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Somehow, incredibly, Matt has saved the LeBron jersey, the old one that Shawn left behind in Cleveland in 2010.
"Get out, man," Shawn laughs when Matt tosses it to him. "You kept this? I thought LeBron was a total persona non grata to you only, what, two years ago?"
"Hey, dude, you were the one who was so torn up about him leaving the Cavs," Matt shrugs. "I thought it was just good business sense on his part. Stay away until the owners bother building a worthy team. And I actually did throw your jersey away for, like, five minutes," he admits, somewhat sheepishly. "But then I figured it might be worth something on eBay in a few years. Still would bring in a lot, come to think of it, especially now."
Shawn runs his fingers over the 23 on the back of the jersey, MJ's old number, the fabric paint cracked into fine lines from repeated washings (wine spills, ketchup smears, sweat stains). He's forgotten until this moment what the Cavs' old jersey design looked like, but the sight is as startlingly familiar to him as whenever he opens up a drawer in his dad's house and finds one of his mom's scarves there, the faint floral aroma of her perfume overwhelming and comforting. It moves him to know that, even when Matt has flown too close to the sun with Eastside and could have made a bundle off of this jersey, he's somehow preserved it for Shawn after all these years, even after Shawn uprooted and replanted himself in New York, stripping himself of all identifiers of Ohio even more viciously than LeBron on his migration down south to Miami. But then, Matt is the type to get sentimental about his parents' old clunker of a car, which Shawn had fairly purchased, and which Matt's own mother had told Shawn to sell...
"So, you coming, or what?" Matt asks, his arms folded. He's swapped his Armand's uniform for a white t-shirt and a Cavs baseball hat, and Shawn resists reminding Matt that he was the one who hadn't wanted to go to the parade only 30 minutes ago, because he's technically "off sports" right now, or whatever.
"Yeah." He bumps Matt with his shoulder as he passes him on the way out the door, deliberately, affectionately. "Let's go."
The parade is a delirium of unimaginable joy. Fans screaming, fans cheering, face paint, shimmering pompoms, giant foam fingers, Mardi Gras beads—Shawn is pretty sure the very blood of these fans is running wine-red and gold and black today. It's June, and the humidity from off the lake is fucking oppressive, but everyone is too elated to care. It reminds Shawn of those days when he and Matt used to share those season tickets, hollering themselves hoarse from Section C, part of each other and of the crowds around them, an energy wave pulsing through Gund Arena (Quicken Loans Arena, whatever the fuck they're calling it these days). In Los Angeles, Shawn is a name, a writer on a prime-time TV show, living the Hollywood dream; and yet he is no one, isolated, lonely. Here, he is anonymous, but he is a Cavs fan, and so he is everyone around him, their excitement, their passion, their incandescent ecstasy. Today, all of Cleveland crackles with the same joyous spark of connection and pride.
Neither of them even remembers the phone call Matt was supposed to take, until they're heading home from the parade on the RTA and Matt checks his messages. "Eight missed calls," he reports, and then shrugs and slips his phone back into his pocket without listening to any of the messages.
They lounge on the sofa in the basement of Matt's mom's house for hours afterwards, quenching their thirst with icy beers from Matt's fridge, flipping between football games and MTV and news coverage of the parade. The conversation meanders, weaves back and forth, halting and graceful as a point guard waiting for his teammates to set for a play. Shawn has always loved this about his chats with Matt, that they can be about nothing and still feel like everything. Even if it's just Matt picking apart the old Jordan-LeBron debate for the umpteenth time, or going on his latest rant about whatever the current problem with America is, the point isn't so much the words as it is the feeling of belonging that always accompanies them, no matter how bitter the terms on which the last conversation ended. Shake hands. Fresh start. New game.
The local news stops showing footage of the parade in favor of discussing the ongoing presidential campaign. Without a word passing between them, Matt changes the channel.
"What the hell?" he says at the cartoon that's now playing on the TV. "Uh, are they allowed to show women dressed like that in Disney films?"
"It's not Disney," Shawn tries to explain with a brain that's pretty fuzzy by this point. "It's, like, knock-off Disney."
"You've seen this?" Matt turns to Shawn, incredulous.
"It was playing at some college party I went to," Shawn shrugs. (He declines to mention that the party was a watch party hosted by his professor for an anti-colonialist lit seminar, to compare and contrast Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King to its counterpart in contemporary culture. He's pretty sure Matt would give him shit forever for that sort of thing.) "It's aight."
Matt watches the colorful animation for a long moment, his expression growing wistful.
"Man, look, they even had a version of basketball in, like, ancient Mexico," he says. "Oh hey! Armand!"
Shawn knows he probably has the stupidest grin on his face as he watches Matt discover a children's film from some sixteen years ago. Matt goes through so much of life desperate to prove how cool and unflappable he is, and Shawn feels like the luckiest person on Earth to be able to witness these little moments of earnest delight that Matt lets slip in front of him.
"Yo, Shawn." Matt is gesturing at the screen with his can of Pabst. "These guys, this is like, you and me."
"Yeah?" Shawn laughs. " 'Cause I'm pretty sure people never look at me and immediately think, 'Hey, a conquistador!' "
"No, shut up," Matt insists. "These guys, this is like. Us. And Armand. And a really hot girl."
Shawn raises his eyebrows at the screen, but yeah, he gets it. Miguel and Tulio, Tulio and Miguel. He and Matt have a similar style of blustering their way through the world, each other's best friends and biggest fans, if sometimes least-reliable sources of support. Making do, day by day.
It's late, and Shawn still hasn't told his dad he's just arrived in town, so Matt rustles up some clean sheets and pulls them onto the sofa for Shawn.
"Hey, Shawn?" he says as Shawn burrows into his little makeshift sheet cocoon, his body cradled by the comfortable, familiar sag of the sofa. "Just wanted to say, um. That parade was pretty cool, you know?"
By now, Shawn knows how to decipher all the little things Matt isn't saying, and he feels a warmth filling his chest, despite the fact the air-conditioning vent is positioned right over his torso.
"Yeah, man," he smiles. "Glad you came along, instead of sitting in your mom's shop, waiting for that phone call."
Matt's silhouette bobs a bit in agreement, and then the sliver of light from his bedroom narrows and disappears, and Shawn drifts off to sleep, still smiling.
He awakes groggily the next morning, his head aching. Damn, he keeps forgetting he's not twenty anymore, and he can't just sleep off hours of partying like they're nothing. Sunlight filters in weakly from between the Venetian blinds on the little windows pressed high on the walls of the basement, streaking light over the empty beer cans, the stained carpeting, Shawn's old LeBron jersey. Matt's bedroom door is still closed, and Shawn wonders if he's dreaming of basketball, or of the parade, or of hot (but actually very problematically depicted) animated Aztec women.
And that's about when Shawn realizes that he has a really ridiculous plan.
Armand's may be in blowout sale mode, but Shawn still remembers all the passwords to the rickety computer system. When he and Matt have chugged enough water between them to ease their massive hangovers, they drive over to the shop together, and while Matt is busy talking to the rare customer, Shawn quietly logs into one of the databases to look up a name. He'll formally fess up later to Matt for snooping—and to Matt's mom, too, given it's technically still her store. Shawn sometimes feels a little weird that they're as tight as they are, but hey, you don't turn down a good friend just because she happens to be your best friend's mom. If anything, Shawn wishes Matt and his mom could see eye to eye a little more easily, so Matt would understand that his mom's running off to Budapest with Edgar isn't some sort of final rejection born of her constant disappointment with him, and so Matt's mom would understand that Matt really is trying his hardest, even if the world around him sometimes is an unforgiving place. But Shawn decided a long time ago not to get caught up in whatever was happening in that whole family dynamic. He sighs and shakes his head as he jots down the info he needs on a post-it note and logs back out of the system.
If Shawn were a better son himself, he'd call his dad right about now, but he has other priorities for the moment and instead directs his rental car towards downtown. He finds the person he's looking for in one of the glossy new buildings at Cleveland State, an old white lady with wild stringy hair and big round glasses and a demeanor that suggests she spends most of her weekends bird-watching out at Rocky River Reservation, wearing one of those funny little vests with a pocket just for your binoculars. She invites Shawn into her office as if he's an old friend, even though he's clearly over a decade too old to be one of her students; and it somehow doesn't surprise him when she expresses awe at the fact that he writes for Bodhisattva.
"It's my favorite show!" she crows, clapping her leathery hands together. "My yoga teacher recommended it to me. And don't you just feel like it brings such hope to the idea that one day, after so much violence, even law enforcement can live in peace with the communities around them?"
Shawn really isn't sure what to say to that, so he just smiles and nods politely, and lets the professor get the rest of her enthusiasm out of her system. Finally, when she's ready to hear why he's in her office in the first place, he broaches the issue at hand.
"I know it's a weird request," he adds, "but the little guy means a lot to my friend. And I'm happy to pay you back in cash what you paid for him..."
"Eh, nonsense," says the old professor, springing out of her swivel chair. "You go right ahead and take him back home."
She opens a cabinet behind Shawn and pulls out Armand. Shawn catches a glimpse of at least three birds and a grim-looking tortoise, all frozen on the shelves with unseeing glass eyes, before the professor closes the door. Fucking weird.
"You sure I can't pay you back for him?" he stammers as she thrusts the armadillo into his arms.
"Got him for a steal," she shrugs. Shawn, having just seen what she paid for Armand when he looked up the credit card transaction records, is suddenly very curious to know what this odd professor paid for the rest of her taxidermy menagerie. "Anyway, much as I like the little fella, he's not in as pristine a condition as I'd hoped. Someone did a pretty shitty job of supergluing his paw back on, if you'll excuse my French."
Matt's out for the moment when Shawn brings Armand back to his rightful domain, and Shawn is trying to figure out the best way to stage this return when he hears Matt right outside. In a panic, he stuffs Armand into the globe bar and closes the lid just before Matt re-enters on his phone.
"Yeah," he says, gesturing at Shawn for a moment longer. "Well, I guess I won't call you back, then. Bye."
"You okay?" Shawn asks as Matt hangs up.
"Officially single, once again." Matt lets out a long sigh.
"Hey, man, I'm sorry." Shawn glances at the globe bar. "You, uh, need a drink or anything?"
Matt's eyes follow Shawn's, and the corner of his mouth twitches upwards.
"Ah, what the hell, might as well use the damn thing before someone buys it," he reasons.
Shawn can't see Matt's face the moment the lid of the globe swings upwards, but he watches as his friend's body tenses in surprise, then as Matt's head quirks slightly to side the way it always does when he's confused.
"No way," he mutters, and when he turns with the stuffed armadillo in his arms, his eyes are filled once again with that boyish delight. "Shawn...?"
"Hmm?" asks Shawn, trying and failing to look as innocent as possible.
"It's... fuck, how did you get Armand back?" Matt turns away to brush his hand across his eyes.
"Who said I had anything to do with it?" Shawn replies airily. "If King James can teleport across the court in Game 7, why shouldn't Armand the Armadillo be able to do the same thing?"
"Yeah." A grin is spreading across Matt's face, even as he sniffs back a few more tears. The insane drive from Oakland to Cleveland was more than worth it for this moment alone. "God damn. Well, here..."
He carefully hands Armand to Shawn as he begins bustling about the globe bar, pouring the dregs of the bourbon inside of it into some surviving Eastside tumblers, relics of their own battles with time and fate. Shawn turns Armand in his hands to examine all his limbs, and he truly doesn't think he did that poor a job with the superglued leg, but he's not going to argue with good luck. He sets Armand down on the desk when Matt finally turns to hand him his drink.
"Well?" Matt says, gesturing at Shawn with his own tumbler.
"Here's to the unexpected return of good old friends," Shawn improvises.
"Shit." Matt shrugs, grinning. "This is what happens when your friends become pro writers. I was gonna say, 'Here's to the Cavs,' but yeah, that works, too."
As they clink glasses and tip back their drinks, Shawn wonders if the two toasts are actually one and the same. Maybe, before he heads back to L.A., he'll have to break down and buy one of LeBron's current jerseys, to keep his old-school one company. If nothing else, he might as well take Matt up on his embittered earlier offer to buy the globe bar. That way, the two of them will have someplace to store their victory booze for years and years to come.