Chapter 3 #3
My tires slosh over the remnants of March snow, mostly melted from the storm the other night.
We’re likely to get another few blizzards before true spring can take hold.
I roll into the driveway of my mom’s bungalow, which sits on a quiet street in Payne-Phalen.
The house waits for me, unchanged for all these years.
My mom purchased the house when I was ten, two years after my dad passed, using the last of his life insurance money.
It was meant to be our fresh start, even if there wasn’t a bit of “fresh” in it.
The house had that lived-in charm—creaks on the stairs, paths on the floorboards, a yellow kitchen with daisy wallpaper from the sixties.
My mom always swore she’d paint over it when she got a chance, but that chance still hasn’t shown up.
I step inside, kicking the slush off my boots on the doormat that reads Bless this mess.
“Beckett?” My mom’s voice carries from somewhere in the back of the house.
“Yeah, Mom, it’s me!” I slide my jacket off and pop it onto one of the hooks by the door, leaving my boots on the mat below.
I find my mom at the kitchen table, tea steaming beside her, the newspaper crossword splayed out before her. Her hair hangs over her shoulder, a braid of silver and brown.
“You’re early,” she says, tilting her cheek toward me as I pass. I kiss it. She smells like Earl Grey and Jergens lotion and every safe thing I’ve ever known.
She sets down her pen. Studies me. Maureen Benson has been a nurse at Regions Hospital for twenty-two years, and she can diagnose a problem at forty paces. I have never successfully lied to this woman. Not once.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Beckett Michael Benson.”
Full name. I’m cooked.
“I saw Everly Hart at the gala.” I say it fast, like yanking off a Band-Aid. “Coach’s daughter.”
Mom’s face softens. “Everly? The little girl with the red hair.”
“She doesn’t have red hair anymore.” Dark bob. Freckles and glasses and a laugh that’s still rattling around my rib cage three days later. “She’s a writer now.”
“Really?”
“She writes crime thrillers.”
“Hmm.” My mom takes a sip of her tea, peeking at me curiously. “How was it? Seeing her?”
I take to pulling ingredients out of the fridge. Chicken. Lemons. Capers. Start rinsing without looking at her. “I mistook her for a waitress.”
“You what?”
“I thought she was waitstaff.” I slice a lemon with more force than it deserves. “And then Coach reintroduced us, and it was—imagine the worst conversation you’ve ever had, then light it on fire and push it off a cliff.”
Mom’s brows shoot upward. “She always was a spitfire.”
I shoot her a look. Is she laughing? “It’s not funny, Mom. She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you—”
“No, she does. Coach asked me to drive her home, and I offered to take her out to Ironclad for a cookie, and she just about threw herself from the moving car. That girl hates me.” I put the knife down before I lose a finger.
I let out a sigh. “I don’t really blame her.
I pretty much told her to get over it when her parents were splitting up.
And then I sprayed ice in her face at that showcase. ”
“I remember.” Her voice goes quiet. “Her father was spending a lot of long evenings at the rink. I remember her mother, Katherine. I saw her crying in the parking lot one night, sitting in her car with the engine running. It was a hard time for them.”
“And Everly blamed me.”
“Everly was hurting and needed someone to blame, Beck.”
I stare at the lemon in my hand, the juice running over my knuckles. “She wasn’t wrong. Coach did choose hockey. And I stood there and soaked it up because I needed him, and I didn’t care what it cost her.”
“You were a child who’d lost his father. You were looking for one.” Her voice is steady, immovable. “That is not a crime, Beckett.”
Mom reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. Calluses from twenty-two years of twelve-hour shifts. The thin gold wedding band she’s never taken off. “You can’t go back. You can only go forward and be different.”
“What if she doesn’t want me to go forward anywhere near her?”
“Then you respect that.” She squeezes. “You apologize and move on. All you can do is hold your head up and be the man God made you to be.”
Sort of wish I knew who that might be. But I don’t say that. Mom has always had this deep, rock-solid faith. Mine is more like a pebbly beach, shifting too easily.
We eat dinner, and she tells me all about a patient who sang show tunes at three a.m. in the cardiac ward—full voice, jazz hands. I tell her about practice, about almost rocketing a puck through Wyatt’s head.
“Oh, Beckett!” she gasps, her laugh bubbling up. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, but it was a good shot. Next time, it’ll go in.”
After dinner, we do the dishes. I wash. She dries. Then we settle down in the living room, and I help her finish the crossword. The evening sun peeks under the tree line, casting the sky in shades of purple and blue.
On the mantel, where they’ve been since I was ten, sit the photographs.
Mom put them there after we moved in. The story of my life.
Me at eight, gap-toothed holding a hockey stick taller than I am.
Mom and Dad’s wedding—a courthouse photo, both of them laughing at something off camera.
Dad in his gear at Sutton Arena, leaning against the boards with one glove off, looking like a man who thought every morning was a gift.
It’s funny. I’ve looked at the picture a hundred times. But sometimes, it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time. Michael Benson. Dark hair like mine. Blue eyes like mine. The jawline I see in the mirror every morning.
He was thirty-one when he died. I’m thirty-one now. He made it exactly this far and no further.
He played at Sutton Arena back when it was still a minor-league-affiliate rink, before the Blue Ox went full NHL. Practiced there, loved the ice there.
Saturday, I’ll stand on that ice. The same ice where he stood. The ice he loved.
The last rays of sun finally drop below the horizon, and the golden light of the living room bleeds out into the dark through the windows.
I think back to the gala, to the bracelet in my jacket pocket. Back to practice today, to me taking my anger out on the ice. To the cold drive home after dropping off Everly a few nights ago.
The problem isn’t that I’m angry. The problem isn’t that she said no. The problem isn’t even that I deserved the no, that I earned it at twelve and reinforced it at fourteen.
The problem is that I’d trade everything—my contract, my stats, every goal I’ve ever scored—to go back to that elevator. To that dark. To the two minutes before the lights stuttered on and the girl in the darkness vanished.
For a chance at a clean slate with someone who doesn’t see my past or a number on a jersey.
I’d go back and I’d say: My name is Beckett. I’m the worst version of a man who’s trying to be better. I’m sorry for things I haven’t told you about yet. Can we stay in the dark a little longer?
But you don’t get to go back. Mom said so. The ice said so.
And maybe they’re all right.