Epilogue
Emile
Graduation is out there waiting somewhere and I’m not thinking about it, because Casimir is here now.
And whatever comes after is a together problem.
I’ve finally learned the whole trick of it.
Eat at the party. Don’t just dress for it.
You know how many nights I stood at the end of a bench with clean dry pads, watching somebody else get fed? Sit down at the table and eat.
I’m eating. It’s the best I’ve ever felt in my life.
Manon calls on a Sunday, like she has called on a Sunday since I was a kid ringing home from tournament hotels on somebody else’s phone card.
She asks did I eat.
“I ate,” I say. “Sat down for it and everything. There was a table, Maman. There were chairs. Two of them.”
There’s a pause on her end that runs a beat long, and I know exactly what she’s doing with it, because she did the same thing the night I told her I had a start. Nothing. She holds still so the moment can’t get away from her.
“Bon,” she says. “Good. That’s good, that.”
Then she asks about him. Not about the net.
Not about where anybody’s name sits on a list. She has watched every game this season on a laptop propped against the sugar bowl and she has never opened with who was in the crease.
She asks how he is. What he likes to eat.
Whether he’s warm enough up here, because she has decided from her own kitchen table that a Polish boy raised in a cinderblock house might not be warm enough, and there is nothing on this earth that will move her off it.
“He’s coming home with me once they turn us loose here,” I say. “Both of us. I already told him about the tourtière. You want to know what he said? Word for word, he said, I will try it. That’s the review. In advance. Of a food he has never met.”
She laughs so hard she has to set the phone down on the counter. I sit on the steps outside the Stable in the cold with my breath going up white, listening to my mother laugh.
“Bring him,” she says, when she’s got it back. “Bring him. And eat something on the road.”
The senior class is on its way out, and that’s the thing everybody is half-not-talking about this time of year, because you don’t name a shutout while it’s going.
Rocco is graduating, our captain, the heaviest object in every room he ever stood in, off to a life with rooms in it.
Casimir with him, the pro thing lined up close enough that we get to keep hockey and keep each other in the same breath.
Bruno is behind the bench now and still turns up wherever Vinh turns up, an arm along the back of a booth at the Hitch like it’s always been there.
Denny will pour the new guys the thing the room decides they drink once they earn it, and he’ll take his time about it, because nobody made it quick for him either.
Bev will keep reading heartbreak off the top of a kid’s head at the counter and feeding him the off-menu special without being asked.
Moose will hand a fresh crop of freshmen the wrong-size gloves and watch them work it out, sacred, older than any of us.
The names on the depth chart turn over. The rink stays. You hand the season forward and you go.
But there’s a freshman coming.
Rocco’s last act as captain is to bring his little brother around before he graduates and hands the room to whoever is fool enough to want the letter.
Gio Rizzo. Left wing, and not a favor pick, not a captain’s-brother charity spot.
The real deal, recruited on his own legs by coaches who never once mentioned the last name in the room, which is exactly why every single one of us gets introduced to him as the captain’s kid brother anyway.
You can see it already. That’s going to be the thing he spends the next four years living down.
And what’s he supposed to do about a last name?
Nothing. There’s nothing. I feel for the kid. I do.
He steps onto our ice for the first time on a gray afternoon with half the team hanging on the boards to watch, like we always turn out for the new blood, half to size him up and half to remember when it was us.
The barn is doing the thing it does with fresh ice.
Holding still. Not decided about him yet.
I remember that feeling from my own first day.
You know what he does with it? He’s good.
Not loud good. Quiet good. Patient good.
The kind that doesn’t need the room to notice yet, that just does the small things right, one after the next, and lets you catch up on your own time.
He takes a feed in stride and puts it top corner without making a thing of it, then skates back to the line like it cost him nothing.
He’s got the last name and the legs and no idea yet which one’s heavier to carry.
And I’m not the only one watching.
Wyeth Stack is watching.
Our defenseman. Rocco’s partner on the blue line for three years, the two of them so wired together they change without looking.
Stack’s-diner family, the ones who leave a pie on the house for anybody in this town who’s hurting, whether they ordered it or not.
Bev runs the counter, Wyeth’s people run the kitchen, and the whole family reads you off the top before it feeds you the thing you need.
Wyeth is standing at the boards with his gloves off, forearms on the top of the glass, his eyes on the freshman.
And his face is doing a thing I recognize.
I recognize it because I spent a whole season doing it at a goalie, standing exactly where he’s standing, telling myself it was scouting.
He’s watching the captain’s little brother the way you watch a window you already know, deep down, you’re going to press your whole face to sooner or later, no matter what it costs.
And he catches himself doing it.
I watch him catch it. I watch it land on him.
His jaw goes. He pulls his eyes off the kid, hard, all at once, the way you pull a hand off a stove, because there’s a code about your partner’s little brother, a code older than any of us, older than the horseshoe over that door.
And what’s a man like Wyeth Stack if he doesn’t keep his codes?
You can see it lock around him right there at the rail, quiet, final.
You can see him decide he isn’t going to look again.
He’s going to look again. I know that look better than I know my own save percentage.
It’s the look of a guy who has already lost an argument he hasn’t started having with himself yet.
I know, because I stood exactly there, at a rail, in this same cold barn, telling myself I was scouting a wall when what I was really doing was finding the one window in it so I could press my whole face to the glass.
It cost me a season and nearly cost me the man.
It was worth every hour of it. I’d do it again tomorrow, me.
But that’s his season, not mine. His to walk into or around. I’ve got my own, and mine, for the first time in my life, is a settled thing. A kept thing. I’m not standing at a rail anymore wanting in. I’m already in.
Casimir comes up beside me. He follows my eyes out to the two of them, the freshman flying on fresh ice and the defenseman at the rail pretending he isn’t memorizing it.
“That,” Casimir says, flat, in the voice he uses for the weather and for the truest things, “is going to be a whole season.”
“At least.” I put my forearms on the glass next to his. “Calisse, you should’ve seen the guy who tried it on the last goalie. Complete menace. No respect for a man’s shelf. You ever hear about that guy?”
“I have heard about him.” Then the corner of his mouth does the thing, the one I’d fight the whole league to see again. “He got the goalie in the end.”
“He got the goalie in the end,” I say.
Out on the ice Gio takes another feed, buries it, doesn’t celebrate.
Just circles back, quiet, patient, already living down a name he didn’t ask for.
At the rail Wyeth keeps his eyes hard on the neutral zone like a man reciting a rule to himself.
I think about how long a code can hold. And how long is that, really?
Not one of them ever holds forever. Good luck, Stack. You’re going to need every bit of it.
He doesn’t put the distance back between us.
He hasn’t, since the final, and that’s the thing my heart rolls clean over.
A man who lived and died by keeping his exact measured distance from every moving body in a building, standing here in the open with no distance in it at all.
Shoulder against mine. Watching the next thing start the way our thing started.
We stand there a while, the two of us, watching the next thing start.
The freshman flies. The defenseman keeps his code, for now.
Somewhere behind us Rocco is running out the last of his captaincy, Bruno is probably already in a booth at the Hitch saving Vinh a seat, and Bev is warming a pie for whoever walks in looking like they need it.
The whole warm machine of this place, humming on, handing itself forward.
I lean into him. Nobody blinks. The building holds still around us like it only ever holds still for him, holding its breath through every empty stretch, waiting for a season to breathe on it.
And for once in my whole life I’m exactly where I want to be.
In the net and out of it. Picked. And staying.