Page 28 of Victory Lap

Just before sunset I catch Mäkinen at the edge of the pavilion, out of the photo line, phone in his hand. I read bodies for a living. His shoulders are doing the thing shoulders do when the news is not news yet.

Avi is beside him before I finish the thought.

“Everything okay?” I hear Avi ask.

“Summer stuff.” Mäki pockets the phone. “My agent says it’s noise.”

He goes back to the photo line and takes a kid’s picture for them, smiling like it costs nothing. Avi watches him go for a second longer than the moment needs.

The roast begins at sunset without warning, which means it was scheduled.

Thompson stands on a picnic bench and produces actual index cards. “Good evening. Some of you may know the team has a book club. We started it as a joke, but we got invested. And the club grew. We are gathered here because our teammate Matteo Marchetti has narrated every love story on this roster like a play-by-play man with no off switch. The captain. The other captain. The goalies, at length. And it has come to the attention of the book club that there is one story he never once called.”

“Oh no,” Teo says beside me, with total delight.

“Exhibit A,” Thompson says.

Kowalski rises. Kowalski has a folder. Of course Kowalski has a folder. He holds up a printed screenshot of a scheduling screen, the columns visible from three tables away, one name moved from one column to another. “All season, he would only schedule with Zay, until the very end,” Kowalski says, like a man reading a verdict. “He thinks nobody checks the audit log.”

The team howls. Teo puts his face in his hands.

“Exhibit B.” A phone, held high, playing four seconds of hallway audio: someone humming, badly, joyfully, a song I sent him in the middle of the night. “He hums them,” Kowalski says. “The whole building knows the playlist. No one hums this happily.”

“And exhibit C.” Thompson takes it back, cards level. “The club read a book this spring. A workplace romance. Two professionals who couldn’t be together because of the rules. We discussed it every week, at length.” He pauses with the timing of a man who has waited months to bring these receipts. “Marchetti led the discussion. Multiple discussions. Never blinked once.”

“The themes were universal,“ Teo shouts, breaking entirely.

And then Hájek stands up, and the roast changes temperature, because Hájek does not do exhibits.

“I will say one thing,” he says, in the careful English he uses when he wants to be sure he gets the words correct. “All season, this man narrated. A man who watches everyone’s love with that much attention, and asks for nothing back, is not making jokes. He is taking care. We practiced with fiction first because he handed us the books. So.” He raises his bottle at Teo, and then, deliberately, at me. “Somebody finally narrated him. It took the whole club. He was worth the reading.”

The pavilion goes up. Teo does not have a comeback. I watch the man who fills every room in Georgia stand there in front of his family and my family and Atlanta Firebirds teammates and staff. Narrated. Witnessed. And he takes it. He doesn’t deflect and he doesn’t rate it and his eyes are shining and he lets it land. Nonna is crying into a napkin. Nan’s hand is on Nonna’s shoulder. That alliance is hours old and already running the pavilion.

Later, the light goes orange, and I find Teo at the edge of the pavilion, looking back at all of it. The Cup on the table with a line of kids waiting. Two grandmothers, one bench. His mother and Guy, deep in conversation, pointing at us.

Quiet, in the good way. The kind I used to have to work him down into, one shoulder at a time. I lean into him and put my hand in his. I feel him lean back into it half an inch, and neither of us says anything at all.

I had my day with him and the Cup already. It fit in one hour.

It fit in one word, actually. He knows which one.

The Literary Line Change #3

Ash

book club update. The Longest Road Trip is COMPLETE. every member finished. this community READS

Mueller

the horse carried that book

Ash

book two drops today. The Keeper’s Tide. grief. a lighthouse. one dog

Novák

does the dog survive. i ask for my mother