Chapter 4 Wes
THEN
The hallway is quiet. The guest room door is closed. I walk past it toward the kitchen and the coffee is already on.
Luca is at the counter with his back to me. White T-shirt, shorts, hair pushed up on one side from sleeping on it wrong. Two mugs out. Handles turned the same direction.
"Morning," he says without turning around.
"Morning."
He turns. "I added the breakfast place from yesterday."
"What did you give it?"
"Seven-three for the eggs. Six-nine for the toast. The toast was too light, which is a penalty."
"It's a deduction."
"A deduction is a penalty with better branding." He pulls the carafe off the burner and pours.
I reach for the mug. His hand is still on the handle and my fingers brush across his knuckles. He lets go. I add milk from the fridge. The morning light comes through the kitchen window and lands on his collarbone where the T-shirt sits loose.
"The eggs were a seven-three?" I say.
"Generous, honestly. The yolk was overcooked. But the seasoning saved it." He sets his mug down and opens the laptop on the counter. The spreadsheet is there. He scrolls to the bottom and types something into the notes column. The weighted average for the breakfast place reads 7.1.
"Seven-one for the overall," I say. "That feels right."
"Seven-one is honest. I would go back for the eggs. I would not go back for the toast."
"The return verdict?"
"Yes, with reservations. The reservations are the toast."
He closes the laptop and leans against the counter and drinks his coffee. The balcony door is cracked and the air has the weight of early morning before the heat sets in. His feet are bare on the tile.
"I found a cubano place on Brickell," he says. "Supposed to be serious."
"How serious?"
"The menu is four items. That's usually a sign." He takes another sip of his coffee.
"Four items is confidence or bankruptcy."
"Exactly. We should find out which."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow." He finishes his coffee, rinses the mug, sets it in the sink. "Morning skate at nine?"
"Nine-fifteen. They pushed it."
"Good. I want to work on my release point. It's been off since Seattle."
"Your release point is fine."
"My release point is a six-eight."
"You're rating your own release point now?"
"Everything gets rated, Mercy. That's the system." He grins, using the nickname he’s picked up from the rest of the team. Then he takes his laptop off the counter and walks toward the guest room and the hallway is quiet after he is gone.
Morning skate is sharp. Coach runs the lines through a neutral-zone breakout for twenty minutes and Paulson and the kid and I cycle through the drill until the three of us stop thinking about it and it’s muscle memory.
Paulson carries the puck up the left wall.
I cut across the middle. Berger reads the seam before it opens and is already there, stick flat, weight low, collecting the pass in stride.
The whole sequence takes four seconds. Nobody says out loud that the twenty-two-year-old on his third week in this building is reading the play at the speed of the two guys who have been running this line for years.
He does it again on the next rep. Paulson chips the puck off the boards and I'm trailing the play and Berger picks up the chip, looks left, looks right, and puts the puck on my tape without looking back.
The pass is flat and clean and arrives where my stick is going to be, not where it was.
I don't have to adjust. I don't have to slow down. The puck is just there.
"Kid sees the ice," Paulson says to me at the bench, toweling off his neck. "How long has he been doing that?"
"Since he got here."
"He's reading you before you commit. That's not a rookie thing."
"No. Though technically he’s not a rookie now."
Paulson watches Berger take a wrister from the circle. The release is quick and the puck goes high glove and the goalie gets a piece of it but has to work. "His release point is better than a six-eight," Paulson says.
"I know."
"He knows too. He's sandbagging the rating so you'll argue with him about it."
I don't answer that. I watch Berger take another wrister and the release is the same, quick and high and clean. What I won’t say to Paulson is that in my fifteen years, I’ve never had a winger set me up with the puck so perfectly. Like the pass already knew where I was going.
The apartment is quiet that afternoon when Berger comes through the living room around six. I'm reading on the couch. He has his phone in his hand and one earbud out, a grey t-shirt and shorts on.
"My sister Sina called," he says. He drops onto the far end of the couch and pulls one leg up under him. "She's getting married in the summer."
"Yeah? Where?"
"Bern. The whole family. She wanted to make sure I'd come back for it."
"Of course you will."
"I told her I'd be there. She started sending me pictures of venues and I made the mistake of having an opinion about the lighting."
"You rated the lighting?"
"I rated the lighting. She sent me nine pictures and I gave her honest feedback on every one and now she wants me to come early and help with the setup.
" He is grinning as he pushes his hair back off his face.
"I told her I'm a hockey player, not a wedding planner. She said those are the same skill set."
He shifts on the couch and looks at the book in my hand. "What are you reading?"
"A novel about a man standing in a rail yard."
"That doesn't sound like a novel."
"That's why it's good."
"How long has he been standing in the rail yard?"
"Two hundred pages."
"Is he going to leave?"
"I don't know yet."
"You are the most patient person I have ever met." He shakes his head. "I would have left the rail yard by page twelve."
"That's because you stop reading everything by page twelve."
"Fair point. I still say if the rail yard hasn't declared its intentions by page twelve, the rail yard is wasting your time."
"The rail yard is not wasting my time."
"The rail yard has definitely been wasting your time and you are defending it." He is laughing now. "This is who you are. You are a man who will sit in a rail yard for two hundred pages waiting for a sentence."
"And you're a man who would rate the rail yard before the train arrived."
"Is there a train?"
"I don't know. I'm on page 212."
"I’m calling it. There is no train." He pulls his other leg up and settles in for the debate. "I'm telling you right now. There is no train. The man is standing in a rail yard with no train and you have given this book days of your life."
"If there's no train, that's the book."
"If there's no train, that's a crime."
I get up and go to the kitchen to warm up the pork shoulder from last night. He sits across from me at the table and rates the reheated pork a seven-five.
"Seven-five is generous for a reheat," I say.
"Reheated protein always loses half a point for texture degradation. But the seasoning held, so the seven-five accounts for both the loss and the recovery."
"Texture degradation."
"It's a real thing. The fibers change. You know this."
"I know the food tastes the same."
"The food does not taste the same. The food tastes adjacent to the same, which is a different category."
He does the dishes without being asked. I hear the water. I hear him stack the plates in the drying rack in the order I stack them, which he learned without me telling him.
I go to bed at eleven. The guest room door is shut, with a sliver of light peeking from beneath it.
He is twenty-two. Chapin asked me to look out for him and I am. I'm here, watching.
My mind wanders through the day. The mugs on the counter this morning, handles turned the same way. His hand on the handle and my fingers across his knuckles. His release point, quick and high and clean. The puck on my tape before I was there. His sister in Bern. The lighting.
He has been in my guest room for three weeks. He hasn't called his realtor. I haven't asked and don’t look too hard at that.
I will shoot the water from the balcony in the morning. It will be better in the morning. It usually is.
?