Page 32 of Victory Lap

The flight home, I buy the pot its own seat. I’m not putting my grandmother in an overhead bin, I tell the gate agent, and the gate agent, a professional, does not ask a single follow-up question. The pot rides next to me in 14B with the seatbelt through its handles and the jar packed in my carry-on in four shirts, and somewhere over Alabama I text Sadie the picture.

Pot’s coming home. Phase one complete.

you bought it a SEAT

she’s family

you’re going to make me cry at work. also I’m coming to the photo thing. that’s not a question.

Never was, cher. Never was.

I call Tishka when I land. I call walking up the jet bridge, phone against my ear, pot in my arms like a baby.

“You landed?” he says. His phone voice. Flat to strangers. Not to me. It hasn’t been flat to me since January.

“Landed.”

“Good. The Bugs destroyed the paper towels. I did not stop them. It was a coordinated operation.” A pause. Behind him I can hear the sounds of our building, our floor, our kitchen. “What were you doing in Louisiana, Bastian?”

“Picking something up for the weekend,” I say, deflecting for the umpteenth time he’s tried to get this out of me. “You’ll see.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“You love me. You’ll love this.”

Silence. The specific silence of a man refusing to confirm the truth. I grin all the way to baggage claim.

Everyone else gets to have their day how they want, usually at where they consider home. And that’s right, and I’d never take it from any of them. Lundy took his to his dad’s place in Chicago. Avi wrote down his own address. Even Berger’s taking his to an island, and no, we don’t have details. Tikh watched the schedule go around in June with his face doing nothing. Only three people alive can read that nothing. Two of them are cats.

You can’t fly a Cup to Saint Petersburg. Fine. Noted. Logged.

Watch what I build instead.

Chapter 11: Tikh

Iwake at six to a smell that does not belong in Atlanta.

Roux, first. Dark roux. Patient. An hour old already, which means he got up at five. Which means he did not sleep much. Which means today is the day he has been building toward with the subtlety of a parade. Under the roux, coffee. Under the coffee, something older. Cast iron heating. A particular mineral warmth that I know from one kitchen in the world. That kitchen is an ocean and half a continent from this apartment.

I lie still for one minute and let it work on me. Then I get up. The Cup arrived last night and is standing in our living room wearing a bath towel like a prizefighter. The man in my kitchen has been waiting for me to wake up since five.

Bastian is at the stove with his hair tied back and Bug on his shoulders like a stole. He is stirring with a wooden spoon I do not own. On the stove, next to my tray and my grinder and my white coffee mugs, there is a pot. I have never seen it before.

It is enormous. It is black. It has the finish cast iron only gets from decades, the surface gone satin, the sides carrying small scars like a defenseman. It is the kind of object museums put behind glass and call folk art, and he is cooking in it like it’s an everyday pot.

“You’re staring,” he says, without turning around.

“I am assessing.” I come closer. The gumbo is deep brown, andouille and chicken, the trinity gone soft, filé standing by in its seven-dollar jar. He is making it the whole way. No mercy. I look at the pot again. “Bastian. What is this?”

“Breakfast, eventually.”

“I mean the pot.”

He turns around then. Bug rides the turn like a sailor. I watch the volume drain out of him. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it means the ground is about to move.

“That’s my grandmother’s gumbo pot,” he says. “My mère’s mama. She fed the whole street out of it every Friday for forty years. My mère kept it in the cabinet under the window ever since. Nobody cooks out of it but her. You don’t ask for it.” He wipes his hands on the towel. “I asked for it.”

“That is why you went to Louisiana?”