Page 27 of Victory Lap

The rest of my day has forty people in it. Two grandmothers on a collision course. A park pavilion. A team that is absolutely going to make me cry in public. The list of who touches the Cup is long now and it’s loud and I want every name on it.

But it started at six, in the dark, with only one.

Everyone gets their day. He got the first hour of mine.

Chapter 9: Zay

The Marchettis arrive at Hartsfield-Jackson at 10:15 in a formation I can only describe as tactical.

Mary comes out of the doors first, scanning like a point guard. Tony follows with the bags, all of them, refusing help on principle. Then the sisters, three across, Gina and Jackie and Nicole in sunglasses, moving like a unit that has been getting each other through airports since the eighties. And in the middle of the phalanx, at the speed she has decided the day will move, Nonna. Cane in one hand. In the other, a cooler bag that made it through security by a mechanism nobody in this family will explain to me.

“Caro,” she says to Teo, taking his face in both hands. Then she turns to me and takes mine. Same grip. “Isaiah. You look tired around the eyes. Good. It means the season was honest.”

Teo looks at me over her head with an expression that says told you. I stand in the arrivals lane of the busiest airport in the world getting my face held by Teo’s grandmother.

My nan and I had a long discussion when the schedule went around, and I told her what a Cup day was and that the Marchetti’s were coming into town. She was quiet for a second and then said, “So I should make three pies,” and that was the entire negotiation. What I did not fully plan, what nobody could have planned, is what happens when you put my grandmother and Teo’s grandmother on the same porch.

They size each other up for exactly one minute. Nan in her church-adjacent Saturday best, hands folded. Nonna with her cane planted like a flag. Two women who between them have run multiple kitchens, four churches in two denominations, and every family decision on the eastern seaboard for half a century. The Cup sits on Nan’s good table in her dining room, and neither of them has looked at it yet, because they are looking at each other’s boys.

“He eats at your table,” Nonna says, nodding. Not a question, knowing she would do the same if the situation were reversed.

“Every Sunday he can,” Nan says.

“Matteo sings in the hallway. All his life. You cannot stop him.”

“Isaiah hums. Thinks I don’t hear it.”

They look at each other a moment longer and settle something nobody asked the rest of us to weigh in on.

“Sit down,” they both say, to all of us, at the same time, and that is that. Détente. Alliance. Whatever it is, it involves sweet potato pie and biscotti on the same plate, which Teo eats crossed-legged on Nan’s floor like a kid, rating nothing, saying nothing, his knee against mine.

Nonna inspects the pie with the gravity of a customs official. She takes one bite. She sets down the fork.

“You will give me this recipe.”

“I’ll trade you,” Nan says, “for the boy’s bolognese. He talks about it like it’s a person.”

“The bolognese is a person. It is my mother.” Nonna picks the fork back up. “We will call each other.”

They exchange numbers. Landline to cell. Jackie enters it for Nonna with the practiced air of a woman who has been the family’s IT department since 2004. Beside me, Teo watches his grandmother and my grandmother form the single most powerful alliance in either of our lives. His face is doing something that has no bit attached to it at all. Nan catches me watching him watch them. She doesn’t say anything. She just puts her hand on the back of my neck on her way to the kitchen. The touch I grew up under.

At five, we are at the pavilion with everyone. And by everyone, I mean everyone Teo could think to add to the list.

We rented the big one at the park because Teo made a list of people to invite and the list was, functionally, the word yes. The team comes in waves. Guy and Michael arrive with folding chairs and a cooler.

“That’s bigger than on TV,” my best friend Guy says, which is what every single person who isn’t a hockey player or hockey-adjacent says.

“It’s exactly as big as on TV,” Michael says, already organizing a photo line. “Stand behind it and you’ll see.”

My folks are here from South Georgia, my father staking out the shade with a plate before the line forms, my mother folding Teo’s sisters into conversation like she’s known them for years. Tony and Jensen discover each other near the grill and stand there in the deep, wordless comfort.

Parker attends in her carrier, is released under leashed supervision, ignores the Stanley Cup entirely, and claims the Cup’s empty shipping case within four minutes. She sits in it all evening like it was delivered for her. Honestly, by the law of this team, it was.

Nonna is given a folding chair next to the Cup and receives visitors. At some point Berger asks her, respectfully, if she wants to eat something out of it. It’s tradition. People eat out of it. Nonna looks at him the way she must have looked at the twentieth century.

“You do not eat from a trophy. You eat from a bowl. This is what is wrong with your generation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Berger, who has faced playoff elimination with less humility.