Rafe
Chapter five
The team plane boarded in the usual order. Veterans in the back, card table claimed before the door closed, coaches up front with the lineup sheet, and rookies wherever nobody else wanted to be. I had a window seat over the wing, which suited me fine.
I watched the bags going up the belt loader. Mine was third from the end, zipped square.
Trier passed my row on his way to the back, glancing down at the open duffel on the seat beside me.
“Rolled,” he said. “You rolled your socks.”
“They travel better rolled.”
“Fourteen years,” he said as he kept walking. “Fourteen years and now rolled socks.”
The plane filled in around me. Heath and Kieran had the row across from me. Kieran was reading a book. Heath was already asleep.
Varga came down the aisle last, and he was carrying a pillow.
It wasn’t a team pillow. It was his pillow, from his bed at home, compressed into a stuff sack the size of a watermelon. He carried it in front of him, held to his chest, the way other men carry a briefcase full of important documents.
“Before anyone says anything,” he announced, “I want you to think about the last road trip. I want you to think about how you slept.”
“Here we go,” said someone at the card table.
“Every hotel in this league buys the same pillows.” Varga stopped at my row. “The same ones. League-wide. You think that’s a coincidence? They’re engineered. They design them to be almost comfortable. Almost. And you know what an almost-comfortable pillow costs you?”
“Four percent,” said half the plane in unison.
“Four percent of your sleep.” He pulled off compression straps and freed the pillow. It expanded with a sigh, and he held it up as evidence. “Four percent for eighty-two games and the playoffs. Do the math. Nobody does the math.”
“He’s been doing the math for nine years,” Rook said from his seat near the front. “It’s still the same math.”
“Red blood cells and sleep, Mattias. That’s the whole sport. Everything else is decoration.”
Varga went back to claim a seat at the card table, tucking the pillow under one arm like a mascot. The game was already starting. Somebody had shuffled without cutting, and somebody else wanted it known that Varga still owed forty dollars from a flight to Nashville.
The flight attendant did her count. The door was still open, letting in a slice of January cold coming off the tarmac, and I settled against the window.
Rook stood. He walked forward to the front of the cabin, put one hand on a seatback, and turned to face down the length of the plane.
The card game stopped. Somebody reached over and turned the music down without being asked.
“This’ll be quick,” Rook said. “I know we’re on a schedule.”
The engines hummed, and an attendant pulled the door shut.
“Next season’s my last one,” Rook said. “I decided after talking to Varga and my agent. The team’s announcing it next week, and I wanted you guys to hear it from me first. That’s it.”
It was as direct as my announcement three days earlier.
Rook stood there with his reading glasses pushed up on his head. They were new since November, and he took exactly one day of grief about them before it was old news. He waited for comments.
“Okay,” Cross said. “Then we’ll make the rest of this season and next season worth it. We’ll do it right.”
Coach Markel nodded once from the front, like Rook had confirmed a practice time.
“Question,” Trier said, raising a hand. “The parking spot next to the tunnel. Does that open based on seniority, or is there a lottery?”
“Don’t bother yourself,” Rook said. “You’re not getting it.”
Laughter rolled through the plane, and it loosened everything. The card game resumed. Somebody yelled something about Rook finally having time to golf.
That would have been the end of it, except Varga got up from the card table.
He didn’t make a production of it. That was remarkable for Varga. He walked up the aisle with his cards still in one hand, took Rook’s face in the other, and kissed him.
A guy from the card game asked, “Are you in or out, Varga?”
“I’m in. Don’t look at my cards.” Then, at full volume, “For the record, I found out Tuesday, and I’ve kept it secret for three days. Three days. I want that considered at the trial.”
“Noted,” Cross said.
Varga went back to the card game. Rook went back to his row, and we pushed back from the gate on schedule.
An attendant came down the aisle with a snack basket over Nebraska. I took a banana and the cookies and said thank you twice, once for each.
I had a clear sightline up the aisle to Rook’s row. He’d finished the crossword, or quit it on good terms, and now he was looking out the window, sipping coffee.
I’d occasionally sat by Rook before while Varga played cards. He was undemanding company on a plane, quiet in a way that didn’t make you nervous.
He caught me looking. He tipped his head, gesturing me forward.
I slipped in beside him. “You’ve got a question,” he said.
“Varga said to ask you about the yogurt.”
Rook closed his eyes for a moment. “He tells everyone to ask me about the yogurt.”
“You don’t have to—“
“In my third year with the Ironhawks, I took an endorsement deal. It was a regional one with a yogurt company. It was one commercial.” He raised a hand.
“I was to hold up the yogurt, smile, and say, ‘This is how champions recover.’ We lost in the first round that spring. For four years, in every road rink, some smart-ass guy in the crowd would hold up a cup of that yogurt during warmups. Four years.”
“That’s why Varga says never hold the product.”
Rook nodded. He sipped his coffee. “The money was good, but it was not four-years-of-yogurt-heckling good.”
I laughed, and he shook his head. I stayed in the seat for a few minutes longer.
Rook continued to drink his coffee, and he pointed out a center-pivot field that was perfectly round. He asked me if we irrigated like that at home, and I said no, we were dry land, and he nodded.
He looked like a man at the end of the harvest. That was the closest I could get to it. Like the trucks were full, and the weather had held, and whatever happened now was next year’s problem.
Somewhere over the Colorado line, Rook fell asleep mid-sentence. He’d been talking about a combine dealership his cousin ran. I took the sleeping as my cue and went back to my seat.
Seconds later, Varga dropped into the seat beside me with his pillow under one arm.
“Rook’s asleep,” he said. “He sleeps anywhere now. It’s disgusting.
All the years I’ve known him, he sleeps like a soldier in a war movie, one eye open, hearing everything.
Now?” He waved a hand toward the front of the plane.
“Out. Gone. He slept through turbulence over Minnesota in December. I had to check he was alive.”
“That sounds like a good thing. He’s relaxed.”
“It’s a wonderful thing, disgusting and wonderful.” He wedged the pillow behind his head, settling in. “Anyway. I’m not here about Rook. I’m here because I’ve been monitoring a situation, and that situation is you. I want to give you the briefing.”
“The briefing?”
He pulled out his phone, thumbed it awake, and held it between us.
“I do this for the rookies. Nobody reads their own coverage right. They read the one bad comment, and then they miss the big picture. So I read it for you, and I tell you what it means, and you say, thank you, Lucas, and we move on with our lives.”
On his phone screen was the restaurant photo. It was the one that showed Max tucked against my side with both of us laughing. Mark responded to it with three exclamation points, and Mom had sent a question last night about whether my coat was warm enough.
“This picture,” Varga said. “The internet has decided you are a golden retriever who learned to skate, and everybody is excited in a way that means the requests are coming.”
“What requests?”
“Appearances. That’s how it goes. First the photo, then the photo does well, then somebody wants the photo again but at their event this time. It might be a charity skate or a gala. Just say no to anything where you hold a product.”
“I know the yogurt story now.”
“Good. So my briefing is: it’s working, and it’s going to work harder, and they’re going to want more of it.
When they ask, you’ll feel like it costs nothing to say yes because it’s just dinner, an event, or a photo.
” He shrugged and tucked the phone away.
“Mostly, that’s true. He seems like a good guy, the boyfriend. Professional. That helps.”
“He is,” I said. “Everybody was right about him.”
Varga resettled his pillow and closed his eyes. For a few moments, I thought the briefing was over.
He opened his eyes and turned his head to face me. “So what’s he actually like? The Max guy. Off the camera. You’ve done what, dinner and a thing at his brother’s shop? Don’t tell me if you’ve—“
“How do you know about the shop?”
“Rafe, there’s a picture of you biting into a cherry pastry with two million views. Everybody knows about the shop.”
“He’s easy to be around,” I said. “Which doesn’t sound like a big thing, but I think it is. He’s on all the time, and you’d think that’d be tiring to sit across from, but it’s the opposite. He asks questions and waits for the answers, and he’s funny, too.”
“Funny is good.”
“He ordered walleye,” I said. “I didn’t think anybody ate walleye in Chicago.”
“So you like him. Good. It’s easier when you like them. What about the shop? The brother’s the woodworker, right? The serious one?”
“Niko,” I said. “Yeah.”
And then I told him about the shop.
“There was a joint on his bench,” I said. “It was a dovetail, an interlocking corner joint. You’d know it if you saw it. There’s no glue, nails, or screws, and I asked him what’s stopping it from coming apart.”
“And?”
“He stopped everything and knocked it apart with his hand and made me look at the geometry. It’s a wedge.
The tail’s a wedge and the socket’s the same wedge backward, so the only way out is the exact way it went in.
If you try any other direction, it jams against itself.
The harder you pull, the harder it holds.
” I made a wedge out of my hands, demonstrating. I put them down.
Varga rubbed his chin.
“We had a grain drill at home with a tapered shaft and no key or bolt. Dad always said the work kept it together, and I just thought that was Dad being Dad. It’s not. It’s real physics. Niko showed me.”
“Huh,” Varga said.
“And he let me hold it. The joint.” I smiled.
Varga leaned back against the pillow, eyes forward.
“Sorry,” I said. “The pastries were great. They kind of made the entire visit.”
“Sure,” Varga said. “Sounds like a good shop.”
He said nothing else about it. He resettled the pillow, and the seatbelt light came on with the first soft drop of the descent.
Denver appeared out the window all at once while Varga chewed gum with his eyes closed.
***
I got a window seat near the back of the team bus while the bags thumped in below us. My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Max: tragic news. taco sunday will proceed without you
Max: you’re excused on account of employment. it’s the only excuse my mother accepts and honestly she accepted it too fast, I’d be hurt if I were you
Max: they know about you btw. they have QUESTIONS. mostly mom. I’m deflecting nothing, I want that understood. you will face them alone
Max: next time. that’s a promise not a threat
Max: okay it’s both
I typed back that I was sorry to miss it and hit send. It was a dinner at a house I’d never seen, with people I’d never met, and missing it felt like missing something real. I searched for and opened Max’s website.
It was good. It had a series of before-and-afters of bright rooms coming together out of chaos. A video ran in the corner with Max’s face narrating a planning session for a kitchen makeover.
I scrolled through six projects and finally realized what I was looking for. It wasn’t there. I went back up and scrolled again, slower, to be sure.
Niko’s workshop wasn’t there. I didn’t know whether that was on purpose.
I was scrolling through for a third time when my phone buzzed. It wasn’t Max.
Niko: That corner you asked about is a drawer now. Stop by when you’re back.
I read it twice. It was an invitation.