Page 33 of Victory Lap

“That’s why.”

I look at the pot. Seasoned by two generations of hands, carried here on an airplane. Heating on my stove between my kettle and my mugs like it has always been there.

“You should not have taken this from your family,” I say, because someone has to say the reasonable thing, and it is always me.

“I didn’t take it from my family.” He says it easily. “It’s still in the family. That’s the point. It stays here, Tishka. It’s yours now. Ours. My mère said to tell you her mama fed the whole bayou out of it and never once asked anything of anybody.”

I look at the pot for a long time.

When the schedule went around in June, every man on this team wrote down a homecoming. I wrote down my own address, the same as Avi, except it did not mean what it meant for Avi. It meant: there is nowhere to take it. He watched me be good with that fact for a month. And then he flew to Louisiana and asked his mother for the pot.

“Tikhon.” His voice is careful now. “Say something, cher.”

“You put a seatbelt on it,” I say, because I have seen Sadie’s phone. “In the airplane.”

“She’s family.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“I’m extremely ridiculous. Come here.”

The gumbo cooks all morning, the way it is supposed to. We eat the first bowls at noon, right next to the Cup and the keeper. Mishka watches from the bookshelf with the expression of a tsar reviewing troops. It is absurd. It is the best thing I have ever eaten. “The roux is better than March,” I tell him.

He puts his hand over his heart like I have knighted him. In the vocabulary of this kitchen, I have.

His mother calls on speakerphone while the second bowls go around. She talks to Bastian for one minute and to me for twenty.

“Did the roux go to pecans?” she asks me. Not him. Me.

“Just past. He held it there.”

“Did he scorch my onions?” Her accent is thick, but I understand her. Just as I have learned to understand Baz when he leans into it too.

“He did not. I watched.”

“Good. Somebody has to.” She pauses. “Tikhon. The pot. How does it look on your stove?”

“It looks like it has always been there.”

“Bon,” she says. Then she wants to know when we are coming down. Both of us. Together. She says both of us as if it is something she decided a while ago. She does not say anything enormous. That is what makes it enormous.

My own mother has known about him since May. I told her on a Sunday call with my heart in my ears. She was quiet for eleven seconds. Then she asked three questions. His name. His age. Whether he can cook. Now she ends every call the same way. Say hello to Bastian. She has never met him. Mothers.

I don’t tell her everything, all the details. I will not, for a long time. Maybe ever. This is a weight I have carried so long it has stopped being luggage and become posture. But she knows the shape of my life now, and she blesses it in her own dialect. Hello to Bastian. Today, in this kitchen that smells like his grandmother’s, the ocean between my two homes feels less like a wall and more like a distance. Distances can be crossed. This is a meaningful upgrade.

The sea-glass jar goes on the windowsill in the afternoon. He puts it there with ceremony. He adjusts it twice. He tells me its full biography. The counting of colors. The old house. The aunt who absorbed it. Our windowsill now holds one jar of Louisiana beach glass. At six, the light comes through it and throws small green and blue coins across my floor. Bug loses her mind about them. I stand in my kitchen watching a cat hunt light, and something in my chest that has been braced for years lets go.

After the keeper leaves with the Cup, the pot is washed later that night with no soap and dried on the flame, the way the instructions came to us. He leans in the doorway of the bedroom with his hair loose and says, “So. Day one of two. How’s it rating so far, on the record?”

“Come here and I will tell you.”

He comes here. I take his wrist and feel the pulse in it go up, the way it has gone up for me since a kitchen counter in January. I walk him backward to the bed. The day was his gift to me. This is mine to him, and I intend to give it thoroughly.

“Clothes off,” I tell him. “Slowly. I want to watch.”

He talks while he strips, because he is Baz, a running commentary on my bossiness, the thread count, the cats’ whereabouts, the historical significance of the day. I let him run. I fold my own clothes onto the chair while he talks, because watching me be unhurried does more to him than any hand could. By the time I put him on his back on our bed, he is hard against his stomach and the commentary has developed gaps.

I start at his throat. My hand around it, light, thumb on his pulse. He presses up into the hold. He always presses up into the hold. That is the consent, ours, older than any conversation, and I tighten my grip to exactly the pressure that makes his eyes lose focus.