I finish the kitchen. Every surface. Twice. He helps me pack the few things that are mine. The good knife I bought to replace his bending one. The gold chain that kept its usual post for the match and now gets half the blame for the result. We work quietly, and it’s the good quiet, the years of friendship quiet. By noon the borrowed apartment looks like nobody ever cooked, argued, or fell in love in it, which is the point, which is what leaving is.
Gianna calls while I’m zipping the bag. I let it ring twice, which for us is a scream.
“I’m not going to say it,” she says.
“Then don’t.”
“I’m not saying it. I’m just going to be on the phone while you don’t cry. Then we’re going to hang up. Then I’m going to text Mamma that you’re coming home and you’re fine, and it’s going to be a lie, and she’s going to know it’s a lie, and she’s going to make the ragù anyway. The good one. The Sunday one. For a Tuesday.”
“Gianna.”
“Come home, Enzo. Let us feed you for once. You’ve fed everyone. Come let your terrible family feed you.” Her voice cracks on terrible, which is where the Valenti love lives, in the insult that’s really the whole heart. “That’s all. That’s the whole speech. I’m hanging up before you hear me.”
I stand in the apartment with the phone warm in my hand. I don’t cry. She asked me not to. A man has to keep one promise a day, even if it’s only to his sister.
I spend the afternoon packing to leave a city that took three weeks of my life and handed me back the exact shape of the wound I arrived with. It’s a short list. I’ve checked it twice. I know I did the right thing at the door. I know a third time as a secret would have cost me something I can’t afford to lose again. Not him, but me. I know I’m going home to people who love me out loud, at full volume, in daylight, on Tuesdays and for no reason, the way I have always deserved and always tried my whole life to give.
And I know one more thing, and it’s the thing I didn’t say to Davide, and won’t, and would deny if he asked again.
The door is closed. Fully. With my whole strength.
It is not quite locked. I didn’t nail it shut.
I told him it was over, and I meant it. And then some animal part of me that has loved that man for three years left the smallest gap at the bottom. The width of a real thing done indaylight, at a cost. Not because I’m waiting. I’m done waiting, that part is true. But there’s a difference between a door you’ve stopped guarding and a door you’ve welded shut. I built the first one this morning. And I will go to my grave calling it the second.
Davide carries my bag to the door the next morning.
“You’ll cook for me in Naples,” he says. “When the season lets me. I’ll bring bad wine on purpose to watch your face.”
“Bring bad wine and I’ll send you home hungry.”
“That’s my Enzo.” He pulls me into the kind of hug men our age only give at airports and funerals, and this is a little of both. “Spine straight on the plane. You lost a match and you left a man who wasn’t ready. Both of those are survivable.”
“It’s a good word,” I say into his shoulder. “It’s just the smallest one there is.”
I keep my spine straight the whole way. And somewhere over the ocean, between the meal I don’t eat and the movie I don’t watch, I let myself think it exactly once. Quietly. Where nobody can see.
I hope he does the impossible thing. And I hope it before I finish healing. Because after that, the door I left unlocked is a door I’ll finally have the strength to weld shut. I don’t want that strength. I want him to arrive first. In daylight. At a cost. And I know exactly how unlikely that is, because he has chosen the box every single time it mattered.
Then I put it away. I look out the window at the nothing. I go home.
Chapter 18: Marek
We lose the semifinal, and I play the whole ninety minutes like a man watching himself on tape.
I do everything right. That is the strange part.
I hold the line and organize the back four and read the runs, and the reads arrive on time, all of them, delivered by some department of me that never heard about this week.
A better team keeps the ball as if they own it, and we chase it in shifts. Twice I win a duel that has no business being won. Once I clear off the line, and the bench comes up screaming, and I feel it like it’s for another person.
Their winger tries me in the sixtieth, shows me the outside, takes the outside. It works because he doesn’t know me.
The only man alive who knows me is an ocean away, and I gave him the tape of me one night at a time for two years, and none of these men have seen a minute of it.
At halftime, the coach says the things you say when the football is honest and the margin isn’t. Šíma sits beside me and says nothing at all.
We go back out, and it isn’t enough, and by the hour mark everyone in the stadium knows it isn’t going to be enough. A better team, a hot night, the whole country watching us come up one gear short.
