Chapter 3 Beckett
I left. I went to the house at seven-thirty and showered. I put on the gear and drove to the rink. I took the ice for the first practice of my Denver career and stopped pucks for ninety minutes. I was back in the lot at Reeves Rescue by two.
Then I did it again Wednesday. Then Thursday.
By Friday Marisol had stopped asking who I was there for.
"He's in three," she'd say, without looking up. "Two minutes."
"It's been two minutes for four days."
"Then you're due for a raise."
I sat in that waiting room long enough that it stopped being a waiting room and became a place. The phone rang in clusters of three. The fish tank filter clogged on Thursdays. A woman named Deb came in every afternoon at four with a Pomeranian named Sergeant who did not need anything.
"He's been off," Deb told me on the second day. "Since Sunday."
Sergeant was standing on Deb's purse, vibrating slightly, at what appeared to be full operating capacity.
"He looks fine to me."
Deb gave me a look I had previously only received from officials.
"You're not a doctor."
By Friday she was saving me a chair.
And Margaret ran the building. Day three I was at the front counter and I heard nothing at all. Then nine pounds of tortoiseshell landed on my shoulder from the top of the supply cabinet.
I had taken a slapshot off the collarbone and made no sound. I made a sound this time.
She got one back foot into my ear and pushed off. She hit the counter and walked away with her tail up.
Marisol was crying. Not politely.
"Is that normal?" I said.
"That's Margaret."
"That's an answer to a different question."
They moved Bear into a room with a mat on the floor and let me sit with him as long as I stayed out of the way. He'd lift his head when I came in and put it back down. His belly was shaved and purple, with a line of staples running down him like a zipper. He smelled like a hospital.
"Walt had a diner. You were there. That place on Thirty-Eighth for forty-one years, eight booths and a counter with nine stools.
One of the stools was crooked and he never fixed it.
He said the crooked one kept people honest. There was a booth at the back, by the pie case.
Nobody sat in it because you couldn't see the television from it. "
Bear's tail moved twice on the mat.
I sat on that floor and told an unconscious dog things I had never said to a human being.
That my father was gone from October to April, and that being gone was never the problem.
The problem was what happened when he came back.
I would get in the car after a game at nine years old and there would be a long drive home.
He would go through it goal by goal, calmly, no yelling.
By the time we pulled into the driveway I would know precisely what I had been worth that week.
And that Walt would be at the diner at seven the next morning with the lights half on and the grill warming. He'd put a plate down in front of me. He'd sit across from me in the back booth and read the paper and not ask.
Not once. In forty-one years of that man's life I don't believe he ever asked me about a hockey game.
"He gave you to me. He wrote it into a will. My dog, Bear, to my grandson. Like you were the house."
Bear put his chin on my knee.
"He was smarter than all of us."
My father called Thursday during morning skate. I listened to it in the parking garage.
"Beck. Watched the practice clips. Your glove's low.
It's been low since Buffalo. I've said it on air and I'll say it again this week, because that's the job.
Baranov's a good coach and he will not carry you.
" There was a pause. "Also somebody's going to ask you about the Minnesota thing again, because it's a slow month.
Have a line ready. You should have had a line ready two years ago. "
There was a thing that happened in Minnesota. It had been a closed subject for two seasons. My value went from a contract offer with real numbers on it to a one-year deal in about nine days. There was a twenty-year-old goalie involved. I said nothing then.
I kept saying nothing.
What my father said on the air that spring was that his son quit on a room.
Eleven words, hands folded. He has never taken it back.
He did not know one thing about that night and neither did anybody else, and that was my doing.
I have never worked out how to hold a man responsible for a hole I dug myself.
I deleted the voicemail and drove to the clinic.
Auggie found me there on the fifth day, because Auggie could find anything. He came through the door with a balloon.
"Do not," I said.
"Too late." He handed it to Marisol, who took it. "It says Get Well Soon, which… look. At the store the options were that, congratulations on your retirement, or one that was simply a large foil star. I felt the star lacked a message."
"There's a dog back there with staples in him."
Marisol put the balloon behind the desk.
August Petrakis was twenty-eight, a second-line center. We had two years together in the minors. He was the most relentless human being I had ever met, and one of maybe three people whose calls I answered.
"So," he said.
"Don't."
"I'm processing the room." He pointed at the bulletin board. "There's a llama up there. Is the llama a patient or is the llama aspirational?"
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and his voice came down about a foot. "You've been in this city eight days and you have not asked me one question about it. And I've driven past this parking lot twice. Your truck was in it both times."
“Why are you driving past this parking lot?”
"I have a dentist over here," Auggie said, with enormous dignity. "Is the dog going to be all right?"
"We're waiting on a lab result."
"Okay." And he stopped joking. "That's a real thing. I'm sorry. That's your grandpa's dog, right? Then the balloon stays."
Then the door to the back opened and Tessa came out with a folder. Auggie's whole face turned over like somebody had flipped a card.
"Doctor Reeves," Marisol said, "room two's the ear."
"I heard the ear. Everybody in Jefferson County heard the ear." She looked at me. "Bear ate."
I stood up.
"Sit down, it's a good thing. Half a can at ten, kept it down, then asked for more. He tried to get up and tour the treatment room like he holds the deed."
"That's Walt's dog," I said.
Then she stopped, folder against her hip, and something in her went off duty.
"How is Walt? I mean… I know. I'm sorry, I saw it. I just meant. Was it…"
"February."
"Was it fast?"
"He had a stroke behind the counter at six in the morning. He was gone before the ambulance turned onto Thirty-Eighth."
"Oh," she said.
"He'd have hated a long one."
"He'd have hated any of it. He'd have wanted to go at ninety-nine, on the grill, mid-order."
Something went sideways under my ribs.
"He gave me a piece of pie once for free," she said. "He told me I looked like a stray. Then he asked what I was studying. I said veterinary medicine, and he said…" She stopped. "Sorry. You've got a dog to see."
"What did he say?"
She looked at the folder.
"He said, well then, you're going to have a hard life, honey. The good ones always pick the work that doesn't pay."
"Room two," Marisol said from the desk, apologetically.
Tessa went.
Auggie waited a full four seconds after the door shut.
"No."
"Beckett. Buddy. That is the strangest conversation I have ever witnessed between two adults. I once watched a man propose in a Waffle House."
I started noticing things, the way I noticed a bad angle a beat before I could name it.
She did the work of three people. She was the surgeon.
She was the person who answered the phone when it rang twice.
She was the person out back at five in the afternoon hosing a run with her sleeves shoved past the elbow.
There were two other staff on the payroll, and one of them was a teenager who only worked Saturdays.
Two of the waiting room chairs had duct tape on them.
On the desk, under the appointment book, there was a window envelope.
It was there Tuesday. It was still there Friday.
On Friday there was a second one underneath it.
I could read the top line of letterhead over the edge of the book.
It was the name of a property management company, and under that the word Notice.
I stood at that counter a while, looking at a corner of a piece of paper that was none of my business.
There was a thing in me and I didn't like it. I saw a problem and my hands wanted it. My father used to call it my one useful instinct. Somebody's cold, get them a coat. Somebody's short on rent, cover the rent. I did it, and then it was done. Nobody had to have a conversation.
I did the math on the invoice in the folder on my passenger seat, then on what I made, then on a building.
Then I made myself stop. I had been in that woman's life for five days and she had not asked me for one single thing.
Friday she came out of the back at four with her hair up off her neck, because it was hot in that lobby. She reached past me for the appointment book. I got a lungful of clinic disinfectant and, underneath it, her.
Ten years, and my whole body sat up like a dog at a door.
I looked at the fish tank for a while after that.
She had a scar on the inside of her left wrist from a shepherd in 2018. She had a crease between her eyebrows she did not have at twenty-one. I catalogued both in about two seconds. Then I spent forty minutes trying to think about the neutral zone.
I was not sitting in a waiting room for five days for a dog who was asleep.
The lab result came back Monday afternoon. I was at the rink. I called back from the hallway in socks with my chest protector still on.
"It's benign," Tessa said.
I didn't say anything.
"Beckett?"
"Say it again."
"It's a hematoma with benign nodular hyperplasia. That's the one that isn't cancer. Two out of three of these come back the other way. That's the number I wouldn't give you Tuesday. He got the third one."
I stood in a hallway in the bowels of an arena with my back flat against cinderblock.
"You've gone quiet, which for you is…"
"I'm here."
"Okay," she said, gentler, and I could not have that.
"So he's fine."
"He's a thirteen-year-old dog with bad hips and tired kidneys and no spleen, so no, he's old. But he is not dying of this. He's dying of the same thing everybody's dying of, at the normal speed."
I laughed. It came out wrong, like a cough.
"Sorry. That's the vet version of a joke."
"No. It's good."
Auggie came around the corner, saw me, stopped, and did not come any closer.
"When can he come home?"
"Thursday. Staples another six days after that, so you'll come back for those. Then his kidney values rechecked, and honestly at his age I want eyes on him every couple of weeks for a while." She paused. "That's not me padding a bill. Some people think it is."
"I'm not some people."
She was quiet.
"Thursday, then. Come at four. I'll go over the medications with you myself, because there are six of them and one of them is stupid." There was a beat. "He's a really nice dog." And she hung up.
The relief was doing something to my legs. It was not only that a dog lived. It was that the last living piece of Walt was on a mat in a room on Federal Boulevard, and it got to stay.
And underneath that, so far down I didn't find it until midnight, standing in a kitchen that still smelled like cigarettes:
Thursday. Staples in six days. Every couple of weeks for a while.
It wasn't over. This building, this woman, this whole reopened thing did not end Thursday. It kept going, indefinitely, on a schedule.
And I was glad.
I stood there with a dish towel in my hand. I was so glad about it that I had to put the towel down and hold onto the counter with both hands. Then I hated myself for about ten minutes, which was roughly my average.