Chapter 5 Beckett
Baranov skated us two hours on the Tuesday. Then he kept the goalies twenty minutes after, which was a message. He was about five foot eight and built like a fire hydrant. He never raised his voice, which was, in a specific way, worse.
"Douglas. You are fighting the puck."
"Yes."
"Do not agree with me so fast. It is annoying." He tapped the toe of my pad with his stick. "You are big. You take up the whole net. You do not need to be early. When you are early, you are guessing. And when you guess, you are a man with opinions instead of a goalie. Do not be early."
He skated off. That was the entire conversation. I thought about it for the rest of the day.
The room was polite. They were waiting to find out whether I was going to cost them. I'd been in rooms where they'd already decided, in both directions. Polite was the best one.
The press was less polite. There was a columnist here who wrote a piece in August titled The Peaks Bought a Used Car. Then he had to come stand in front of me on media day and ask how I felt about the fresh start.
"Good," I said.
"Anything you want to say to fans who are skeptical?"
"No."
He waited. Reporters left a hole to see whether I would fill it. I've never filled it. My father taught me that when I was seventeen.
Then he asked whether I'd be nervous with my dad on the national call for the home opener against Vegas. I said no. He wrote that down like it meant something.
My whole life was a series of systems. The ones that held were the ones I got to keep.
I did the kitchen on a Sunday. Everything out, everything wiped, everything back in an order that made sense. I consolidated Walt's four half-empty coffee cans into one, which took twenty minutes of standing there with a can in each hand.
Then I taped a laminated sheet on the fridge with Bear's medications, times and doses. Then came a second sheet for the fluid days, marked out three weeks ahead.
Then house rules, which I wrote on an index card and taped to the cabinet:
No stairs unsupervised. Nothing off the counter. He does not sleep on the bed.
He slept on the bed the first night.
He was eleven days out of surgery and he could not get his back end off the floor. He stood there with his front paws on the mattress and looked at me.
So I picked up eighty pounds of dog and put him on my bed. Rule three was gone. By the end of that week rules one and two were also gone.
I did not throw the card away. I looked at it most days.
Auggie started calling her the hot vet on a Wednesday and never stopped.
"How's the hot vet?"
"I'm hanging up."
"You can't hang up. We're in a car."
"Auggie."
"I have four sisters, Beckett. I'm world class at conversation." He put his blinker on. "You have gone to that clinic nine times."
"That's not…"
"It's nine. I have a note in my phone. It's called Beckett Vet Tracker, and entry six says, quote, Tuesday afternoon, dog does not have an appointment."
"How would you know whether he has an appointment?"
"Because you're a bad liar with a beautiful face," Auggie said. He took the exit.
Two weeks became every other week, and then became whenever Bear had a thing. Bear was thirteen, so Bear always had a thing.
I'd done the fluids at home nine times. I walked in that afternoon feeling roughly the way I felt in the tunnel before a game I already knew I was going to win.
"Show me," Tessa said.
So I tented it and went in beautifully. Bear turned his head and looked at the needle in his own back. Then he stood up and walked off the end of the exam table.
The line came with him. The bag came off the hook. The hook came out of the ceiling tile.
"Bear. Bear, no…"
"Grab the bag."
"I've got the dog."
"The bag is the thing that…"
The bag hit the floor. A liter of fluid went out across the tile. Bear stood in the middle of it looking extremely pleased with the outcome. Tessa put both hands on top of her head and made a noise like a laugh being strangled in a back room.
"I'm sorry. I'm going to pay for the…"
"You're not going to pay for a fluid bag, Beckett, they cost $9. Get the mop. It's in the closet at the end of the…"
I turned toward the closet. Margaret came off the top of the supply cabinet and landed on my shoulder.
I'd now been hit by that cat four times, and this one was set up. She had waited until my hands were full. She came in from behind and above. She used my collarbone as a landing pad and my ear as a push-off. I went down on one knee in a lake of saline in front of a woman I used to be in love with.
Tessa could not help me. She had her forehead against the cabinet door.
"She's nineteen," she managed.
"She's a professional. She has a system," I said, from the floor, "and I want you to know that I respect it."
She laughed until she had to sit down on the step stool. She was still going when Marisol came in to see what had died. I stayed on one knee in a puddle longer than I strictly needed to.
My father called that night. He called after practice reports. Games he did on the air.
"Beck. Watched the clips from today. Your glove is at your hip."
"It's where it's always been."
"It was at your ribs in 2019. You dropped it two inches when you got heavy and you never picked it back up.
Every shooter in this league has that on video.
You're getting beat high on the glove side.
You're closing the glove after the puck's already there, and that's because you're early on your push.
Baranov will tell you about the push and he will not tell you about the hand. "
"Okay."
"So fix the hand. I've got your Vegas game. National window. They're putting me at the desk for the whole broadcast. I'm going to say what I see."
"I know."
"Beck. I'm not doing this to be unkind. I'm the only person in your life who'll tell you the truth."
"I know."
"How's the house?"
"It's fine."
"You should sell it," he said. Then somebody said his name in the background. "I've got to go, I'm on in six," he said, and hung up.
Ninety-one seconds. I counted.
Then I opened the drawer by the sink.
The index cards were where I'd left them. There was a rubber band ball and a bottle opener. There were forty years of receipts, and a stack of cards in handwriting I would know from across a room.
The one I wanted was third from the top. It was the worst-looking one in the stack, because it was the one that got used. Grease had gone all the way through the paper.
Sunday. Chicken, whole, don't be cheap. Onion. 2 carrots. Celery if you got it, if not, don't cry. Bay. Handful of parsley stems, not the leaves. Salt at the end. Little vinegar at the very end, they'll never know why it's good. Noodles separate or they drink the pot.
And down at the bottom, in different ink, in a hand that had gotten shakier:
Beck: low and slow. If it's boiling you're mad about something.
I made it. That was what I did when my head got loud. It took about four hours, and I had nowhere on earth to be. By ten that night there was more soup than one man and one dog could get through in a week.
I put a container in the fridge. Then I stood there with the door open a while. Then I put it in a bag and got in the truck.
The clinic lights were on at 11:30, which they should not have been.
She opened the door with her hair coming out of everything and a stain down the front of her scrub top.
"Are you okay? Is he…"
"He's fine. He's in the truck. I brought you this," I said, and held out the bag.
"What is it?"
"Soup. It's my grandfather's."
"Beckett."
"It isn't a thing." I put it on the counter. "You're about to say you already ate."
"I already…"
"When?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
"There was a granola bar," she said. "At some point."
I looked at her.
"There was definitely a granola bar."
"Bowls. Where?"
"Break room, second cabinet, but I don't…"
There were four bowls and one of them said World's Okayest Doctor. I used that one because it was the biggest. I filled it and put it on the front counter. I set a spoon down beside it and stepped back.
"I'm not going to sit down," she said. "If I sit down I'm finished."
"Then don't sit down."
So she ate it standing up at her own front counter at a quarter to midnight. About four spoonfuls in, she stopped.
Something went across her face. It wasn't happiness. It was closer to what people look like when they finally sit down after standing for a long time.
"You made a face."
"I did not make a face."
"Tessa."
"It's good," she said, to the bowl. "It's really good. It tastes like…"
"Like what?"
"It tastes like a person made it. That's a stupid sentence. I've been awake nineteen hours."
She ate the whole thing. Then she looked at the pot, and then at me. She filled the bowl again and ate that one too. She did not say another word the entire time.
I would have stood there all night.
While she ate, I looked at the desk. I meant to.
Under the appointment book there were three window envelopes now, all opened. The top one had Second Notice printed where I could read it without moving anything, and a date eight days old.
On top of the whole stack was the golden retriever again. A partner for the next chapter of your practice. Somebody at Apex had written a name and a direct line across the bottom in blue pen. Underneath that, smaller: We'd hate to see the renewal go the other way.
"That's junk," she said behind me.
I hadn't heard her set the bowl down.
"Okay."
"They send them to everybody. They bought the strip mall on the corner and the practice on Sheridan. They are buying up this whole block," she said. She picked it up and put it in the drawer.
She did not handle it like junk.
"How much do you sleep?" I said. "You've been here since when?"
"Beckett."
"I'm asking a question."
"And I'm telling you it's not a question you get to ask." Not meanly, but with a door in her voice. "Thank you for the soup. Take your bowl."
"Keep the bowl."
"I don't want to keep your…"
"Keep the bowl," I said.
And she stopped arguing about the bowl.
I've thought about that more than I should have. She was a woman who would not accept a strike plate. She kept the bowl.
In the truck I told myself that the clinic was not my business. She had a brother and a staff and an entire life she built without me anywhere in it. A man does not fly into a woman's life on the back of a dying dog and start reading her mail.
I told myself I was on a one-year deal with nothing in it that stopped anybody moving me. There were two ways this season ended, and both of them had me in a different city.
And I told myself none of it was about her. The soup was about a bad phone call and a pot on a stove.
Three lies and a true thing.
I drove home the long way. The long way went up Thirty-Eighth.
The diner sat on the corner with a dead sign and a sheet of plywood in the door where the glass used to be. There was a dumpster in the side lot that wasn't his. There was a leasing sign in the window with a phone number on it.
I pulled over across the street and put the truck in park.
Bear sat up in the passenger seat and looked out the window at it. He looked at me and lay back down.
I sat there longer than I'd meant to.
Through the plywood I could see about four inches into the room, not far enough to see the back booth. I knew exactly where it was anyway. Left side, past the pie case, under the vent that dripped.
Then I put it in drive. I went home and washed a pot.