Chapter 14: What the Banners Cost

Nobody spoke in the car, and nobody turned on the kitchen light when we got home.

My father sat at the head of the table with his suit jacket still on.

Paolo stood by the fridge with his arms crossed over his brace.

Luca sat beside me with his cast on a chair.

"Say it all," I said. "Not half."

My father looked at the wood grain.

"I was thirty-six," he said. "My left knee was gone. The surgeon told me one more season, maybe two, and then I'd walk with a cane."

"And?" Paolo said.

"A man offered me something for the pain and the recovery. I took it for a season. I told myself it was medicine."

"And the second season?"

"By the second season I knew what it was, and I took it anyway."

His voice stayed flat.

"I won two titles on it."

Paolo made a noise in his throat.

"Your mother found out that winter," my father said. "She ran the lab. She saw my numbers and she knew before I told her."

"Did she report you?" I said.

"She told me to stop. I said I would."

"Did you?"

"No."

Luca put his head in his hands.

"The league tested me in March, after Vasko was caught and named me," my father said. "I had no clean urine in me, and I knew it."

He looked at me for the first time.

"Your mother went into the lab that night and switched my sample for another. She signed my name on the clean one."

"For you," I said.

"For me. Then she came home and didn't speak for three days."

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