Chapter 26 #2
The scout came for one question, the only one they really ask.
Can this goalie make the last save of a final the same way he makes the first save of the season?
For a stretch there the tape didn’t answer it, because a man coming apart at the seam gives up soft ones and soft ones live on film forever.
Casimir isn’t coming apart anymore. The tools were always in him.
Now they’re on the tape too, every shift, and the tape doesn’t lie.
And here’s the sweet, backward joke of it, the one I turn over on the bus rides home with my head against the cold window.
All season I told myself the math was zero-sum, that loving him and beating him were the same knife pointed both ways.
I had it exactly upside down. Beating him was never what was going to put him on a scout’s page.
Being whole was. I gave the net back, gave him the quiet, and he did the rest himself, one save at a time, in the only language a notebook reads.
“He’s going to get his look,” I tell Vinh at the Trough, over the ordinary end-of-night noise.
Guys wronging the microwave. Somebody down the table hollering, “Does it count if it hangs off the edge?” at a shuffleboard puck that doesn’t care either way.
Across the room Casimir is not-eating, in the place he sits that’s near the room and never in it, except he’s a little more in it than he used to be. Nobody made an event of that either.
“The pro thing,” I say. “He’s going to get it. You feel it coming? Because I feel it coming.”
Vinh peels the label off his water and doesn’t look up. He came up through figure skating, so he reads weight, edges, where a body is going before it goes there, and right now he’s got all of it pointed at me.
“And you’re okay with that.” Not a question. Vinh doesn’t really do questions. He does the thing where he says the answer and lets you catch up to it.
“I’m the reason he’s going to get it,” I say.
And it comes out with no ash in it. None.
I keep waiting for the old animal in my chest to get up on its feet and hate it like it hated Casimir holding a puck he had no business holding, back when I was a backup dressing for a party I never got to eat at.
The animal stays down. What comes up instead is pride, the clean kind, the kind I didn’t know I had a slot for.
Vinh doesn’t say anything for a second, and Vinh not saying anything is never nothing.
“What. Say it,” I tell him. “You think I’m going to wake up next season hating it?”
“No.” He sets the label down flat on the table and smooths it out. “I think he’s gone next season, and you’re right here, and neither of you has said one word out loud about that part.”
And there it is, dropped on the table between the trays with the microwave going and somebody down the row hollering about shuffleboard.
The thing I have been carefully declining to look at since the second time the scout came back.
Casimir graduates. The pro thing takes him wherever it takes people.
I get the crease and whatever’s left of my own time in this town and a phone.
“I don’t have that one worked out,” I say.
“Nobody does.” Vinh shrugs, and it isn’t unkind, it’s just true. “You do it and you find out. That’s the whole answer. It’s a garbage answer. It’s the only one anybody’s got.”
He’s the guy who let an enforcer put a hand on the back of his neck in the middle of this room and never spent the night waiting for the bill. He figured out the thing I spent a whole season being too stubborn to figure out, that you don’t have to earn the hand. You just have to let it land.
“I spent my whole life trying to be the pick,” I say, quieter, because true things come out quiet. I turn my glass a slow quarter on the table. “There’s no drill for it. Turns out somebody just has to choose you, and you have to be dumb enough to believe them.”
Vinh grins, slow, and tips his glass at me, which is what he does when he’s clocked something and is being kind enough not to say it out loud.
And across the room, Casimir catches me looking.
Of course he does. He’s already looking.
He always is. We’ve done this since the equipment room the first day, the only two people in a loud place turned away from whatever everybody else has their eyes on, and we called it rivalry for a whole season because rivalry was the one word we both knew how to hold on to in daylight.
All season the move was the same. He’d let me have his eyes for one breath, then set the space back inch by careful inch, like a man returning a borrowed thing before anybody could notice it was gone.
Not tonight. Tonight he holds it, in the full light, in front of the whole team, over a cooling tray of food he isn’t going to eat.
It’s the loudest thing this quiet man has ever said and there isn’t a word anywhere in it.
I feel it land in my chest like a flat palm pressed there.
I don’t look away either. Let the room watch.
Let the whole town watch. Let Denny hear about it and pour us both the thing he decides we drink.
Let the bad-font internet make of it whatever it wants.
I’m done being careful about the one true thing I’ve got.
I spent a whole season taking separate elevators from the only person I wanted in the same room with me, and I’m not doing another one.