Not the one-word kind. A real one, sent at six forty, which for a man on a tournament schedule is a declaration of intent all by itself.
Walk today? Beltline, eleven. Daylight. No pretext. I checked the schedule twice.
I read it three times. Then I make one coffee, on purpose, and drink it standing at the window before I send a thumbs up. The sting of the single cup is different this morning. Hope is heavier than the wanting ever was and ten times as dangerous.
Davide pads in wearing the face of a man who slept through nothing.
“You came in late from somewhere,” he says, neutral as a referee. “Or somebody left late. The stairs have opinions.”
“The stairs exaggerate.”
“Mm.” He pours his coffee black. He complains about it and drinks it anyway. “After the tournament. The whole thing. That’s still the deal?”
“That’s still the deal.”
“Then I’m not counting stairs until then.” He salutes me with the cup. “Whoever it is, tell them the stairs squeak on the third step. For everyone’s dignity.”
Gianna texts while I’m lacing my shoes. No meme this time, which is how I know she’s paying attention.
Mamma lit a candle at San Gennaro yesterday. She says it’s for the quarterfinal. It’s not for the quarterfinal. Answer honestly, are you okay?
I answer honestly, three words, which from me at eight in the morning is a voice note’s worth.
Better than okay.
The Beltline at eleven is joggers and dogs and strollers and nobody who cares about football. He’s waiting by the entrance in the cap that fools no one who has spent five years trying to get past him, holding two coffees from the bar with the good roaster. He’s holding them level, like the job matters. It’s eleven in the morning and he is exactly on time, which he has always been, to everything except the only thing.
In full sun the grey of his eyes goes nearly silver. Two years of nights, and I’m only learning that now. It’s the first fact daylight has ever handed me about this man, and I file it the way he would file it. Permanently.
“Double, short, no sugar,” he says, handing me one. “And the water’s in my pocket. You’d want the water.”
“You promised two words last night. I counted one.”
“The second one wasn’t allowed out yet.” He produces the water bottle from his pocket and hands it over unasked. “For later. You talk with your whole body. You’ll need it.”
“Five years of scouting and that’s the report?”
“The report has appendices.” He falls into step beside me, and for four blocks we walk like men who have all day, which neither of us has, which makes it a spent thing, chosen. “It’s why I asked for the walk.”
The sun is high and hot and completely indifferent, and we walk through it in the open, past strangers, past a man selling water from a cooler, past a woman with a dog named something she yells twice. Nobody looks at us. Everybody could.
“So,” I say. “The second word.”
He takes a breath like a man at the top of the stairs with a heavy box.
“In Rome there’s a restaurant I’ve been… not-going-to, for five years. The chef knows me from the market, keeps sayingcome, bring someone, I’ll cook off the menu.I never went, because it’s the kind of place you take somebody, and taking somebody was never in the system.”
He watches the path instead of me, but his voice stays level and he keeps going.
“In November, after the break, I want to book it. Under my name. For two. I want to sit in a room in my own city, at a table, with you, where anyone I know could walk in. That’s the second word, Enzo. It took eleven hours because I had to be able to finish it standing up.”
We walk maybe ten steps while that sits in the air between us, getting realer.
“And the noon?” I say. “The witnesses. Šíma? Tomáš?”
“Not yet.” He says it plainly, no flinch, which I respect and hate at the same time. It lands the way a stud lands, low on the shin. The kind you walk off in front of the bench and feelall night. “November is what I can lift today. I’m telling you the truth instead of promising you the world and dropping it on your foot in a corridor at midnight. You said the sentence had to survive daylight.” He gestures at the sun, the joggers, the whole indifferent morning. “This is me walking it around outside.”
I understand what he means. I also understand what he is not saying. The sun is full of strangers. Strangers are practice. The witnesses I named are people who would still know tomorrow, and he has not brought me to them yet.