His phone buzzes against the table. He looks at it, and his whole face goes unguarded before he catches it. He types backwith his thumb while his other hand keeps eating. “Tobík says get the sausage too. And if there are burnt ends left, I should consider it a test of character.”
“He can want them. The burnt ends are spoken for.”
“Tell him yourself next time.”
Nobody at the table blinks. Damián answers a text at dinner, in front of the whole squad, from Tobík, and nothing happens. No pause. No inventory of who saw. He leaves the phone face up next to his plate, as if even an unfinished thing is allowed to exist in the room.
My phone stays in my jacket. It’s a good phone. It behaves.
It behaves because I trained it to. No names lighting up in front of teammates. No proof left where a hand could accidentally turn it over. A private life is manageable as long as it never asks a room full of people to make space for it.
A year ago, I stood in a stairwell at four in the morning with my shoes in my hand, listening to a door open one floor down. A neighbor with a dog. Sixty seconds flat against a wall that smelled like summer and old cigarettes, watching the stair light time itself out and click back on, listening to a dog decide whether I was worth mentioning, doing the math on how many steps to the street and what I would say if the light found me, which was nothing. Because there was nothing to say and nobody I was allowed to say it to. The dog knew I was there but the neighbor never looked up. I drove home with my shoes still off, and I didn’t go back, and I have called that an act of kindness for months. It even sounds like kindness if you say it fast enough.
“Kovár. The sausage.” Tomáš holds a piece up like evidence. “Why is this better than at home? Tell me the truth. I can take it.”
“Different animal, different smoke, different country.” I turn a piece over on the tray. “The casing is the test. A serious casingsnaps. It doesn’t bend, and it doesn’t chew like a wallet. When you bite this one, listen. It’ll sound like a small decision being made.”
He bites. He listens. He looks at me as if I’ve shown him a card trick.
“Kovár,” Tomáš says. “If it’s Italy, the winger, can you hold him?”
“That’s talk for after we win this match.”
“But can you?”
“I’ve done it before.” I stack the rib bones on the tray’s edge. “It costs ninety minutes of never being wrong.”
“Never being wrong for ninety minutes.” He whistles. “Against a man like that?”
“Ninety-four. He plays the added time like it’s his birthday.”
Tomáš laughs. “What’s he like off the pitch? Five years in the same league. You must have crossed paths.”
I’m assembling the answer. The safe one, the one that fits in one word.
The door of the restaurant opens before I can say anything.
It brings the street in with it, and then a noise I know arrives ahead of its owners. I’ve heard that noise for five years playing in Serie A. Italian. A lot of it, all at once, the whole language coming through the door sideways.
Rossetti first, pointing at the counter like a man with his own nod privileges. Behind him, half a squad’s worth of Italy in training casuals. Gallo. Ricci. Two more I know from Serie A. And in the middle of them, hands already going, telling a story that has the whole group leaning in before any table has been found, Enzo.
His hair is longer than it was last year, dark brown and pushed back badly, already trying to fall into his eyes. Atlanta has put more color in his olive skin. I don’t need the distance closed to know the eyes. Deep blue, darker than television gets them. I’vespent five years being professionally unaffected by them, and I have the disciplinary record to prove it.
He hasn’t seen me. He’s in the middle of a story. The story has hands, and an ending everybody is already waiting in line for, because with him the laugh is a place you stand, not a thing you decide. The volume is exactly the same.
Something in my chest stands up. I tell it to sit down. It doesn’t sit down.
“Off the pitch,” Tomáš says. “You were saying.”
“Professional,” I say. The word comes out in the right way. It costs more than a word should.
Šíma is looking at me. One second. Maybe a second and a half, which from Šíma is a paragraph. Then Novotný announces that the brisket portions are a scandal in our favor, and the table tilts toward the argument, and Šíma goes with it.
The Italians settle two tables away, loud and easy, pulling chairs as if they own chairs everywhere. Rossetti spots Damián and points at him across the room, some football thing between them already, and Damián points back, and the two tables are suddenly one room with a seam down the middle. He still hasn’t looked over. Or he has, at some point I missed, and decided the room was big enough for both of us. I’m not going to think about which of those is worse.
I file him where he goes. Serie A. Left winger. That’s all he is, all he needs to be.
I put the fork down and pick up my water and drink it slowly, like a professional, like a man whose only problem in this city is the hotel eggs. The counter calls out a number and somebody’s tray goes by loaded. Two tables away, a story lands and takes the whole corner of the room with it.