“Long walk.”
“Those are the good ones.” He pushes a plate toward me, my own food served back to me in my own kitchen.
I eat mine too, and it’s enough, and it isn’t, and I’ve decided to live with both of those for as long as it takes.
November has a shape now. That’s new. Between now and then is the place I swore I’d never live again, and I just signed a lease. That’s not enough for a Friday. It’s what Friday gets.
Chapter 12: Marek
Ihave marked the best attackers in Europe for a decade, and nothing has ever made my hands sweat like typing one sentence to a market vendor’s schedule.
Tonight. I’ll cook. Tell Davide he’s invited to his own kitchen. Meet me at the market at nine.
The reply comes back in four minutes. Three peach emojis. Then, a minute later, a second message, because he can never leave a ball alone.
Bring the list. I know you made a list.
At breakfast Šíma watches me eat with the expression of a man updating a file.
“You’re doing something today,” he says. “You have the face of a man with an appointment.”
“Recovery protocol. Long walk. Real food.”
“Real food where?”
“A friendly kitchen,” I say, and he lets it go with the smallest nod on record.
“Walk well, Kovár.”
It’s the second time in three days he’s let me off easy, and someday I’m going to have to think about what that means, but not today. Today I have a list in my pocket, in my own handwriting. The list frightens me more than any team sheet ever has. A team sheet only asks me to defend. This list asks me to be seen buying marjoram.
What I do not tell him is that the night porter watched me come back through the loading dock at one in the morning, and looked at me for exactly as long as Šíma just did. The building knows. Buildings always know. I am running out of people who don’t. That should scare me only because it is a building. Instead it scares me because Šíma is starting to look less like a locked door and more like someone who has been standing beside the open one the whole time.
He’s waiting at the market entrance, sunglasses, linen, entirely himself. In daylight. On purpose. Because I asked.
“You made a list,” he says, delighted before anything else. “Show me the list.”
“The list is classified.”
“Marek. Show me the list.”
I show him the list. He reads it the way other men read match reports. His whole face does the thing I used to drive two and a half hours to see. We’re standing in a public market in the sun while it does it.
It starts at the left corner of his mouth. It always starts there, one side committing before the rest of the face signs off, and then all of it arrives at once and a year of discipline is worth nothing against it. I could scout every winger alive and never find a tell I’d rather study.
“Bramboracka,” he says. “Potato soup. You’re making me your mother’s potato soup.”
“I’m making my mother’s potato soup in a foreign country from foreign potatoes, which means I’m making a tribute act. Manage your expectations. There’s also the mushroom problem.”
“What’s the mushroom problem?”
“The mushrooms here are polite. Czech mushrooms have opinions. I’ll have to compensate.”
The peach man sees us from four stalls away and starts waving like we’re rescuing him from a boring party.
“The serious one,” he announces to the entire aisle. “He came back. You brought him.”
“He brought himself,” Enzo says, and there it is, out loud, in a market, with strangers arranging themselves around the sentence. “Piero, this is Marek. Marek, Piero. His trees are in Georgia, his sister is in Bari, and his peaches forgive.”