Page 38 of Puck You Both

She knows. Whatever it is, she's known long enough to be calm about it.

Once the plates are mostly empty some thirty minutes later, Washington takes a spot by the fireplace. He doesn't tap a glass. He stands there being Washington, and the room quiets in concentric rings, fastest nearest him, until even Becker's laptop bag stops rustling. Snooze wakes up like a submarine surfacing, senses the pressure change, and sits up straight.

Leila crosses the room and sets her palm flat between his shoulder blades.

"I wanted you all here," Washington says, "with the people who put up with you, because you're going to hear this soon enough, and I wanted it to be from me." He looks around the room, unhurried, and his eyes touch each of us. "This is my last season. When it's over, I'm retiring."

At first, there’s a moment of nothing, space filled only by the refrigerator humming two rooms away.

Then a noise comes out of Becker. It starts as a word, fails the physical, and exits as something between an accordion hitting stairs and a smoke alarm losing power. Kane puts a hand on his back and rubs a slow circle.

"Breathe."

“Why?” Becker demands. “What has breathing done for us?”

“Kept you alive.”

“For this?”

Petrov, pale, retrieves his phone. He types hastily, reads, straightens in his chair, and delivers his findings to the room. "I am… bereft."

"Correct usage," I say, before I can stop myself.

He points at me, grateful, eyes wet. "Thank you. I have been improving."

There’s some movement at the mantel. Jinx has taken down the framed photo of Washington hoisting his first division trophy and is arranging the four candles around it in a square, with a folded cocktail napkin underneath, and the overall effect is not subtle.

"I'm not dead, Jinx."

"The candles are preventative."

"Preventing what?"

Jinx adjusts the frame a quarter inch and doesn't answer, on the grounds that saying it aloud invites it.

The television comes on by itself, which is to say Becker has crawled to his laptop bag, and white letters fill the screen:

LIFE AFTER DAD: A SUCCESSION PLAN.

"You prepared a deck for this?" Kane asks.

"I prepared for everything. One per scenario." Becker's voice has gone thick, but his trackpad finger stays true. "This was scenario three. I hoped so hard it was scenario one, Kane. Scenario one was a boat purchase." Slide two arrives: an empty organizational chart under the heading WHO GETS CUSTODY OF THE GROUP CHAT. "We need continuity of government. I'm nominating myself as interim dad."

"You're the reason we need a dad," Ace says.

Snooze raises one hand from the loveseat. "Black armbands. Home and away."

"On it." Hammer already has his phone out. "Matte or glossy?"

"Matte," Jinx says from the memorial, in the tone of a man who has priced them before.

"Nobody is wearing mourning gear to my games," Washington says. "This is a retirement, not a diagnosis."

Through the noise, Ace leans forward with his elbows on his knees, and for a moment he's the veteran forward the league sees on game nights. "Hey. It's your call, Cap. You've earned it, and we're behind you. Whatever you need."

"Completely," Groover says, nodding along. "One hundred percent. It's your career."

The maturity lasts for eleven seconds. I count them.