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“The line is fine. The line is also slightly intimidated.”
“Better intimidated than wrong.”
Šíma jogs up behind us, toweling his neck. “Vež ran the last twenty minutes like he owed the pitch money. The pitch was not asking to be repaid.”
“Šíma, you’re supposed to be cooling down.”
“I’m cooling down verbally. It’s a method.”
“It’s not a method.”
“It’s my method. My method involves commentary. Kovár, tell him.”
“Leave me out of this. I’m conserving energy.”
“You’ve been conserving energy since 2019.”
I let the corner of my mouth go up because the banter is old and warm and these are my people and they will give me shit in three languages before breakfast. My muscles are still playing. My calves are still reading the pitch. The mistake is still sitting where it sits, but the sun is on my shoulders and the grass smells the way Atlanta grass smells, which is different from German grass. Wetter. Greener somehow.
The session ends and I’m pulling on a training top near the bench when I see him.
Tobík is at the far side of the pitch, sitting in the metal bleachers behind the near goal with a water bottle. Alone.
He lifts a hand. I lift a hand back. The gesture is small and correct and exactly what it would look like from the outside.
From the inside, the wave is the closest I’ve come to touching him in six days.
I walk toward the bleachers because walking away would be more conspicuous. The team filters toward the tunnel behind me. Šíma is beside me for a second, still toweling his neck, and I feel his attention shift. His eyes land on my face and then follow where my face is pointed. A pause. Šíma doesn’t say anything. The not-saying-anything is louder than the commentary was.
He jogs ahead toward the tunnel. The moment passes.
Tobík doesn’t stand. He waits, forearms on his knees. His eyes are doing the thing they always do, which is working carefully over whatever’s in front of him as if the looking itself is a form of respect.
“Tomáš told you we’d be out here?”
“He mentioned it. I like watching football. The way everything moves together.”
“And how did it move today?”
“It moved well. You were the loudest thing on the pitch. Not your voice. The way the line bent to where you pointed. Everyone knew where to be because you knew.”
I sit on the bench one row below him. Close enough that if I turned my head his knees would be at my shoulder. The cicadas are loud in the trees beyond the parking lot. The metal of the bleachers is warm under my hand.
“You played well today,” he says.
“I got caught on one.”
“You got caught on one and then you made every call after.”
“That’s the job.”
“You said something like that to the new kid. When he stepped early. You told him the want is right and the timing catches up.”
“Because that’s true.”
“Yes. And then you got caught and you didn’t say it to yourself. You said yeah to Tomáš and then you went quiet and you made twelve calls and the twelve calls weren’t celebration. They were something else.”
The sentence arrives the way Tobík’s sentences arrive. Plainly. Without warning.
