Fair Play Read Free

permanent place on the roster. But all that could change if Michael, or any of the other players, got sloppy or slowed down. And van Dorn knew it. He seemed to take sadistic pleasure in needling some of the guys about being “old men.” But with Michael, it was more personal. “I thought old Italian men liked to sit in their gardens and look at their tomatoes,” he’d once cracked while Michael was killing himself on an exercise bike. Another time he’d asked Michael if he needed help dressing. Arrogant little Wasp prick.
    Michael nodded at what Ty said and skated back out onto the ice.
    The coach was right: He wasn’t focused at all today. Instead, his mind was on the meeting he was having later in the day in Brooklyn. He wanted Theresa and Janna’s PR help to bring in more customers to the restaurant he and his brother, Anthony, had inherited from their parents. Unfortunately, Anthony was the patron saint of sullen, older siblings. He was also the head chef at the restaurant and was horrified at the idea of changing anything . To him, change was bad, period. Anthony had had the same hairstyle for twenty years and had held on to his ’70s threads for so long, they were now back in style. Michael loved Anthony, but his narrow-mindedness and inflexibility often drove him to despair. He knew that when he got to the restaurant that afternoon and told Anthony they’d be sitting down with a PR person, his brother would start foaming at the mouth. Pots and pans would be hurled and the sanctity of their parents’ vision invoked. Michael could deal with that later. Right now, he had to deal with muscles screaming for relief in his legs.
    Joining his teammates, he gave it his all as they sprinted up and back, up and back. . . .
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    Theresa muttered to herself as she hustled down Eighty-Sixth Street on her way to Dante’s on Twentieth Avenue. She was feeling guilty that she was in Bensonhurst, but had no intention of visiting her parents. She kept imagining bumping into her mother coming out of Cuccio Brothers Cheese or Santoro’s Pork Store. After feigning a heart attack, her mother would launch into a tear-jerking soliloquy about how her only daughter had time to come to Brooklyn for work, oh yes, but God forbid she see her family more than one Sunday a month. The fantasy encounter was so real Theresa had started defending herself out loud. If that wasn’t a testament to how easy it was for her family to get under her skin, she didn’t know what was.
    Dante’s. She could have put her foot down and demanded Janna do it. But Janna seemed so stressed of late. Not that she wasn’t stressed herself. The idea that their agency might not make it kept her up at night watching bad TV, sucking her into the twilight world of infomer cials and square-headed, self-righteous televangelists. She sighed. There were worse things in life than meeting with professional athletes. Unemployment was one of them.
    Rounding the corner of Twentieth Avenue, she marveled at how little it had changed since she was small, the mom-and-pop stores of her childhood still intact. Dante’s was the same as she remembered it, a veritable Bensonhurst institution with a decent-sized dining room and an ample, traditional menu that featured everything from spaghetti and meatballs to osso bucco. Up until her father was diagnosed with lung cancer eight months ago, her parents used to go to Dante’s every Thursday; their “date night” as they called it. But now Poppy was too tired and too sick to go anywhere. Once again, guilt gripped her. Maybe she would stop by the house when she was done and surprise them.
    She pushed open the large, carved wooden door to the restaurant and slipped inside, out of the warm September air. The lights and air-conditioning were on, but there was no one behind the long, polished wood bar, and every linen-covered table in the large room was empty. Trying