15. Jack
15
JACK
I always dread going home. For most people in the world, home is a cozy place, a sanctuary, four walls filled with love and safety.
Most people didn’t grow up under the roof of Ted Gross.
Home was where I went to get nonstop feedback on my hockey game, where pressure was put on to win the next game, where a homey touch was forever lacking after Mom left. When I got drafted out of high school, I might’ve been happier to live in a different city than I was to become a professional hockey player.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Dad asks when I stumble into the kitchen from the garage. He hunches over the small table with a microwave dinner, the purple Ferguson’s apron slung over the opposite chair. Lucky for me, he never changes his garage door code. Otherwise, I don’t know if he’d let me in.
“I need something from my room,” I say.
I look around and recoil at the memories that seep out of the old furniture. Even though Dad keeps the house clean, there’s still a dingy, sad quality to it, like being in a club that’s no longer cool. He never bothered to replace the family pictures on the wall. Dad’s always preferred living in the past. Mom’s smile from a Disney trip beams back at me, empty and cruel. I’ll never understand how someone could look that joyful and then bail on her son less than a year later. When she left, Dad’s idea of fatherly warmth was telling me to channel my anger on the ice.
“I’ll just be a minute.” I trudge upstairs, past a photo wall of family pictures, pictures from my peewee hockey days, and Dad’s high school hockey days. It is the staircase of broken dreams.
My old bedroom is the first one in the hall. The bed is gone, as are the posters I had tacked up. Boxes line the wall under the window. The bookcase that used to be a shrine to my medals and trophies and news clippings sits empty. When I was playing in the NHL, I’d come home to my room in pristine condition, exactly how I left it at eighteen. Now I’m a ghost.
I kneel down and begin searching the boxes, scrambling through years of hockey memorabilia, digging through the good times. It takes epic concentration to avoid reading old articles about “Promising Hockey Star” Jack Gross.
“Shit,” I mutter, getting to the bottom of one box with no luck. I pop open the next one. Old trophies clang together. I hate all of them. They’re gravestones for success.
After opening all four boxes and coming up short, I search behind furniture and in the nooks and crannies of my old closet. But there’s no way it would be there. The lanyard bracelet always sat on the bookcase. It needed to commune with those fucking trophies, according to my dumbass teenage logic.
“Where did my bracelet go?” I ask Dad after stomping down the stairs.
“What bracelet?”
“You know which one. The blue and green one that I wore for every game. It was my good luck bracelet.” My junior high girlfriend made it for me at church camp. (We only kissed, and I thought of her brother the whole time.) I knew she’d get pissed if I didn’t wear it, so I put it on for one of my games. I wound up scoring a hat trick. From then on, I wore it for every game. Hockey players are very superstitious when it comes to good luck.
Of course I’ve been rusty and not my best self on the ice lately. I haven’t been wearing my lucky bracelet.
“I last had it on the bookcase in my room,” I tell Dad, who shovels a sad, shriveled piece of meatloaf into his mouth. “I put it there after my final game when I moved back.”
“All your stuff is in those boxes.”
“When were you going to tell me you boxed up my old room?”
“You never come home. I figured you didn’t want it.” Dad’s callous expression screams “you snooze, you lose.” I’m surprised he didn’t burn all that shit in a bonfire.
“So you were just going to throw all that stuff away without telling me?”
“If you want it, it’s there. I’m planning to turn that room into a home gym.”
“Wonderful,” I deadpan. “Do you remember seeing the bracelet?”
He shrugs, and I catch a flash of something dark in his eye. He goes back to watching the news on a small flatscreen sitting on the kitchen counter.
“You threw it out.” I clench my jaw. “Of all my shit, that’s the thing you throw out.”
“I might have. I did a purge in your room, getting rid of random junk.”
He knew it wasn’t random junk. He saw me put that bracelet on before every game.
“Why do you need it? For that beer league you’re in?”
“Yeah,” I say confidently.
“How’s it going?”
“It’d be going a lot better if I had my bracelet.”
“If you need a fucking bracelet to win against a bunch of amateurs, then you’re in deep shit.” He gets up and takes his dinner to the trash. He washes his cutlery in the sink, dries it, and puts it back in the drawer.
“Griffin Harper is in the league.”
Dad’s back tenses up. The muscles flex in instant fury.
“When you told me the story of what happened, you left out the part about gouging the other player’s eye out.”
“He charged at me!” Even now, as a full-grown adult, hearing Dad yell makes me want to cower in fear as if I’m still a little kid. “I had no time to move!”
“You never apologized to him.”
“Because I didn’t do anything wrong!” Dad wipes his hands and throws the dishtowel on the counter. He squirms from the movement. We rarely had father-son catches because of his shoulder. Maybe that was for the best since he would’ve been critiquing my pitching the whole time. “At least he can still play.”
“It’s amazing. He’s not bad for only having one functioning eye.”
“You’re a fan?” Dad asks, disgusted.
“No.” A flush of heat creeps up my neck. “I haven’t played against his team yet.”
“You can’t let him beat you, Jack,” he says with the seriousness of a father sending his boy off to war. “A professional hockey player getting beat by a middle-aged, one-eyed has-been? It’s pathetic.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder, a sign of paternal affection that sends a chill through my body. “He is not your friend, Jack. He’s not your league mate or drinking buddy. That man took everything away from us.”
His voice is fragile and laced with pain. I let his hand stay on me a moment more before shrugging it off. I have a low tolerance for father-son bonding. “Noted.”
* * *
I played that Sunday without my lucky bracelet and was as rusty as ever. Is it any surprise we lost?
Fortunately, the beauty of a recreational beer league is we can drown our sorrows at Easter Egg, a new arcade bar that opened up in downtown Sourwood. I sit around a big table with my teammates while the bright colors and symphony of arcade noises surround us.
Nobody in the Blades is that sad about our loss. We only talk about the game for a little bit, then the conversation moves to jobs, family, movies.
I can’t help but feel an uncomfortable spotlight on me, though. Griffin said it himself: I am a ringer. When you put a former pro on your team, you expect results.
I excuse myself from the table, get some quarters from the bartender, and shuffle to the open Addams Family pinball machine straight out of the early ‘90s.
“Hey.” Miller knocks my elbow, sensing my frustration and current party-pooper status. “It’s all good.”
“Yeah, I know.” I stay locked into the game, fighting to keep the pinball from the gutter for a few more seconds. The last thing I want is a pep talk.
“It’s just a game.”
“Says the guy who unleashed a string of F-bombs at the player who was hooking you.” Summers Rink bills the league games as “family-friendly events.” Marcy had a word with Miller about his language.
“I’m a very passionate player,” Miller says, inhaling a deep breath and chasing it with more beer.
“I didn’t have my lucky bracelet. I’ve always played with the bracelet.” The pinball careens into the gutter, right between my flippers, shutting me up. I can’t blame my performance on a piece of lanyard, as much as I believe in good luck charms. “I sucked out there.”
“You didn’t suck,” he says with little confidence. I arch my eyebrow at him, calling bullshit. “Fine, you’re still a little rusty.”
“When can I stop being rusty?” Is there WD-40 for this problem? Isn’t rust irreversible anyway? Rusty machines don’t become brand new no matter how much scrubbing you do.
“You need to get out of your head,” Miller notes. “You’re thinking too much.”
“There’s a first for everything,” I joke. Though Miller might be onto something. I play best when I can focus on the game, but my head’s been filled with so much shit lately. Finding a job. Figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with my life. Dealing with Dad’s perpetual disappointment. And now Griffin has wedged his way inside my brain. Our conversation in the hangar and the night we met keeps playing in my head. Something about him instantly makes my thoughts untangle and allows me to admit things I’ve been too scared to say.
Oh, and his bare chest and belly play in a running loop in my head, too. As if I didn’t have enough noise already.
“Fuck.” I watch another ball fall into the gutter. Game over.
Miller rubs a spot on my back that he’s sure holds all my tension.
“These things take time. You haven’t played in a few years,” he says.
“Neither have you guys.”
“Trust the universe. It knows what it’s doing.”
“Miller, I love you, man, but I also want to punch you in the face when you say shit like that.”
“That’s fair.” He sips his drink. “Can I play?”
Miller and I switch positions. He instantly locks into the game, his eyes narrowing at the pinball swirling through the game, a tiger ready to pounce on his prey.
I check my phone and find an email from Darlene at the airport asking me in for a second interview.
“Yo, I got a second interview.” My heart fills with glee. Email is like a slot machine, and I landed on a jackpot. “I got a second interview!”
“No way! That’s awesome! For the office manager job?” he asks, not taking his eyes off the game.
“Yeah. I thought I bombed that interview.” I remember Darlene ushering me out of there so fast. It didn’t help that a half-naked man was distracting me.
“Way to go, Jack.” He tries to give me a high five while his eyes stay glued to the game. Miller winds up smacking me in the face, but it’s a smack of pure love.
The more I think back on the interview, the more cringe moments pop up in my recollection. Did she really see potential in me after I sputtered through most of my answers?
“Shit!” Miller yells, his face turning cartoonishly red.
Shit is right. Because I keep reading her email.
While I know our first interview got off to a bumpy start, Griffin Harper in the mechanics department raved about you. He said you have a great work ethic. I’d love to bring you in to meet with some other people on the team as well as the GM.
“Oh, I got you motherfucker,” Miller growls at the pinball.
I find myself in a growling mood, too.
“Griffin Harper said something to her. He told her how great I am and that she should give me a second look.”
“That’s awesome.” Miller turns and checks out my reaction. “Or it’s not awesome?”
Objectively, it is awesome. But the cognitive dissonance of Griffin is astounding. The man opens up to me and gets me to spill my guts for a second time. He acts like he wants nothing more than to kiss me, batting his dark eyes and shooting me the cutest grin known to man. Then he rejects me for a second time .
And then he goes to bat for me with Darlene?
What? Ex-fucking-cuse me? Do you like me, do you not like me? You want me thrown out of the league, yet you lobby for me to be your coworker?
Fuentes joins our gathering with shots. “What’s going on?”
“This game is a FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT,” Miller yells as the warbled game-over noise plays from the pinball machine. “Gomez Addams, I will FUCK YOU UP.”
I can practically see the steam coming out of his ears, and I’m right there with them. The source of my anger isn’t a pinball machine, but a guy who keeps slipping through my flippers like a dastardly shiny, silver pinball.
Miller shuts his eyes and takes deep breaths en route to his happy place. I prefer to marinate in my righteous anger.
“Well, I know why he’s angry, but what’s up with you?” Fuentes asks me.
“Griffin inserted himself into my job search,” I say with disdain. I take my shot and Miller’s shot in quick succession. “I have a second interview.”
“That’s great!” Fuentes takes his shot then begins playing the pinball machine. “You should send him a thank you.”
“I shouldn’t thank Griffin Harper for anything. The guy gives more mixed signals than a broken traffic light.”
“Are we still talking about the interview?”
“After the interview, we almost kissed. Until Griffin very pointedly said ‘no thanks.’”
“So he’s not interested. His loss.” Fuentes’s tongue peeks out from his lips as he gets into the game.
“Is he really not interested? I can’t tell.”
“Uh oh. Jack Gross found a guy who doesn’t immediately give it up. No wonder your head looks like it’s going to explode.” Fuentes finds way too much joy from my personal life.
“Griffin isn’t playing hard to get. He’s playing some other game with no clear-cut rules. I am tired of him meddling in my life.”
Miller returns, face a normal shade of color. “Okay, I’m back. What did I miss?”
“Jack’s desire to jump Griffin’s bones is eating him from the inside.”
“Fuck you, Fuentes.” I storm back to the table and say good night to the rest of the team. I take two shots someone left and bolt out of there.
The cold air and alcohol work to clear my head, or try to. But goddamn Griffin is still in there, playing his games with no rules. Why does he have to be so fucking attractive and sweet and thoughtful? It only makes the rejection sting more. Does he think I’m not good enough for him?
I wander down the main drag of Sourwood. Most stores are closed. Lampposts and neon signs of bars light up the night.
Miller says to trust the universe. Well, the universe is quickly proving herself to be a bitch who can’t be trusted. Because when I glance down an alley, I spot a familiar pickup truck.
What the fuck is the universe trying to say with this?
I burp and then narrow my eyes at the car as I laugh to myself. I don’t know what the universe has up her sleeve, but I have a plan of my own.