Chapter 11 Beckett
November went like this. Vancouver, win. Nashville, loss, and the loss was mine. Calgary, win. Seattle, shutout. Chicago, win in a shootout, which was not a real thing.
Baranov started me eighteen of twenty-two. Everybody in the room knew it and nobody said it.
The prove-it clock ran anyway. There was a deadline in February and not one word in my contract to stop it. Every third day some site put up a list and I was on it. Auggie sent it to me with a picture of a garbage can.
The room warmed up around the middle of the month.
Nobody announced it. It was that Skoglund started sitting in the stall next to mine instead of the one with the outlet.
It was that a defenseman named Wheeler asked what I did on off days.
When I said nothing, he asked me to breakfast with his wife and their kid.
I went. The kid was two and threw a fork at me, and I liked it.
Baranov started watching me, not the way a coach watches a goalie. He came and stood next to me at the boards during a drill and said nothing for most of it.
"You are not early anymore. Since the Vegas game."
"Around then."
Baranov watched the drill. "Something is happening off the ice."
"Nothing's happening."
"You are a bad liar for a man with such a good face," he said. That was the second time somebody had told me that in two months. He skated off before I could decide whether to be insulted.
I touched the paper before every game.
It was a piece of an exam form with a dog's medication schedule on it. I could write it out from memory including the abbreviations.
Two hours before a game I'd put my hand inside the blocker glove. I'd press my thumb along the seam until I felt the place where the lining sat a half millimeter high. Then I'd take my hand out and go warm up. I did it in Nashville in a visiting room with nine guys in it.
The dog was the best thing about November.
He got better. I knew exactly how much of that was the fluids.
I knew how much was a house instead of a kennel, and a person who was home more than Walt was at the end.
By the third week he was doing the four stairs without stopping.
He'd get to the top and turn around and look at me like a man who had finished a job.
We had a route. Out the door at six-forty, down to the corner and left past the house with the tomatoes that were done. Four blocks, then back. Then again at nine.
Walking an old dog slowly down the same four blocks twice a day for a month, I met everybody who lived on them. There was a woman named Anh who brought Bear a piece of chicken. When I said he had kidney values, she started asking about them.
I've lived in four cities and never known one neighbor.
At night he'd get up on the bed. He couldn't do it himself, so I got his back end and he did the front. Then he'd sigh like a man sitting down after a double shift and put his chin on my shin, and that was the day.
I talked to him. That hadn't stopped.
"She gave the food away," I told him, in the third week of November. "All of it. Eleven boxes. I know because I called the supply place about a different thing. The guy said, oh, that account, they donated the whole order out. Isn't that something?"
Bear's tail moved twice.
"So that's a no," I said.
Auggie tried the direct approach on a Tuesday in the parking garage.
"I'm going to ask once. Are you seeing her?"
"No."
"Beckett."
"No," I said.
He looked at me over the roof of his car for a while.
"Did something happen and then stop happening?"
"That's a nothing."
"You're allowed to tell me. I've got four sisters. I've been trusted with a great deal of extremely stupid information and I've never once repeated any of it. So."
"I'm not going to," I said.
He nodded at his car keys.
"Okay. Do you want to come over Thursday? Wheeler's coming. There's food. You don't have to talk. You can stand in my kitchen and be enormous and eat."
"Yeah," I said.
"Bring the dog."
"He can't do stairs."
"I'll carry the dog," Auggie said. "I'll carry him up and I'll carry him down. I will not make one joke about it. Then in about two years I will make forty jokes about it and you'll deserve every one."
I went. He carried the dog.
My father did a segment on the 15th about goaltenders on expiring contracts. I was the third one.
He was fair about it, which was his word. He said my numbers were good, which they were. Then he said the word sustainable twice. Then he said the thing about how everybody plays well when they're playing for a number, and the question is what a man does the year after.
Then he called on Sunday.
"You saw it."
"Somebody sent it to me."
"You know I'd say the same thing if it was anybody's kid. That's the value of it. If I go soft on you nobody believes a word I say about anybody. Your push is better," he said. "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."
That was the closest thing to it I'd gotten from him in eleven years. I stood in Walt's kitchen and felt it land, and it did not feel good. It felt like a coin going into a machine.
"How's the house?"
"It's fine."
"Sell it in the spring," he said. "You'll be somewhere else by then anyway." The call was eighty-eight seconds.
The clinic sent a statement on the first for Bear's account. It came in an email with a portal. The portal had a box for an amount, because people pay these things off over time.
I paid Bear's balance. Then I put a number in the box that was not Bear's balance.
The equipment financing was sixty days out in October. I knew because a leasing company letter sat folded on a desk in a lobby where I sat for five days. I read the top line. I knew what was owed within about $800.
I did it in three pieces, a month apart.
One payment is a gift. A gift has a face on it.
Three payments a month apart against the same patient account, in amounts that are not round numbers, is a payment plan.
A payment plan appears in a ledger as a line with a date and a reference number.
A woman running a clinic on no sleep sees three of those against an old dog with a running balance. She thinks, oh, right, that.
I understood all of it. I designed it at Walt's kitchen table with a calculator app, so it would look like something she'd agreed to and forgotten.
What I told myself was that it was a dog with kidney disease and a rescue that takes in eighty animals a year. I made more money than one person needs. It was not about her.
That's a lie and it isn't even a good one. But I was going to keep saying it. The alternative was a sentence I could not say out loud to anybody, least of all her. There was exactly one language I spoke.
I put the money in the box. Then it was done. Then nobody had to have a conversation.
On the 22nd I got a text from a number I did not have saved. I'd known whose it was for two seasons. It came about twice a year.
saw the Denver thing. your dads segment. I’m sorry. I’ll say it if you want me to. I’m serious. just say the word and I’ll say all of it.
I sat in a parking lot outside a grocery store and looked at that for a long time.
He's twenty-two now. He was twenty in Minnesota.
He's playing somewhere in the East and playing well.
He has a life and a contract. None of that exists if the thing that happened that night is a thing anybody knows.
That's because of who else was in the room, and what it costs a kid to be the one who says it out loud.
My value went from an offer with real numbers on it to a one-year prove-it in nine days. Everybody read the story. The story was wrong in the specific way a story is wrong when nobody in it will talk.
I could have talked. I've been able to talk for two seasons.
I typed: don't say anything. I’m good. how's the shoulder?
He said: better. thanks. I mean it though
I said: I know
And I put the phone in the cupholder and sat there until the guy in the next spot got out and looked at me. I remembered I was a large man sitting alone in a truck outside a grocery store at eight at night.
Then it was the 24th. It was cold and I had a practice that was fine and felt bad. I sat in my truck in the players' lot for eleven minutes without turning the engine on, which I'd started doing.
I went home. I fed the dog. I did the fluids, which took me three and a half minutes.
Then I stood in Walt's kitchen with the drawer open.
The card was third from the top where it always was. Grease all the way through, one corner gone, a brown ring from the bottom of a cup.
Sunday. Chicken, whole, don't be cheap.
I made it. It took four hours. Salt at the end, and the little bit of vinegar that they'll never know why it's good.
At nine-forty I put it in a container on the counter and watched it stop steaming.
Then I put on my jacket. Then I put the container in a bag.
Then I stood in the doorway with the bag in my hand and the dog looking up at me. I said out loud, in an empty house, "I'm just going to drop it off."
Bear got up.
"You can't come. It's ten o'clock."
He got his leash off the hook himself, which he did by pulling on it until it fell. He stood there holding it.
So we both went.
I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal without the radio on. I was building the same sentence I always built, which was that I was in the area.
The lot was dark. One light was on out back over the runs, and her car was in the spot it was always in. That meant she was in the house behind the building. It meant she was asleep, which was the entire reason I could do it.
I parked with the engine running and walked up to the front door with a bag of soup. There was a metal ledge under the mail slot exactly the depth of a container. I set it down flat.
I did not knock. I did not text. I did not write anything on it.
I stood there a second with my hand flat on the glass of a door I'd never once been able to walk past.
Then I drove home with a dog in the passenger seat. I made myself a bowl of the same soup and ate it standing up at the counter.