Page 67 of Offside

Damián finds me last, the way we both planned without planning.

His bags are small. Eleven boxes come Thursday, but this morning it’s one duffel and one carry-on. Twenty years of federation life, travel-sized. A taxi idling twenty minutes east of everything.

“So,” he says.

“So.”

“Twenty years.” He looks around the lobby like it’s a stadium. “I keep waiting for it to feel like an ending. It just feels like an away trip where nobody gave me the itinerary.”

“I’ll send you an itinerary. Monthly. With the dumplings.”

“The crate.” He grins. “Tobík built a shelf for it already. He labeled it. TOMÁŠ SUPPLY LINE.”

“Good. It’ll be a reliable service.”

“I know. It’s yours.” The grin softens. “Listen. The programs are in the locker. I told the federation you have access. Twenty years of Czech league, alphabetical, because I knew you’d want them alphabetical.”

“I want them chronological.”

“Then you’ll have a project.”

Here’s where I do the thing I’ve been coming toward all summer.

“Damián. Look after my brother.” He starts to answer and I hold up a hand, because this one gets finished. “Not a request. A transfer of title. I held that job since he was twelve. I did it well and sometimes I did it terribly, and it’s yours now. Both of you knew it before I did. I’m making it official. That’s all. Paperwork.”

Damián looks at me for a long second. Twenty years of my deliveries in his face.

“He looks after me, mostly,” he says. “You should know that. The couch, the bakery, the tutor. I signed for a new life and he’d already furnished it.”

“He’s a Hájek. We furnish.”

“You’re all insane and I’m keeping him.” He puts out his hand and I take it. Then neither of us pretends the handshake is enough. The hug is long and hard and says the twenty years.

And standing there, with my best friend’s medal digging into my collarbone, the sour thing I’ve been carrying since a fence in the second week finally gives up its name. Because I can afford the name now.

Envy. That’s all it ever was. Damián said one true thing out loud and got a whole life for it. A couch, a bakery, a boy who labels shelves. I stood at fences all summer wanting what he’d paid for. And now the ledger’s even. I said mine at a pool and it cost me two days of my life. Then a man amended a record in front of sixty thousand people. Last night I fell asleep mid-word with the lights off and nobody leaving. The envy dissolves the second it’s named. There’s nothing left to envy. I have mine.

“Text me when you land,” Damián says, picking up the duffel. “Wait. I don’t land. I forgot I don’t land.” He laughs, delighted with himself, a man whose whole itinerary is a taxi. “Text me anyway.”

“Every month. With tracking numbers.”

“Tomáš.” He stops in the door, half in, half out, the way he’s exited every room I’ve ever shared with him. “It was the best twenty years anyone ever spent being the second-most organized man in a federation.”

“Second.”

“I let you have it. That was the gift.” And he goes through the doors and doesn’t look back, because he’s Damián. The last I see of him this summer is an arm out the taxi window, backward,waving, like a man who knows exactly what’s behind him and where it lives.

Mami’s dispatch takes place at nine, curbside. It requires two federation staff and a luggage decision.

“The horn travels in the cabin,” she says.

“Mami. It’s a horn.”

“It’s a national instrument. It has a medal.” She’s sewn a ribbon on it. She has actually sewn a bronze ribbon on the horn. “Tobík, tell your brother.”

“The horn flies cabin,” Tobík says, deadpan, wheeling her cases. “I’ve already paid the seat fee. Window. It likes to watch the wing.”

“You paid a seat fee for a horn.”