3. Goldie
THREE
GOLDIE
Monday was my busiest day at school, and I was thankful for the distraction of my classes. A certain hockey player’s face kept appearing behind my eyelids whenever my brain wasn’t occupied with science. Even though I was thankful for the distraction, after a long day of dealing with neuroscience and kinesiology undergrads, all I wanted to do was flop into bed.
Darkness had set in by the time the streetcar dropped me off at the end of Neville Park Boulevard.. The fresh blanket of snow left the world with an insulated and quiet quality, one that I usually loved, but with the silence came thoughts of Ace. I blinked hard, hoping to rid his blue eyes from my mind.
The fingers on my right hand tingled, reminding me of our last moments together. The curt handshake I’d shared with him had left my hand feeling electrified. Mom had warned me about tingles, but I stacked that up as another one of her crazy ramblings. It didn’t mean anything; there had to be a scientific reason why my hand hadn’t felt the same since we’d parted ways. In a weird way, I ached to call my mom to ask her how to get Ace out of my thoughts. To find out how to get his touch off my hand, but doing so would be admitting that I shared her “gift.” I wasn’t prepared to join camp crazy.
My dad’s Yukon was parked in the driveway and as I brushed alongside it, snow fell on the sleeve of my blue puffy jacket. The kitchen lights cast a glow on the laneway that separated my dad’s house from the carriage house where I lived.
The door cracked as I walked by.
“Goldie,” Dad shouted. “Come in for dinner.”
“I’m beat, Dad. I’m going to have a sandwich and hit the hay.” I stretched my arms above my head and yawned. Thinking about Ace Bailey had left me exhausted.
“Come on, Goldie Girl,” a woman’s voice came from behind my father and Mel stepped beside him. “Your dad ordered Pad Thai.”
My stomach growled. “What are you doing here?” I changed course to walk through the door that my dad held open.
“Um. I was dropping off something…” She pointed to Morton, who was passed out next to the coffee table.
My dad’s brow furrowed as he took my backpack from my shoulder. “Are you all right, kiddo?” he asked.
“Dad, I’m twenty-five years old.”
“You’ll always be my kiddo, kiddo.” He set my bag on the floor and I followed him and Mel into the kitchen. Aluminum takeout containers dotted the marble island. Dad handed me a plate and fork. “You look like you could use a glass of wine.”
Wine. That might help. “I’d love a glass.”
“Mel?” Dad held up another wineglass. Mel nodded so enthusiastically, I thought her head might bobble right off her neck.
While my dad poured the wine, I went to the sofa, buried my face in Morton’s chest, and scratched the scruff of his neck. How had I forgotten that Mel was going to drop him off? What was wrong with me? “I’m sorry, pal,” I whispered.
Morton stretched his legs and let out that cute sound dogs make when they yawn. He gave the couch a couple of thwacks with his tail before going back to sleep.
I sidled onto one of the barstools at the island. Dad held up his wineglass. “Do we have anything to celebrate?”
“I sold a house on Leslie Street today.” Mel smiled.
“Congratulations.” Dad clinked his glass to hers. “What about you, Goldie?”
“As a matter of fact, I received some surprise funding for my study.”
Dad’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. “That’s wonderful, dear. I know you’re passionate about your thesis.”
“That’s awesome, Goldie Girl.” Mel grinned. She knew how tight my funds had been the last little while. My father was a retired NHL star and a head coach, but I wouldn’t take a dime from him for my studies. I wanted to do it on my own. My undergrad had been funded mostly through scholarships, and while he didn’t write any checks for my tuition, he let me live in the carriage house for free, something that I would never have been able to afford in the Beaches area of Toronto.
“Thanks. It’s going to help fund the studies.”
“Do you have any subjects yet?” Mel asked.
“Not yet. I’m still working on that.” I cast Mel a glare that hopefully said, Remember, my dad doesn’t know the details about my research.
My study on concussions wasn’t a secret, but I hadn’t told my dad all the nitty gritty details. Like how I was studying the impacts of traumatic brain injury on personality, namely impulsive behavior. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. He would be a prime candidate for a test subject. In a way, I was hoping the results would explain why he’d done some of the things he’d done in the past.
Mel smiled widely. “What about you, Mr. Swanson? Are you celebrating anything?”
My father gave Mel a smile in return. “You know that you can call me Scott. But, no. Still on a losing streak.”
Dad dug a spoon into the red curry and deposited a heaping serving onto my plate. He knew that the spicy dish was my favorite. “Sorry to hear that, Dad. I’m sure things will turn around.”
When I closed my eyes to take a bite of the rice, a flash of Ace’s smile appeared. In the imagery behind my lids, he was spinning, holding something above his head, a big trophy. I blinked a couple of times.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Dad’s eyes were filled with concern.
I must have been staring into space and blinking for a little longer than I’d thought. I swallowed the bite of rice and took a big sip of my wine. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
“So, Mister…I mean, Scott…was the polar beach thingy a success?” Mel asked.
Dad didn’t hide his eye roll. “That publicity stunt? Maybe if my guys spent more time on the ice and less time doing crap for the media, we wouldn’t be…” He stopped and held his hands up. “Sorry, Goldie and I have a strict no-work-at-the-dinner-table policy.”
Redness had crept up my father’s neck and was dancing with his jawbone. When he was a player, he could take out his frustration on the ice, slam pucks, body check a few wingmen, and be back to his place of zen. As a coach, he didn’t have the same physical outlet, and I worried about his blood pressure. Talking about the team got him worked up, and not in a good way, at least not when they were losing.
“Roger.” Mel smiled. “No more hockey talk at the table.” She took a sip of her wine. “Does talking about the players count?”
“In what way?” Dad wasn’t a dummy; he knew that Mel was angling to get some dirt on the players.
“Mel…” I groaned.
“It’s okay.” Dad finished his glass of wine and topped up our glasses. “What player has caught your eye?” He winked.
Mel’s cheeks went as red as the wine in her glass. “What’s the deal with those Bailey brothers?”
This time my father rolled his eyes. “You mean the worst trade that’s happened since I started coaching the Tigers?”
“Yeah. Do they hate each other or something?”
As much as I didn’t like the direction the conversation was going, I was curious about their animosity.
“Hate is a strong word. They’re competitive, and it’s normal to see brothers where one shines a little brighter than the other, but those two—there’s another layer there. I don’t know what happened, and it’s really none of my business, but they don’t speak to each other off the ice. On the ice, they fight. If they weren’t such talented players, I would’ve gotten rid of them ages ago.”
Mel nodded. “The only thing that could come between two guys like that is…a girl.”
Dad shrugged. “Like I said, none of my business.”
My best friend cast a glance at me before asking the question I hoped she’d avoid. “Do either of them have girlfriends right now?”
Almost as a reflex, my foot kicked and made contact with Mel’s shin. She jumped, but didn’t let out a peep. She wasn’t fast enough to catch her fork before it clattered to the floor.
Dad got up and retrieved Mel’s fork. He tossed it into the sink and handed her a fresh one from the drawer. “What the players do off the ice is none of my business. But, Mel, if I were you, I would stay far away from any of my players.” He’d clearly had enough of the interrogation.
Later that evening, Mel and I curled up on the sofa in the carriage house. Each of us had our own blanket, and the gas fireplace flickered next to the TV, which was on its third or fourth episode of Seinfeld . “Another bottle?” Mel filled my glass and topped hers up.
“No, I have to figure out some stuff tomorrow, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to wake up with a medium-sized hangover.”
“You’re probably right.” Mel’s teeth were stained a deep purple. “I have a bunch of showings to book for Aubrey.”
Sometimes, I wished I had Mel’s job. We both worked hard, but she made more as an assistant for a top agent in the city than I ever would as a researcher. I was okay with that—I wasn’t doing the research for the money—but some days it would’ve been nice to sleep in, drive around to beautiful homes, and be a part of people’s dreams.
“I would love to sleep in.” I stretched my arms above my head. “I’m waiting to hear back from the soccer team to see if they will approve some players to be a part of my study. I’ve got a call with someone from their management at eight o’clock.”
“In the morning?” Mel gave me a playful shove. “You’ll get it. I’m sure of it.”
I wasn’t so sure. “The funding depends on it.”
“Now that we’re out of earshot of your super hot dad, can we please talk about your date with Ace?” Mel clicked off the TV.
“It wasn’t a date.” I clicked it back on. “And there’s nothing to talk about. He seems like an okay guy, for a hockey player. He saved Morton, and I bought him a pizza. Or, I mean, he bought me a pizza. That’s it. Full stop. The end.”
“Did he try to kiss you?”
I tossed the throw pillow at her. “What part of ‘it wasn’t a date’ didn’t you get? We did not kiss. I did shake his hand though.” I opened and closed my hand. The tingling had subsided, but at the mention of his name, the sensation returned.
“I bet his hands are huge, but probably not as big as his brother’s. That guy is a monster.” Gideon was definitely the larger of the two brothers, but it was hard to imagine his hand being much bigger than Ace’s. My hand had completely disappeared into his. The tingling intensified and I shook my hand from the wrist. It was the same kind of pain that you get when your hand falls asleep and you have to shake it awake.
“Are you all right?” Mel’s wine sloshed in her glass as she pointed to my hand.
“My hand just fell asleep, that’s all.” There wasn’t any other explanation. I’m a scientist. Extremities fall asleep all the time. It didn’t have anything to do with Ace. “Gideon’s a dick to fans, but Ace… Ace was so sweet to this young kid that came up to us after lunch. We actually made a bet about when he’d get approached and I lost, so he bought lunch.”
“He what?” Mel’s eyebrows rose so high I thought they might slip under her dark curtain bangs. “You were thanking him for saving Morton, and he ended up paying?”
I shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal, Goldie Girl. That means you can ask him out again, you know, because you still have to thank him for pulling a Mitch Buchannon on Lake Ontario.”
I stood and poured the remainder of my wine into the sink and rinsed out the glass. “You’re forgetting something pretty major.” I stretched my arms above my head as I yawned. “Even if we wanted to go on another date, there’s that whole thing about being the coach’s daughter.”
“Is that like an official rule?” She air-quoted rule .
“No, but it’s like bro code, but even more serious—hockey code. You don’t bang the coach’s daughter. And who the hell is Mitch Buchannon?”
Mel laughed. “He’s the main guy from Baywatch .”
“You and your classic TV,” I yelled from the bathroom where I put toothpaste on my toothbrush. I didn’t watch The Golden Girls , but that didn’t stop Mel from calling me Goldie Girl every chance she could get. She said that she was Blanche and I was Dorothy. “Are you sleeping on the sofa, or calling for an Uber?”
“It’s too cold to go anywhere. Can you pass me my pillow?”
I jammed the toothbrush in my mouth, pulled the spare pillow from my bed, and tossed it to Mel. She spent so much time at my place, she had her own shelf in the medicine cabinet. She said she was tired, but I knew she was going to stay up watching reruns of something cheesy and fall asleep in her clothes.
Mel stretched and pulled a second blanket on top of her. “What do your spidey senses say about him?”
She was one of the few people who knew that I had what I called an uncanny knack for reading people. My mom called it something else, but to me, it was nothing but intuition. I paused in the doorway to my bedroom. “There weren’t any red flags that I could see, but it doesn’t matter. I told him that I couldn’t date a hockey player.” That was only the partial truth. I felt a warmth when I was with Ace, the opposite of a red flag reaction. There was a pureness to him, but I didn’t want to tell that to Mel. I also didn’t want to admit it to myself. It didn’t matter that I felt both calm and excited when I was with him; it was a bit cruel, actually. One of the few men who made me feel something was completely off-limits. “So forget about it. You can date him if you want.”
“He’s not my type.” The TV flickered as Mel flipped through the channels. “That behemoth of a brother of his though…get a read on him. I’d like to see if everything is to scale.”
I tossed the pillow at her. “And with that, I bid you good night.”
She might be able to sleep off the two bottles of wine in the morning, but I needed to get to sleep. Tomorrow was one of the most important days of my academic career. I couldn’t let a night of girl talk, or thoughts of Ace and his goofy smile, keep me up one second longer.