19. Chapter Nineteen
Percy
A key goes into the front door, and I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to be.
It’s four in the afternoon on a Sunday in the middle of August, and I’m standing in the middle of the living room now on the balls of my feet. The lock turns. The door opens.
“Deveroux!” Benson’s got a duffel over one shoulder and a fan under his arm. His hair’s shorter than it was in May. Something goes through my chest that I’m not ready for, and I stand there.
“Reeve,” I say.
He looks around at a house that’s cleaner than he’s ever seen it.
“How was the summer?”
Fine. That’s the answer. It’s been the answer my whole life. It’s a good answer. It closes the door without slamming it.
“Marco let me run bottles,” I say.
Benson turns around.
“By July.” I nod. “You have to cut the foil under the lip, so it doesn’t show. Then get the screw in straight, or you tear the cork. I dropped a foil in a woman’s soup in June.”
“You did not.”
“She was nice about it.”
He chuckles. “And Marco.”
I shake my head.
Benson laughs and heads for the stairs. “That ice machine still make noise?”
“It’s worse.”
“It’s been making that noise since I was there. He’ll never fix it.” He takes the first step. “Bruno still comes in on Thursdays?”
“Every Thursday. Table six. Same wine.”
“Same wine,” Benson repeats, and shakes his head at it. “You stay here the whole time?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
He nods. “That’s a long summer.”
That’s it. He doesn’t ask why. He heads upstairs, unpacks, and when he comes back down, he tells me about his summer. The house doesn’t seem so empty anymore.
The next day, Stanley arrives, and I can hear him from the street. The front door bangs off the wall.
“Mon petit Percy poney.”
He comes across the living room at me with both arms out. He’s tanner and louder than I remember him. He takes my face in both hands. Everything in me goes rigid at the touch, the way it always has since I was small. He shakes my head once and lets go.
“Three months,” he says. “Three months and not one text. I could have died.”
“You texted the group chat forty times a day,” Benson says from the couch.
Stanley pivots on him instantly. “Reeve.”
“No.”
“Reeve.” He drops onto the arm of the couch. “I hear Gianna’s working the equipment room this year.”
He lets it hang, eyebrows up, until Benson looks over.
“So?”
“So I’m just saying. Proximity.” Stanley leans in. “Skates. Tape. All that gear. A man could spend a lot of time in the equipment room. Freshman meat.”
Benson comes off that couch, reaching for Stanley.
Stanley laughs, trying to get away. He blocks Benson’s hand.
Stanley hits the floor. Benson’s genuinely angry for about four seconds — he’s got a fistful of shirt, and he’s saying say it again — and then Stanley says something into the carpet about the equipment room.
Benson’s laughing now, furious and laughing.
A chair goes over, and Stanley’s shin catches the table leg, and he screams about it and does not stop talking.
“I’m just saying—”
“Say it again.”
“Gianna and the sticks—”
A laugh comes out of me as I watch these two guys.
They both stop.
Benson looks up. Stanley twists his head around on the carpet with his cheek mashed flat, and for a second, nobody moves. I stand there with my heart going.
Then Stanley says, “Get off me, you psychopath,” and Benson grinds his face into the rug, and the whole thing starts over.
Blue arrives quietly the next day. Rowan gets in a few hours later, and he’s complaining in the kitchen.
“You’re not even unpacked,” Benson argues.
Rowan scoffs. “There’s nothing in this fridge.”
Benson makes a high-pitched voice. “There’s stuff in the fridge.”
“There are condiments and a lemon.” He shakes his head.
Stanley slaps the table. “I’ll pay you, Laurens. Monthly. Cash. If you cook.”
“Me too,” Benson says.
Blue looks at me.
“I’m in,” I say.
The kitchen stops.
Stanley doesn’t say anything. He gets up out of his chair, comes around behind me, takes the back of my neck in one hand and squeezes. Then he turns and looks at Rowan and nods, slow, waiting.
“Fuck it,” Blue says. “Me too.”
Stanley grabs the back of Blue’s neck now, looking over at Benson who’s watching the whole thing.
Rowan looks at the four of us. “Fine.”
Stanley takes my cheeks in both hands and shakes them.
“You convinced him, Mon Petit Percy. And you, baby Blue. The freshmen are coming out of their shells!”
“We’re not freshmen anymore,” Blue says.
Stanley nods. “Yeah. So you two talk now, apparently. This year should be interesting.”
That night, he stands on the coffee table and shouts, “House meeting.”
“Get off the table,” Rowan says.
“This is a podium.” He has a cup of water in his hands. “Reeve, myself, and Laurens are juniors. That’s leadership. That’s a burden I carry gladly.” He points at me, then at Blue. “You two. No longer freshmen. Congratulations. Nobody’s picking up pucks for the seniors anymore—”
“We picked up pucks for you,” Blue says.
“—and I want that respected.”
“We had no choice.”
“Big Ten,” Stanley says, sailing straight over him. “Home opener is going to be a good one. We have a good line. Boston in October. Wisconsin in November.” He drinks his water. “There will be scouts at that Michigan game. Actual scouts. I intend to be perceived.”
“You intend to embarrass,” Rowan says.
“You could get looked at this year.” He says it lightly. “Reeve’s already in.”
Rowan shakes his head.
Benson doesn’t say anything.
“Roster.” Stanley holds up a piece of paper I didn’t know he was holding.
“We lost Cole. We lost Dan. We’ve got a transfer defenseman out of Colgate with a neck like a horse.
Jonathon’s back, and Jonathon thinks he’s better than he is, and I want that on record now so I can point at it in February. ”
Rowan snorts.
“And they brought in a freshman goalie.” Stanley drinks. “Kid’s drafted. Fourth round, Nashville.”
He’s looking at me when he says it.
“Anyway,” he says.
He points his water at the whiteboard in the kitchen doorway. “We still follow the house rules. No ands, buts, whats, or ifs. Same as it’s always been. This year’s no different.” Then he steps down off the table and comes and takes me by both shoulders and shakes me once, hard.
“You’re gonna be better than Cole was,” he says. “I hear you’ve been on the ice since they put it back in. Who told me that? Somebody told me that.”
I don’t say anything. The whiteboard’s over his shoulder while he shakes me. I read all five rules the same way I’ve read them all summer. Something goes tight low in my gut.
“Somebody order the pizza,” Rowan says.
Stanley claps. “That’s your job now, Laurens.” He winks and then leaves.
The bags stay in the hall three days.
Stanley never unpacks. His things migrate — a shirt of his turns up in Blue’s room, his charger lives in the kitchen, and the bag collects dust.
Rowan reorganizes the fridge on Saturday morning.
Stanley destroys it by Saturday night, looking for mustard.
They argue about fantasy football for forty minutes, and it becomes an argument about whether Rowan has ever watched a football game in his life.
The frittata pan comes out. The burnt edge is still there.
And I sit at the end of the table with my back to the wall and my book open — the second one now, a different French paperback — and Stanley shouts something across the kitchen with three French words in it and no meaning at all.
I don’t look up, and Blue pulls out the chair on my left and sits down without a word.
I’ve got doubles at the Camerie until classes start.
Marco’s glad to see me every shift, which he expresses by giving me more work.
I run bottles. I train a kid named Kevin who’s a sophomore and terrified of everything.
I flip the chairs at midnight and mop myself out the back door, and then I walk home.
Over the summer, this restaurant was the whole of my life.
I came here from an empty house, and I went back to an empty house.
The house was where I slept, and this was where I lived.
Now I come up on Hawthorne Street at half past ten, and every light in the place is on.
There’s music, and Stanley’s out on the porch arguing with somebody on the phone, and he throws an arm up over his head when he sees me coming down the street.
Informal skates start in two weeks. Captain-run, no coaches. Real practice the first week of October. Classes Monday.
It’s the twenty-eighth of August. She still hasn’t texted.
Josh calls on a Wednesday to ask how I’m settling in for the new school year.
“Good,” I say.
“Still have the job?”
“Yep.”
There’s a long pause. “Scholarship still good?”
I nod. “Yeah. I had to turn in a few things, but it’s good.”
“Good,” he says. “You sound good, Pers.”
“I am.”
There’s a pause on the line, and I can hear him working up to something, and then I hear him decide not to.
“Well,” he says, and clears his throat. “Alright, then.” He fills the rest of it telling me about the truck.
It needs a transmission. Mary says to sell it and he says he’d sooner sell Mary.
Eight minutes. I don’t say the thing I want to say.
It sits behind my teeth the way it always does.
The call ends. I sit in my room in the dark with the door shut and the house going on underneath me.
The top drawer of my dresser sticks. There’s a broken watch in it, and under the watch, there’s a piece of paper folded twice. A whole year, and I haven’t opened it. I sit on the edge of the bed and unfold it.
Blocky handwriting, pressed hard enough to dent the paper. You versus you, kid. That’s all it says.
He said it to me on the curb out front. Two fingers to his own chest, standing in front of a house he was leaving me in, and then he got in his truck and drove to the stop sign and lifted his hand.
I stare at it for a long time. I get up and get my wallet out of my jacket and put the paper behind the only other thing in it, a debit card for an account with nothing much in it. I fold it closed and set it in the drawer. Then I lie down on top of the covers with my hands behind my head.
The Hawthorne boys are loud down there. Somebody’s on the stairs. The whole floor moves when Stanley moves.
Over the summer, the silence was nice, but I hadn’t realized how much I missed the guys until they were back. Now everything feels right again. I lay in this same bed with the windows open, and I lie there and listen to them through the floor.