"That's not—"
"I still can't ride a bike."
I turn to look at him fully. "You cannot ride a bike."
"No."
"Jamie."
"It never came up. I was on the ice before I was on anything else. It just never—"
"Jamie, I love when you tell me things you can’t do." I shake my head. "But I'm not even going to make fun of you this time. It's too bleak."
"Callahan."
"I'll teach you," I promise. "After the season. I'll find two bikes and I'll teach you."
"Okay," he says, timidly, pink crawling up his neck.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
We look at each other a beat too long, until the record skips and takes us out of the moment.
"Your turn," he says.
"I cried at the end of Toy Story. Alone in my dorm room. Called my brother Eli after and he cried too and we stayed on the phone for an hour. That was last year."
"We're close," I add.
"You cried about a children's movie and called your brother?"
"Yes."
"At twenty years old."
"The themes are universal, Jamie, it doesn't have an age limit, it applies to—"
"No, I—it's not a bad thing. I just—" He looks at me. "You called him. I’m just happy you had someone to call last year."
I look at him. At what's underneath that sentence. At what it means that he noticed that specifically and what it says about what he didn't have. "Yeah," I say. "I did. I at least had him."
We order food at noon. Sit cross-legged on my bed with containers between us and the second record playing — he picked this one too, went to the shelf without asking, and I didn't say anything about the fact that it's the one I played on a loop the night I packed up my dorm at Eldridge.
He didn't know that.
But he picked it.
Like he knows me well enough.
"Tell me about your mom," I say.
He's quiet. "What about her?"
"Anything. You mentioned her once. Before games."
"She used to say—" He stops. Starts again. "She's not — she was different when my dad was around. He had a way of making the room about him without trying. She just got smaller over time." He looks at his food. "I used to think when he was gone she'd come back to herself, but after a while she just disappeared further inside herself and never came back." A beat to catch his breath. "She was just trying her best. I don’t blame her. I think he broke her into a million pieces and they never fit back together again. She never wanted to leave him either.”
