2. Jett
JETT
There's a thing that happens about forty minutes into a hard practice. Your legs stop being your legs. They turn into somebody else's, somebody who owes you money and resents you for it. You skate on top of them anyway and trust they'll hold.
I hit that wall right as Coach blew the whistle for one more set of suicides.
"You're killing us," Moose hollered from the blue line, bent double, gloves on his knees. Big Norwegian bastard, slowest recovery on the team, complained like it was a second job. "It's November, Coach. We won the championship in March. Let a man breathe."
"You want to breathe, retire," Coach said. "Line up."
We lined up.
That's the thing nobody tells you about winning.
You'd think hoisting the thing over your head in front of nineteen thousand screaming people buys you a little grace.
A little attaboy, take it easy, you earned it.
It buys you nothing. It buys you a target the size of a dinner plate.
Every team in the league gunning for the champs.
A coach who decided over the summer that defending a title is harder than winning one, and we were all going to suffer for his theory.
I dug in and skated. Goal line to blue line, blue line back, goal to red, red back, all the way down and all the way home, lungs full of broken glass.
Langley puked a little behind the net at the end of the third one and tried to play it cool, wiping his mouth on the back of his glove like we hadn't all seen it.
"Atta boy, rookie," I said, gliding past. "Get it out. More room for beer later."
"I'm two years in, you asshole."
"You'll always be the rookie to me, sweetheart."
He flipped me off. I blew him a kiss. Behind me, Rhett laughed, that low rare thing he did maybe twice a practice.
Stone, the guys called him. Our captain, and the closest thing I had to a best friend, not that either of us would've said it out loud.
Stone didn't hand out laughs. You earned those same as everything else off him.
Coach finally let us off the ice. We clattered down the tunnel like a herd of something prehistoric, all pads and stink and noise.
I peeled out of my gear at my stall and sat a second in the steam and the racket of thirty grown men being idiots, and I let myself feel it.
The good ache. The bone-deep done-ness of a body used all the way up.
People asked me sometimes, the rare times anybody asked a real question, why I still played this hard. I had the contract. I had the ring. I had, though almost nobody knew the actual shape of it, more money than a man could spend in nine lifetimes, sitting quiet in accounts I never touched.
I never knew how to answer that without sounding insane, so I never answered straight.
But the truth sat right there in that locker room every day.
I grew up in a house where joy was a thing you apologized for.
Where a boy who laughed too loud got a look.
Where the only acceptable noise was the noise they told you to make, in the key they picked, on the Sundays they told you to show.
Then I found this. A barn full of noise nobody could take.
A hundred and ninety pounds of reasons to yell, and not one of them a sin.
I'd have played this game for free. I just made real sure nobody found that out. It would've wrecked my negotiating position.
"Sturgill." Coach was in his office doorway, chin tipped at me. "Got a minute."
The locker room went oooooh like a bunch of fourth graders.
"Somebody's in trouble," Moose sang.
"Somebody's mom got called," said Tank.
"Eat a helmet, all of you," I said, cheerful, and grabbed a towel and went.
Coach's office hadn't changed since the day he showed up in Vegas a couple years back to take over a team that was a punchline at the time.
Same bad fluorescent light. Same whiteboard full of his chicken-scratch X's and O's.
Same framed photo on the desk that used to be just him and now had Brynn in it, the two of them squinting into the sun somewhere with mountains behind them.
A second frame sat next to it that I tried not to look at too long, because it did something to my chest. Brynn and her mom, Victoria. Both of them holding the trophy.
Family. The man had built himself a family out here from scratch. I respected the hell out of it, and it made me itchy to be in the room with it. Both at once.
"Sit," Coach said.
"I'd rather stand. I smell."
"You always smell. Sit down, Jett."
I sat.
He leaned back against the front of the desk, crossed his arms, gave me the look he used when he was about to make me do something I didn't want to do and had already decided I was doing it anyway.
"Victoria's putting together a thing," he said. "A feature. Big one. Long magazine piece about the championship season. The whole story, how the team got built, all of it. National."
"Cool. Tell her congrats."
"You're the centerpiece."
"No."
"Jett."
"Coach. Come on." I dragged the towel over my face.
"You know I hate that crap. The cameras, the questions, some reporter trying to make me cry about my childhood so they can stick it in a box with a pull quote.
I did the whole media tour after the championship.
I did Kimmel. I did the morning show with the lady who kept touching my arm. I paid my dues."
"This is different."
"It's always different until it's exactly the same."
He gave me a look. He had a few hundred of them and I knew most by now. This one said, I am being patient with you and the patience has a clock on it.
"Victoria asked for you specifically," he said.
"She believes in this piece. She handpicked the writer — somebody she trusts, somebody who'll do it right and not turn it into a tabloid thing.
The league wants it. The magazine wants it.
And frankly, son, after the title, you're the face people want to read about.
The mouthy kid who buried the championship goal. That's the story."
"That's not a story. That's a highlight."
"So give them a story." He pushed off the desk. "One interview to start. You sit down, you answer the questions, you behave like a professional human being for ninety minutes — which I realize is a big ask. If you hate it, we talk. But you're doing the first one. Monday, here, after practice."
I rolled the towel up and snapped it against my own knee, thinking.
"Who's the writer?" I said.
"Some friend of Victoria's. Or Brynn's. I didn't get the full org chart." He waved a hand. "It's not gonna be Bob Woodward, Jett. Relax. Hockey story for a hockey magazine. Smile, say nice things about your teammates, tell the one about Moose and the Zamboni, you'll be a hero."
"The Zamboni story makes Moose look like a genius. I'm not doing the Zamboni story."
"Monday," Coach said, in the voice that ended things.
I stood. Stretched. My back made a sound like a bag of gravel.
"You good?" he said, and the question had shifted, gone quieter, the way it did sometimes when the door was closed and it was just us.
Coach noticed things. It was what made him good at the job and what made him a pain in my ass.
"You've been off the last couple weeks. Quiet for you. Which for you is basically catatonic."
"I'm great," I said. "I'm always great. It's my whole thing."
He looked at me a moment too long.
"Monday," I said, and got out of there before he could find whatever he was looking for.
It wasn't a lie, exactly. I was always great. Greatness was the bit, and the bit was load-bearing.
But he wasn't wrong that I'd been off. And I knew exactly why. It had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the phone in my bag that had lit up four times that week with a 931 area code.
I knew that area code in my body. Middle Tennessee.
Middle Tennessee was the town, and the town was the church, and the church was my mother, and my mother only ever called for one of two reasons.
Either somebody had died, or somebody wanted to remind me I was killing them slowly by living the life I'd built.
I sat in my car in the players' lot and looked at the latest voicemail without playing it.
Then I did the thing I'd been doing for eight years, which was nothing. Phone in the cupholder, face down. Backed out. Drove home.
Home was a problem I'd made for myself, if I'm honest, which I tried not to be too often because it was exhausting.
Six bedrooms for one man and a dog I didn't have yet but kept meaning to get.
Glass and stone up in the hills, the whole valley laid out underneath like somebody'd spilled a jewelry box.
I'd bought it with cash, through an LLC with my name nowhere a reporter could find it.
The last thing I needed was some beat writer doing math on a hockey salary and an eight-figure house, asking questions I didn't answer.
Nobody on the team had ever been up here except Rhett. And Rhett didn't ask questions, because Rhett had his own locked doors, and we'd struck a silent deal a long time ago to leave each other's alone.
The guys thought I lived in some flashy condo on the Strip.
I let them. Easier than explaining how a loudmouth winger from a Tennessee church town ended up worth what I was worth.
Easier still than explaining why I didn't act like it.
Why I drove a 1969 Pontiac Firebird I'd restored from the frame up over four off-seasons, flew commercial, clipped coupons in my head out of a habit my mother beat into me back when we didn't have a dime.
The car was the one thing I let myself have.
The one thing my mother would've called sinful.
I'd built it with my own two hands, and every time I dropped into the seat I felt better in some quiet way I never tried to name.
The money wasn't the life. That's the part none of them would've understood. The money was just proof I'd gotten out. The life was the barn full of noise, and the laugh I could pull out of Stone twice a practice, and a coach who closed his door to ask if I was okay.
I let myself in. The house was quiet in the enormous way it always was. I dropped my keys in the bowl by the door, the bowl my decorator picked out, because I wouldn't have known to have a bowl.
The phone buzzed again in my bag.
931.
I turned it off. All the way off, thumb on the button till the screen went black. I stood there in the front hall of my ridiculous, beautiful, empty house and breathed until the buzzing in my chest matched the new quiet.
Monday, I thought. One interview. Some friend of Brynn's, here to ask me about hockey.
How bad could it be.