“Forgive what?” I ask.
“Whatever you did,” Piero says, and hands me one like a communion wafer. “Tell me what you taste.”
Under a market awning, with Enzo watching and a stranger waiting and the whole thing happening in full sun where anybody could see, I do the ceremony. First bite. Hold. Two seconds.
“Summer,” I say. “And it’s not sorry.”
Piero looks at Enzo. Enzo looks at Piero. Money changes hands, and I understand I have just been adopted or purchased.
“Both,” Enzo says, reading my face. “It’s called a market.”
We work the market like a route I’ve been running for years. He knows every vendor, and they know him, and one by one he hands me to them by name. This is Marek. Marek, this is Rosa, this is the bread man. Nobody blinks. Nobody cares. A first namein a market is nothing, and it’s everything, and I collect the nothings all morning like caps.
Strangers are generous because they owe you nothing. They take the name you hand them, use it once, and let you go. A teammate would keep it. A mother would hear the shape of it under every ordinary sentence after.
The potato situation requires diplomacy. The onions are acceptable. The marjoram becomes a regional incident.
“Rosa runs the herbs,” Enzo says. “Rosa, this is Marek. He has a mushroom problem.”
“We all have problems,” Rosa says, and hands me the marjoram like a prescription.
“Not hers,” a second vendor calls from across the aisle. “Her marjoram is for tourists.”
“My marjoram won a prize.”
“A tourist prize.”
Enzo leans into me, glowing. “This is better than derby week.”
The bread man’s name is genuinely Angelo, which Enzo finds theologically satisfying. “Angelo. Bread. Some things the universe just signs.”
“Two loaves,” Angelo says, not asking. “One for the soup, one for the walk home. Don’t argue.”
I buy sausage from a man who smokes it himself. I taste it and adjust the whole soup in my head around what this country thinks smoke is. We leave with potatoes, two loaves, and a paper twist of contested marjoram.
“You’re recalculating,” Enzo says, watching me. “I know that face from the pitch. Somebody switched the winger and you’re reorganizing the back line.”
“The sausage changes the soup. The soup adapts. This is called coaching.”
“It’s called cooking.”
“It’s called both, and both of us know it.”
I say it about the soup. His sunglasses come off. The way he looks at me says he heard it about everything, and I let that stand too. In the sun. On purpose. My heart breaks stride in my chest, and I allow that as well. There’s a lot of new policy today.
Enzo takes the market bags back to the apartment, and I go the other direction to the hotel, which feels correct until it doesn’t.
Training is training. Tape is tape. Lunch is protein and instructions and men pretending not to watch me pretend not to check the time. By five-thirty, I have showered, changed, and failed to invent a reason not to walk four blocks.
So I walk four blocks.
Davide’s kitchen at six is a hostile away venue that slowly turns neutral.
The kitchen surrenders in stages. First the counter, then the stove, and finally Davide’s radio, which learns Czech folk music at seven o’clock and takes it surprisingly well.
Enzo tries to help four times in the first ten minutes. I bench him without ceremony.
“Out of the kitchen.”