Page 3 of Victory Lap

He tips his head. “I don’t know that one.”

“I know.”

He grins and doesn’t ask. He learned a long time ago what it means when I don’t translate. It means what it always means. I keep it in Finnish so it stays the right size.

Tomorrow the Cup is his, and he has a list. Of course, he has a list. Tonight it sits on my counter full of a cat, in my house, in the town where I built a thing nobody thought I had in me.

The pastry plate emptied first. I noticed.

Chapter 2: Ash

Ihave heard the word risotto seven times today, and there is no risotto at this party.

I checked. I walked the spread twice. I asked the caterer. I looked under foil. Brisket, ribs, four sides, a cooler of beer, and a pastry situation that Avi pretends is not a big deal and that disappeared faster than anything else on the table. No risotto anywhere. And yet Thompson just said it to Hájek by the fence, quietly, like a password. Hájek nodded as if he was carrying something heavy. Davis put a hand on his shoulder. In solidarity. Over rice.

“Marchetti,” I say. “Why does everyone keep saying risotto?”

Marchetti looks at me with enormous kindness and says, “Club business,” and walks away.

I know everyone. I know that Davis’s mom mails him socks he pretends to be embarrassed about. I know Kowalski’s coffee order. I know which video game Jensen switches to when he’s bored. Knowing this team is my whole thing, and several people have said so in interviews. So when there’s something going on at my own party that I am not in, I notice. The way you notice a missing tooth.

I find Thompson at the cooler. “The book club,” I say. “Five Hole Fiction. I want in.”

“There’s a reading list,” Thompson says. “There are rules.”

“I love rules. I’m delightful in book clubs.”

“There’s a waitlist.”

“There is not a waitlist.”

“There’s a vibe,” Thompson says, and closes the cooler. Somehow that’s worse than the waitlist.

I am regrouping by the drinks table when Berger comes out of the house with his phone in his hand and his eyes red around the edges. He addresses the yard in general. “I finished it. Don’t talk to me. He’d known since the risotto.” Four grown men groan like a building settling. And my own boyfriend, my captain, the man whose shoes are next to mine in a closet we now share, says, without looking up from the plate he’s carrying, “He was always going to say yes.”

The yard keeps moving. I do not.

“Avi,” I say with the gravity this topic deserves. “Love of my life. How do you know about the risotto?”

“I’m in the book club.”

“Since when?”

“Book two.” He hands the plate to Soucy’s mother and takes an empty one back, because they have a system now. Apparently everyone has systems that I am not in. “I have opinions about the pacing.”

“He’s our best annotator,” Thompson says from the cooler.

I want it noted that I handled this with grace. I did not lie down in the grass at my own party or stomp my feet. I said something extremely composed, something like, “I sleep next to you,” and when Avi looked at me with the eyes that say he’s enjoying this, I only pointed at him for a second or two. Fine. Ten seconds. Davis took a picture.

“You know what,” I tell the yard, “it’s fine. I’ll start my own book club. A better one. With standards, and no vibe requirement, and snacks that don’t require a waitlist.”

“Good luck,” says Kowalski.

Later, much later, I will think about the way he said that, long after it’s too late.

I’m still drafting the recruitment pitch in my head when Avi’s father finds me at the speaker. Aleksi Ikonen is Avi in thirty years, which is to say enormous, quiet, and impossible to read until suddenly he isn’t. He stands next to me for the length of one entire song. He watches the yard. I watch him watch it, because I have learned this family’s language and the first rule is you don’t rescue an Ikonen silence. You let it finish its shift.

“The music,” he says, “is acceptable,” and walks away.