five years the league has read him for a tell and found nothing. It was above the collar the whole time.
At the door afterward he stops, and the old choreography asks for its twenty seconds and doesn’t get them.
“The dinner,” he says. “I don’t understand it.”
“I know you don’t. But it is there for when you do.”
I close the door. Softly, and let him stand on the landing with that.
