5. Evan #2
What I hadn't carried into a playoff push before was this particular kind of unfinished business.
The house. The not-quite-settled feeling of a space I'd committed to but hadn't resolved.
A designer arriving Wednesday with preliminary observations and what I suspected were complete opinions.
The specific irritation of knowing Natalie was right and not being able to argue with her about it because the evidence was behind me in the living room with its back to the water.
I finished my coffee. Went back inside. Got my gear together for practice.
—
I was at the arena by eight-fifteen.
The practice facility had its early-morning quality — the rink cold even in April, the overhead lights at partial power until the session started, the sound of skate blades already on the ice from two of the younger guys running edge work before the official start.
I did my pre-practice routine, taped my stick, worked through the mobility sequence Tyler had me doing for the left hip that had been tight since the road trip. Normal morning. Eleven seasons of it.
Callahan ran us through neutral zone structure for the first forty minutes — the same base system we'd been building on all season, the reads and rotations that had to become automatic before you could run variations off them.
I was sharp. The weak-side reads were clean.
The transition timing was where it needed to be.
The body did what the body knew how to do.
Then on the fourth repetition I was a half-step late on the release.
The drill completed. Nobody on the ice called it. But I felt it happen, the way you felt the moments that were off before anyone else registered them, and Callahan blew the whistle a beat later.
"Shaw. Again."
We ran it again. I was where I needed to be.
But for that half-step I had been somewhere else.
Not consciously — I wasn't daydreaming on the ice.
It was the subtler version. The bandwidth thing.
A designer with notes on his kitchen taking up a thin layer of attention that was supposed to be fully on the ice and wasn't, and the ice had charged him for it the way the ice always charged you for what you didn't give it.
I locked in and didn't have another soft moment for the rest of the session.
Afterward, in the locker room, Mason was two stalls over doing his post-skate routine with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for a long time and saw no reason to vary the sequence.
"House stuff," I said, before he could formulate the look into a question.
He glanced at me. "Designer coming?"
"Wednesday."
"Natalie's?"
"Yeah."
He went back to his tape. "Then it'll be fine."
That was the full conversation. Mason didn't elaborate on things.
—
I drove home along the water.
He thought about the kitchen the whole way.
Not the layout. The person who was going to fix it.
The route ran along the river for most of it — the water visible between buildings, the city built around it rather than away from it. I'd liked that about Jacksonville from the first week. I still liked it.
I pulled into the driveway and read the email before going inside.
Mr. Shaw — Blair Collins, referred by Natalie Lockwood. I've reviewed the architectural plans and have some preliminary observations I'd like to discuss on-site. I'm available Tuesday or Wednesday for an initial walkthrough. Please confirm which works for your schedule.
I read it twice.
The name didn't land. The tone did.
The tone was exactly what I'd expected from someone Natalie had engaged — direct, no excess language, framed as a courtesy.
She'd already reviewed the plans. She already had observations.
She was offering me Tuesday or Wednesday, which amounted to: she was coming, and the only variable was specific logistics.
I thought about what she'd find when she walked through. The kitchen she already had notes on. The living room couch facing the wrong direction. The unopened boxes. The lamp on the floor. The hockey sticks by the door.
She'd formed opinions about this house before she'd ever stood in it. That was either impressive or presumptuous. I still hadn't decided.
I typed: Wednesday morning works. Sent it.
Then I went inside.
The living room was the same as I'd left it. Couch facing the center of the room. Empty walls. Lamp on the floor. Boxes.
I stood in the doorway for a moment. Then I walked over to the couch and moved it — not far, just enough that the water came into the sightline from the center cushion. Three inches, maybe four. I stepped back and looked at it.
Better.
Not finished. Not fixed. Just the smallest version of what she'd probably suggest when she walked in Wednesday and looked at the room the way she apparently looked at everything: like she already knew what it was supposed to be.
I sat down on the couch and looked at the river through the window I'd finally turned the furniture toward.
It was a good view. It had always been a good view.
Four days until she walked through that door and told me everything else the house was doing wrong.
He was aware, distantly, that he was looking forward to it.
He didn't examine that.
The river moved. The heron was still downstream, still being patient.
I didn't move.