Page 55 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“Fair enough.” He opened the door, the universal signal for a meeting’s end. “For what it’s worth, I’m rooting for you both to get through this without letting everyoneelse decide what it means. I just need you to make my job possible while I do it.”
We walked out. The corridor was bright after the office’s strategic dimness, and I blinked against it like someone stepping out of a cave.
Evan walked beside me. Not touching. Not speaking. But present in a way that had geometry to it: measured pace, careful distance, the physics of two bodies aware of each other at the molecular level.
“McKinney’s future uncertain,” I said quietly, quoting the headline I had seen on the sports ticker that morning.
He exhaled. Not a sigh. An acknowledgment.
“It’s being discussed,” he said.
“Seattle?”
“Seattle.”
Evan stopped at the hallway junction and turned toward me. His face was doing the thing where it tried very hard to communicate nothingand instead communicated everything: the weight and the want.
“I don’t know what happens next,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
“But I’m not going anywhere. Not today.”
Then he walked toward the locker room, and I stood in the corridor with Silas’s warning, a reporter’s phone call, Frame 187, and the contract window pressing against the walls of a relationship we had not even built yet.
My phone buzzed.
Bella: Sunday at Mamá’s still stands. Before you ask, yes, she is making enough food to negotiate peace in three countries.
Me: I wasn’t asking.
Bella: Your anxiety was. Bring bread. Real bread. Not sad grocery-store bread with trust issues.
Me: Copy.
Bella: Sierra asked if you’re coming. Mack pretended not to care and then asked whatkind of bread you were bringing, which is hockey-man for emotional investment.
Me: That family sounds exhausting.
Bella: Correct. Wear comfortable shoes.
I stared at the screen for a second longer than necessary, then looked down the hallway where Evan had disappeared.
Me: I’ll be there.
Bella: Good. Mamá likes you. Don’t ruin this for me.
Samantha
Iwent to Mamá Rey’s on Sunday because Bella had been threatening it for weeks, and I had run out of useful excuses.
Also, because some part of me, a part I had been trying very hard not to examine, suspected I needed warm food, loud family, and at least one Mexican mother calling me mija before I could survive whatever came next.
Mamá Rey lived in a house on the south side that smelled, from the driveway, likecumin, warm tortillas, and a lifetime of Sunday afternoons.
Bella was already there, barefoot and laughing at something her sister Celia had said. Celia stood by the stove, one hip resting against the counter, holding her child, who bore her eyes and Bella’s opinions. Sierra, Bella’s older sister, was outside on the patio with Mack, who had been handed a plastic soccer ball by one of the kids and was now losing to a six-year-old with the grave concentration of a man defending a championship title.
The television was on in the other room, a soccer game nobody was watching. Somebody’s child was shouting at the dog through a screen door that had not closed all the way since the 1990s. Somewhere in the kitchen, something sizzled in a pan, and the sound alone made my body loosen by half an inch.
