Page 21 of Victory Lap

“You’re coming to Montreal?”

“We are invited. Diane was very clear. Karl is pretending he hasn’t decided.” She sips. “Pack his opinion for him. He travels better when it’s already in the bag.”

Beside me, Soren has gone very still in the way of a man watching two worlds dock and hoping nobody notices him enjoying it.

“She sent the schedule Tuesday,” I tell him, because he might as well have all of it. My mother’s Cup day currently runs eleven items, printed, revised twice. “You are in Matty’s old room.”

“Why is that funny?”

“You’ll see the ceiling.”

“Jules.”

“You’ll see the ceiling.” That information should arrive like it arrived to me, with no warning and a full childhood of context. “Étienne is building a spreadsheet of who holds the Cup in what order. Weighted. Maman asked him one question about parking and now he believes he has committee standing.”

“And Matty?”

“Matty says he is only coming to make sure I don’t put it somewhere stupid.” Which means Matty has told everyone he knows in Montreal that he’s bringing it to the rink where we learned to play, and has already called the man who runs the ice there, and will stand next to it all afternoon saying it’s not a big deal. My brother checks me the way other men hug. “He gets an hour with it. He doesn’t know that yet.”

“An hour?”

“He earned an hour. He spent a year telling Montreal reporters his little brother was going to steal a Cup.” I take Soren’s empty mug before he can set it somewhere wrong. “He was right. I want to watch him deal with that.”

“Take pictures,” his mother says. “Karl will deny wanting them. Take them anyway.”

She carries her coffee toward the garden, and pats the envelope once on her way past, the way you’d touch a railing you trusted.

“Your day was good,” I say, when it’s the two of us again. It is not a question. I watched it as I watch everything, from the best angle in the room. The mother with the cloth. The father with the envelope. The house that did not need me to hold anything, because I have a family now with hands of its own.

“My day was good.” He looks at me over the mug that is mine, which he has taken, because his is gone and mine was there, and there is no policy on earth that will fix this. “Yours is in three weeks.”

“Mine was yesterday too.”

He goes quiet. He heard it. He is the only person who always hears it, which is one of maybe six facts I am certain of, and I don’t say it twice, because saying it twice makes it smaller.

His phone buzzes on the counter. The cat sitter, on schedule, with the morning photo. Gaspard is asleep in my chair with the crossword folder under him like he pays rent on both.

“He’s claimed your spot,” Soren says.

“He holds it when I travel. We have an arrangement.”

“Does the arrangement know we land at four?”

“The arrangement will pretend to be asleep and then sit on the crossword. It’s a formal negotiation. You’ll see it in about nine hours.”

My own phone goes off next. Murray, from a gas station somewhere in Minnesota.

Charlie says tell Gertie and Quessa hi.

I turn the phone so Soren can read it. He reads it twice.

“The posts have a fan club,” he says.

“She decided,” I say, and I do not say anything else, because some facts are complete.

Bags to pack. A flight at one. A summer already tilting toward Montreal and an August kitchen.

Soren rinses both mugs and sets them in the rack, and his shoulder comes to rest against mine while he does it, warm and heavy and in no hurry.