It turned out that lunch was Montreal-style bagels with cream cheese, lox, and all of the fixings, which included everything from thick slices of red onion and tomato and cucumber to dill that Rosa had hand-shredded, and capers. She had bought a few other things from the deli: whitefish and fruit salad and little chocolate pastries called rugelach.
“So you see,” Rosa said severely to Eric, in her heavily accented English for Ryan’s benefit, “I wasn’t actuallycooking, I wasassembling. And now we have time for you to tell me about yourself, Ryan.”
Ryan told her while they each assembled their bagels, although it was a bit of a sanitized version. He told her about growing up in Boston with older brothers who were all taller than him and a father who liked to play them all off against each other, about how he was the only one who had actually made it in the major leagues. He told her about marrying too soon and divorcing too late, about accepting the head coach’s job on a hope and a prayer and not having expected anything that came after.
Rosa was a good listener. She asked questions occasionally but didn’t push, and she kept her warm, dark brown eyes, filmed a little with cataracts, focused on his face the whole time. It was a disconcertingly direct stare, the same one Eric had, Ryan thought, a little hysterically. But it wasn’t uncomfortable, being the focus of her attention. He could tell that she was interested inhim.
“Do I get the embarrassing stories about Eric, or do I have to wait a few days for those?” Ryan asked. He was at the point in a meal where he was full but still had some food on his plate: he pushed around a bit of whitefish salad with his knife.
“Maybe you’ll be surprised to hear this, but Eric was a very good boy,” Rosa said, and laughed. “He loved his books when he was growing up, and he was a real bookworm until he got seriously into hockey. The worst thing he ever did was fighting, and usually he had some sort of a reason for it, and I couldn’t be too angry.”
“You were a bad influence,” Eric said, looking down with a smile.
“Well, if a boy throws a penny at you, he deserves to get a punch in the nose.”
Ryan frowned. He thought, briefly, of all of the stupid shit his brothers had thought was so hilarious as kids, the shit he knew they did even at practice, to their own teammates. The shit his father had even encouraged. It wasn’t a stretch to think that those kinds of things would have happened to Eric, even outside of Boston. “I’m sorry. I never had to deal with anything like that growing up, I—can’t really imagine.”
Eric shrugged. “It was a fact of life. They stopped doing it once they realized that even if I lost the fight, they weren’t getting out of it unscathed.”
“So you came by the reputation honestly, even before hockey?” Ryan asked, shaking his head, to Rosa’s laughter.
“Sorry,” Eric muttered, after lunch, as they were washing up the dishes and Rosa was putting some of the leftovers into the fridge, “she’s been like this with everyone I’ve ever brought home. Grills them like crazy.”
“I don’t mind. It’s nice that she’s interested. And brought home?”
“Well, you know. I dated women too, for a long time, almost exclusively...but it’s also been a long time since anyone’s met Maman.”
“Oh,” Ryan said, because he didn’t entirely trust himself to say anything else.
They spent another hour or so hanging out in the living room with Rosa, who had made coffee and insisted on bringing it out in what she called “the nice mugs,” which were a set of vintage-y-looking white coffee cups printed with gold butterflies and flowers.
“You’re really getting the star treatment, you know,” Eric whispered out of the corner of his mouth to Ryan when Rosa went back into the kitchen for more rugelach. “She doesn’t bring those out for just anyone. Guess you have to make the Hockey Hall of Fame first.”
“Stop,” Ryan demanded, embarrassed. “You didn’t tell her all of that too, did you?”
“She looked it up herself when you first got the job. She knows how to get on the internet and everything.”
“Jesus,” Ryan said, hiding his face in his hand.
“Don’t worry,” Eric said, “she was probably just looking up your advanced stats. Nothing embarrassing.”
After lunch was over, Eric took Ryan on a walking tour of the old neighborhood. It was pretty much what it had looked like on the drive in: pleasant and residential, with an abundance of trees and bushes. They walked past the synagogue where he’d grown up attending, with its beautifully landscaped grounds and its various memorial plaques and statues. They mostly walked in silence; Ryan enjoyed looking around and taking it all in. It was easy to imagine Eric as a child sitting on those steps, his nose buried in a book, his glasses slipping down his nose, or Eric being bar mitzvah’d, which he had explained was like being accepted as an adult in the community and had involved leading an entire service by himself.
When Eric wasn’t looking, Ryan slipped a pebble from the synagogue grounds into his pocket. He could feel it there, smooth and round, pressing against his thigh.
“Like I said,” Eric said, as they were walking home, “it’s nothing special, but I had a happy childhood here.”
“Stop being so self-deprecating. Like seriously, Eric, I grew up in Boston.”
Eric laughed. “I made myself forget.” He mock-shuddered, looking disgusted.“Boston.”
Later that evening, Rosa brought out dinner, to Eric’s protests and Rosa’s insistence that all she’d had to do was cut some vegetables. She had made a roasted chicken and some vegetable side dishes: roasted asparagus and something that involved potatoes and carrots, heavy on the ginger, cumin, and cinnamon.
It was nice to have a home-cooked meal and eat dinner in a household where there wasn’t tension overwhelming everything at the dinner table; Ryan could relax and listen to Eric and Rosa teasing each other or Eric catching her up on the way the season had been going or Eric smiling at her or Eric throwing him under the bus with a sly remark that would immediately prompt a question from Rosa when he hadn’t been paying attention.
After they’d done Rosa’s dishes, again, Eric kissed Rosa on the forehead and said something in French to her that Ryan didn’t understand but was apparently the indication that they were finished with dinner and going to take Ryan’s bags up to Eric’s room.
He hadn’t been sure what to expect there, either. His own bedroom at his parents’ house had long been converted into Chelsea’s craft room. There was still a twin bed shoved in the corner, but it was buried under rolls of patterned fabric, and the vast majority of the rest of the space was devoted to scrapbooking and yarn and other supplies. He felt like that was probably one extreme, and the other was the typical hockey bedroom that hadn’t been touched since the guy went away to juniors, and the only thing that had ever changed was accumulating more and more hockey memorabilia.