Rafe
Chapter nineteen
Niko: He’s okay. It was good he came.
Iread it twice, sitting at my stall before practice. It was true, and it was short. Niko didn’t pad things, but I’d gotten four paragraphs from him about a hotel bar once.
I decided it was brothers’ business and put the phone back in my stall.
***
“Rafe,” Coach Markel said. “You’re on.”
The drills were about the fake bump, because it was dying the same death the real bump had died. Vegas had scouted it and now they planned to place a man in the middle like a boulder, daring me to keep the puck.
Coach Markel had a solution. I was to drive straight at him and dare him to guess whether I’d break left or right. On my third rush Rook floated on purpose, and I made him choose late. By the time he made a choice it didn’t matter. Heath scored on my pass.
“I was being Vegas,” Rook said.
“Vegas lost,” Heath said.
Hockey was the one thing that hadn’t changed. A closing lane was still a closing lane, and for my hours on the ice the world spoke in reads and doors, and I was fluent in the language.
The room emptied slowly after practice. Varga left loudly, as usual. Heath and Kieran left arguing about whether to buy or rent an extension ladder. I stayed at my stall and re-taped a stick.
The stick didn’t need it. I’d taped it fresh two days ago, and the tape was clean, but I stripped it anyway and started over because I needed something to do with my hands.
The room was quiet, and I wasn’t ready to walk out into the rest of the day, where the phone would buzz and Max wouldn’t be there.
Rook was still at his stall, working dubbin into a pair of gloves with his reading glasses perched on his nose.
“That’s fresh tape,” he said, not looking over.
“It’s got a soft spot.”
“Mm.” He worked the dubbin into a thumb seam. For a while there was no sound but the two of us maintaining equipment that didn’t need it. I finished the blade and started up the shaft.
“You know you don’t have to earn your stall every morning,” Rook said.
“Okay,” I said.
I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t fully know what he meant. He nodded as if okay had been the right answer, checked his work, took off his glasses, and packed the gloves away.
“See you tomorrow,” he said, and left.
On the way to the truck, I typed a reply to Niko and deleted it, then typed a shorter one.
Rafe: good. glad he’s ok
I sat in the cold with my hands on the wheel and waited a minute in case a response came. It didn’t, and I drove home.
***
Heath had said six, and I got there twenty minutes early. Heath opened the door, wearing an apron with a cartoon walleye on it. He grinned and pointed at the fish. “For you.”
“I’m early,” I said. “Sorry. I can walk around the block if you guys are—“
“We gave you a key,” Heath said.
I laughed.
He laughed with me.
“I don’t have a key,” I said.
“Kieran,” Heath called back into the condo. “Rafe doesn’t have a key.”
Kieran’s voice came from the kitchen. “I gave him one.” There was the sound of a drawer rolling open and some rummaging through what had to be batteries and twist ties.
Kieran appeared in the kitchen doorway and tossed a key underhand across the living room. I caught it. It was a brass key on a bare ring.
“You keep ending up here. You might as well be able to let yourself in,” Kieran said.
I looked at the key in my palm.
“It’s one we made when Kieran’s brother stayed with us for a month,” Heath told me. “It works. He locked himself out only twice, and both times were his fault.”
I tucked it into my pocket.
Dinner was a roast chicken, potatoes, and a salad Heath had made under supervision. We ate at the small kitchen table.
Halfway through, the ladder came back up.
“We should have an extension ladder,” Heath said.
“We owned one,” Kieran said. “You lent it to Danny in October. If we buy—“
“They aren’t that expensive.”
“Renting one is even cheaper.”
“That’s not the point,” Heath said. “Possession means it’s there at a moment’s notice.” Kieran took the last potato off Heath’s plate while he was talking.
“How’s Niko’s business going?” Heath asked.
“It’s good,” I said. “He’s busy.”
“Tell him the shelf thing worked,” Kieran said. “The trick with the paper shims. My brother Danny hung his TV with it.”
“I’ll tell him.”
And that was all. We moved on.
When I was ready to leave, I held out the key.
“You should take this back,” I said. “What if your brother needs it again, or you have another guest, or—“
Heath looked at me.
He didn’t say anything. He stood there with a dish towel over his shoulder, patiently waiting for me to correct myself.
“Thanks for dinner,” I said and tucked the key back in my pocket.
“Same time next week,” Kieran called from the kitchen.
In the truck, I worked the key onto my ring, between my truck key and my apartment key.
The next afternoon I drove Pratt home from practice because his car was at the dealer and Trier had a thing with his cat. At his building, he didn’t get out immediately. “There’s a box upstairs,” he said. “Team gear from the holiday thing. I’ll bring it down. Mark knows it’s coming tomorrow.”
Pratt invited me up. The box turned out to be light, and he could have brought it down himself.
Sully was home between shifts, sitting on the counter eating cereal at four in the afternoon, and he pulled me straight into a ruling on whether a bartender should make a Manhattan the customer’s way or the right way.
“His way,” I said.
“See, that’s what I said.” He pointed his spoon at Pratt.
“He’s paying for the right one,” Pratt said, and plugged an electric kettle in. I hadn’t seen him fill it with water. He took three mugs down, reached into the cupboard by the stove, and set a bag of coffee on the counter, and it was my coffee.
It was from a roaster in Saskatoon. It had a grain elevator on the label. Mom mailed it to me, and I brought some to a dinner at Heath and Kieran’s. Pratt loved it, so I had Mom send a bag for him. That was back in November.
It was unopened. Pratt saw me watching. “Third bag,” he said. “Pour-over okay? The machine died.”
I drank a cup of coffee that tasted like my mother’s kitchen in a condo in Chicago, and then I carried the box down and put it in the truck bed, pulling my cover over it. Nobody walked me out.
I had a stop to make before going home. It wasn’t yet dark when I arrived.
The good bakery had two cherry pastries left, and I brought them with me in a white paper bag.
Niko took the bag and set it on the end of the bench. Instead of saying hello, he handed me a sanding block and pointed me toward the grain.
For a long time, the only sounds in the shop were sandpaper on oak in long strokes. The tightness I’d carried in my shoulders slowly loosened.
I told Niko about the coffee.
“Pratt,” he said when I finished.
“Yes.”
“The one who notices things.” He ran his thumb along a board’s edge. “That tracks.”
I told him about the key, Heath’s face at the door, and the ladder discussion. Somewhere in there we ate the pastries standing up, and he made tea instead of coffee. I didn’t ask why the tea, and he didn’t explain it.
By eight I was on a stool with my back against the bench leg, more used up than after a game.
Niko set his chisel down.
“There’s an auction in April,” he said. “Estate auction in Indiana, outside Fort Wayne. I go every spring. It’s two days.
Farm country, a fairground building, folding chairs, and terrible coffee.
It’s old tools, mostly, and furniture few people there understand.
Every other year or so, there’s a piece worth the drive.
” He straightened up and looked at me. “The twenty-fifth. Your season’s likely done by then.
Chet says this is a building season, not a playoff run. ”
“Okay,” I said.
“Come with me. This nonsense about the arrangement will be over then, or mostly over. There are no cameras out there. Let’s go together.”
The shop was very quiet. Niko had never asked me for anything, but now he wanted me to expose the one thing they’d never found. It was the one thing that wasn’t discussed on TV.
He wanted me to bring it out into the daylight, where it could be seen. He wanted to be seen with me.
“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. Whatever works. Late April’s pretty open, I think. Depending on how the schedule shakes out. Should be fun.”
The last words echoed in the shop.
Niko was still for a moment. Then he picked up the two mugs of lukewarm tea, carried them to the little sink in the corner, and rinsed them. He set them upside down on a towel.
“It’s late,” he said. “You’ve got an early morning.”
“Yeah.” I got up off the stool. “Yeah, I should get going.”
“Thanks for the pastries,” he said.
It was polite, but Niko didn’t do polite. He said words and phrases like acceptable and he’ll live. The politeness was empty coming out of Niko’s mouth.
I stood there one second too long, waiting for something I couldn’t have named, and it didn’t come.
“Good night, Niko.”
“Good night.”
The door shut behind me, and the bell rang once.
Through the glass I saw him at the bench with both hands flat on it, not working, not moving, his head down over the wood like a man reading something written there.
Then the light went off before I reached the truck, and I stood on the sidewalk in the cold with my keys in my hand, running the whole evening back looking for the mistake.
I couldn’t find one. I went through it turn by turn the entire way home. He’d asked me to go somewhere with him, and I’d said yes. I’d been friendly about it. I’d been easy about it. I’d said everything right, all the way to the end, same as always.
When I got home, I stood in my kitchen and somewhere under everything I knew something had broken with no sound at all. I still didn’t know what it was, because I’d been there the whole time and heard myself not make a single mistake.
I didn’t hear from Niko the next day. The day after, I sent a text.
Rafe: finished sanding the practice board. 320 felt like glass at the end
An answer finally came just before bed.
Niko: That’s the surface telling you it’s done. Anything past 320 on oak just burnishes it and the finish won’t take.
After I read it a fourth time, I realized what was missing. There was no invitation, no request for me to stop in at the shop. It was the answer you’d get from an expert at a hardware store.
Niko was silent for the next several days. I had a three-point game, and I sat at my stall with nobody but Mom to tell about it.
The phone buzzed.
Trier: Peaches update for the distribution list. She has decided the new food is acceptable. It took nine days. I’ve eaten the cost of the old food as a lesson.
Rafe: what’s the lesson
Trier: don’t buy in bulk on faith.
The next day, I started to draft a text message that had nothing to do with wood.
did I do something?
I looked at it for a long time. My thumb hovered over the send arrow, and I thought about Niko rinsing the mugs and his head down over the bench in the dark.
I hadn’t done anything. I deleted the message one letter at a time.
That night I followed my usual routine: alarm set, backup alarm set, phone on the nightstand, and shoes by the door with the toes even, and I lay in the dark, trying to sleep.
Sometime after midnight the ceiling lit up.
It was the light from my cellphone screen, hitting the ceiling in a pale rectangle. I heard multiple buzzes, one after another, and reached over.
The team chat had eleven new messages, and above it, at the top of the screen, sat the notification that started it all.
Max had posted a video.