Page 90 of Puck You Both

Me: home. cleaning. Thriving

Patrick: Goalie session until six. Then I'm coming over.

Me: no need!! i'm great. ask the counters, they've never been cleaner

They're good texts. If I read them fast enough, I can almost believe the guy who sent them.

Somewhere around the beach one, Wall's three dots made an appearance. They showed up, sat there for five seconds, then vanished. Nothing came after. I've checked eleven times. Well, twelve now. Which is fine, whatever. Big quiet men have big quiet errands.

I'm still holding the phone when it goes off in my hand, full volume, and I nearly put it through the backsplash.

Margaux, says the screen.

The report is an hour old and it has already crossed the border. Nothing on this earth moves like the family news network.

I put her on speaker, set her down on the counter, and pick the sponge back up, because my hands desperately need a job right now.

"Maman saw a tweet," she says instead of hello.

"Maman needs to find herself a hobby."

"She lit a candle for you."

I go after a spot on the stovetop that's been clean for an hour. "For a trade rumor?"

"Two candles, actually. One for the rumor, one because you didn't call her yourself."

The second one is fair, so I sail right past it. "It's business, Mar. I'm an asset. Assets get moved. I'm extremely liquid."

"Mmhmm."

She's giving me nothing, which has never stopped me in my life. I can hear my own voice climbing, getting brighter the worse everything is, and I let it, because this routine is airtight. I've been polishing it since eleven a.m.

"Also? Anaheim is fine. Sure, it’s a giant parking lot with a Ducks problem, but it's sunny. I'd get a tan. I'd die alone, but tan. Maman would love the tan—"

"Theo."

"—they have a Disneyland, Mar, I could season-pass my feelings—"

"Theo. You're doing the funny thing."

I stop scrubbing.

She doesn't say anything else, just leaves the line open and waits, the way she's been waiting out this exact voice since the year I got cut from the U16 team and spent the whole spring being the funniest guy anybody knew. She let me run out that time, too. It took a week.

I slide down the cabinets until I'm sitting on my kitchen floor.

I know how this goes. You show up somewhere new and you're loud, and funny, and the room gets easier to be in, and everybody loves you for it. I've been that guy on every team since I was fifteen, and every other March, or June, somebody in an office somewhere ran the math on me, and I found out from a phone call where I'd landed. It was never where I already was.

So it isn't really about Anaheim. Anaheim is just another zip code. I'd hate the driving and survive. It's that a man with sources looked at my name and wrote available, and everyone who reads it is going to nod, because it checks out. It always checks out. Except this time, everybody I love gets to watch it come true.

"Is someone with you?" Margaux asks, gentler now.

"I'm a grown man."

"So that's a no."

I tip my head back against the cabinet door. "I'm fine, Margaux."