Page 37 of Delay of Game
Next to him, Zach sighed, happily, and rolled over on his side, propped up on his elbow. He looked down at Nate. His face was mostly in shadow, the only illumination in the room flashes of headlights on the highway through the window. Nate was struck again by the fact that there were objectively better-looking people out there, probably. Someone somewhere was probably more handsome than Zach. There were individual things about Zach that were weird looking or didn’t quite add up, like his sharp little canines and crooked smile and broken nose, but also, Zach’s face was almost painful to look at sometimes, he was so beautiful to Nate.
So he looked away.
“Hey,” Zach was saying, with a little yawn. “It’s late.”
“So you have to go?”
“Well, I thought maybe I could crash with you tonight?”
Like we used to, before all of this.He didn’t say it, but Nate thought it.
Zach was looking at him still, that weird expression that Nate couldn’t quite figure out. “Itislate, and I’m fuckin’ wiped.”
“Sure,” Nate said, even though he didn’t really understand how it figured into Zach’s pregame ritual. He had also really kind of missed it. “I mean...it’s a king, there’s enough room. If you want to.”
“Thanks,” Zach said, flopping back down against the pillow and turning on his side. Nate stared at the line of his back, the shift of the muscle there as he wriggled around to get himself comfortable. “’Night, bro. We’re gonna kill it tomorrow.”
Nate didn’t say anything, but thought,well, now I have to win, andNate, you fucking idiot. Neither were particularly comforting thoughts, but thankfully, he wasn’t awake for long after that.
It’s just Mom’s annual Chanukah party, Nate told himself, for the fifty-millionth time.
There was absolutely no reason for his chest to constrict every time he thought about it. There was no reason for sweat to prickle on his forehead and back and in his armpits every time he thought about it. Not for the last time, Nate wondered why the fuck he couldn’t just be normal about anything, but the fact was: he wasn’t normal about anything, and he never had been. And he just had to get on with his life.
He’d been playing with the Cons for seven years now, and his parents had thrown the party every season. Even though it wasn’t amajorholiday, his mom liked to give the players who didn’t go home—either because they didn’t get along with their families, or it was too far to fly for just a few days—a holiday experience with a family. The implication, of course, was that Nate’s family was the team’s family too.
It was kind of weird, on one level: both of Nate’s parents had worked long hours when he was a kid, and sometimes it felt like they barely knew each other. They hadn’t had elaborate holiday partiesthen. The team got a whole side of his parents that he’d never gotten to experience, and he couldn’t even begrudge them it, because they were his brothers. And sister.
He didn’t even mind the parties. Not really.
Everyone generally behaved, although there was at least one year where someone got a little too drunk and pissed in the neighbors’ potted stoop plants and Nate had had to send them some expensive gift baskets from DiBruno Brothers as an apology.
And it had been two years now since the last Chanukah with Rachel, the one where he’d fallen asleep on the couch in between her and Zach. Nate had woken up to find she’d already gone home. That had been the first night he and Zach had shared a bed after they’d stumbled upstairs and squeezed into Nate’s childhood twin. Nate had woken up draped over Zach’s entire body the next morning. It should have been awkward, but somehow, it wasn’t.
He’d thought about that night for a long time after. Never let himself think about it fully, just turned the image over and over in his head, Zach’s uncertain smile and sleepy brown eyes. Should have known that he was a goner from that moment on. Had probably been a goner even before that.
Regardless of what had happened in the past, there was no reason to be nervous about the Chanukah party.
But he was.
Like he usually did, Nate went over early to help Mom with the cooking. She always went overboard, even considering that she was feeding half a team of hockey players. All of the classics: brisket, kugel, potato latkes, homemade sufganiyot. Some more adventurous stuff like a walnut and pomegranate chicken, and then some dishes that she insisted were “for the goyim.” A lot of chips and dip. He’d never been able to get a clear answer out of her about what made that goyische. The one that both fascinated and disgusted Nate was the broccoli casserole: she had sworn him to secrecy about the ingredients, but it involved several different kinds of soups named after creamed vegetables and bricks of chopped frozen broccoli.
She started cooking several weeks in advance and freezing things in trays, but there was still a shitload of work to do the day of. And that was where Nate came in—quite literally, through the unlocked door.
The house hadn’t changed at all since he’d moved out. It was an old-school Philly row home, and his parents had never bothered to renovate it. It was a straight-through from the door through the living room, which was still full of the same threadbare, overstuffed furniture that had been there when he was a kid, the same pictures hanging on the walls, back to the tiny dining table and behind it the kitchen.
She’d filled every spare inch of shelf with tchotchkes, little gifts people had given her, things she’d collected on their few family vacations, random family heirlooms from the old country. The house was a time capsule in a lot of ways, but what century you were in was anyone’s best guess, at least until you saw the giant TV screen Nate had bought them when he’d signed his last contract, the only gift they’d ever accepted from him.
The walls were paneled with dark wood and hung with hundreds of pictures, old family photos from Russia and Germany, relatives Nate couldn’t have even named if you’d asked him. Pictures of Zayde as a young boy, before the Nazis had come to power. Pictures of Bubbe and Zayde after they’d come to America, wearing the correct clothes but somehow still not fitting in. Pictures of Nate’s parents, at their wedding and after; his dad at the shipyard and his mom smiling behind the wheel of her bus.
Even worse, baby photos from the time Nate had been born through the present day. You could chart his progression from gigantic baby to apple-cheeked toddler to awkward teenager to professional hockey player in the space of about two feet of wall. His draft portrait was the crown jewel: long, greasy flow, puffy face covered in red splotchy acne, braces, and all.
Natehatedlooking at them.
He’d once asked his mom to take some of them down, or at least put them in a less prominent place, but she’d stared at him like he was crazy. “But weloveyou,” she’d said. “We’reproudof you.”
And that was the worst part: they did; they were.
There was noise from the kitchen: pots and pans banging around, a knife, his mom muttering curses to herself as she went. Absolutely nothing had changed.