Chapter 11 Riley - May 2018, Hibbing
The dead weeks between getting knocked out and awards week belonged to Hibbing, and the first thing Hibbing did that year was produce Kayla.
Dex brought her to the Memorial Day cookout at his uncle's, and I'd been drafting the interview for about three weeks, because that was my job. I'm the customs officer of that man's heart. I've been the customs officer since third grade.
I got her at the cooler.
"So," I said. "Kayla. You know I have to do this."
"I've been told." She cracked a seltzer. "Go."
"How long, and what do you do?"
"Seven months. ER nurse in Hibbing, mostly nights."
"What's the worst thing you've seen?"
"A man who tried to remove his own tooth with a multi-tool," she said, "which I bring up because he was wearing a jersey with your name on it."
I laughed for a long time.
"Okay. Next. What's your five-year plan?"
"Charge nurse, and a house with a garage. What's yours?"
"Second contract."
"That's a number," she said. "That's not a plan. What's the plan?"
"That is the plan."
"Riley. That's what you'll have. What are you going to be doing?" She took a drink and looked at me over the can. "Also, can I ask you something? Why does a professional hockey player check his phone eleven times at a family dinner? And what's a two person fantasy league for?"
I looked at Dex, who was thirty feet away at the grill and who had clearly briefed her, and who did not look back.
"It's a joke," I said. "It's an old college thing."
"That's not what I asked. I asked what it's for."
It took her about as long as it takes to open a beer. I've interrogated a lot of people at a lot of cookouts and I've never once been reversed.
I hugged her and told Dex he was marrying up and that if he messed it up I'd testify against him. Then I drove home at eleven that night, fully aware that in one conversation I had told the truth by leaving things out three separate times.
My ex-girlfriend, Maddie, got married the second Saturday in June, and I ran that wedding.
I wasn't in the party. I was two tables back with an aunt and a guy who sold snowmobiles. But the best man got up and died in front of the whole room, just died, most of a minute of a story about a fishing trip that had no ending, and I was on my feet before I decided to be.
"Folks, can I get in here, because Tyler is being modest and he's leaving out the part where the boat sank."
The boat had not sunk. There was no boat. By the end of it there was a boat, and Tyler had saved a dog, and the room was crying laughing, and Tyler sat down like a man pulled out of a river.
Then I danced with three grandmothers in strict rotation, ten minutes each, because if you do two you've made an enemy.
And at the singles table around eleven, the inevitable.
"So when's it your turn, Riley?"
"Oh, I'm married to the game."
"That's what they all say."
"No, it's a real marriage. It's very demanding, it makes me travel eight months a year, and it has never once cooked."
There was a big laugh.
At midnight I was out in the parking lot with my tie loose, sitting on somebody's tailgate, and the DJ inside had gone to the Bee Gees for the fourth time.
Riley: this DJ has now played ‘stayin alive’ twice in the same set, and sped it up the second time
Nate: Sped it up how?
Riley: with a knob, nate. a man put his hand on a knob and made a decision
Nate: That's a war crime.
Riley: thank you. finally, a person with standards
The reply came back before I'd put the phone down.
It was midnight on a Saturday in the middle of June. There was no hockey in June. No schedule, no bus, no flight, no reason on this earth for a man to be sitting up.
And I knew for a fact where he was, because he had been in his mother's house in Camden since Tuesday. It meant a man was sitting up in a kitchen in Maine with his phone in his hand, awake, waiting.
I looked at that for a while. Then I put my phone in my pocket and went back inside and danced with a fourth grandmother, out of rotation, which was reckless.
It was awards week in Vegas, last week of June.
I wore my dad's wedding suit. Charcoal, two button, lapels that were having their own decade. My mother offered, very gently, at the kitchen table, three weeks out, to pay for a tailor.
"Just the sleeves, Riley. It's an inch."
"It's fine."
"It's an inch and a half, and there'll be photographs, and they'll be on the wall in this kitchen for the next forty years."
"Ma, It's fine."
She let it go. She always let it go, and then it turned up eight months later in a sentence. And I could not tell what the loyalty was made of. I just knew that if a man in Duluth shortened those sleeves I'd have felt like I sold something.
Moose came as my plus one. I asked him because I needed somebody formal to witness a thing like that.
"That is a famous quarterback," I said.
"He is smaller than I expected."
"And that's an actress he’s dating. She's in that thing with the submarine."
Moose looked at her for a while. "She has a very tired face," he said. "She is working hard tonight."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said about anybody."
"It was not nice," said Moose. "It was accurate."
I’d been working the circuit for four days. Being underestimated was a renewable resource and I've never once let it go to waste. Every reporter wanted the rink rat line, and I gave them the rink rat line, and I gave it better every time.
Then they gave the Calder Memorial trophy to Nate.
Closest vote in ten years. They said the number out loud from the podium, and it was close enough to what I'd called in a parking lot in Chester County in April that I could have collected on it.
I had a line ready, just in case I’d lose. I'd written it in the shower three days before and I'd said it out loud to a mirror twice.
They swung a camera to me for reaction, and I put on the grin, and I said, "Look, finishing second to a Sinclair is a proud American tradition. I'm honored to be part of it."
The ballroom went up. Big laugh, real laugh, the whole room. And exactly one person in that entire room heard what was in it.
I watched it get to him. He was up near the front, standing, holding the thing, and I saw his face take it.
It wasn't big. It was a flinch that went across the composed face like weather crossing a field, gone almost before it arrived.
Nobody in that room saw it but me, because I'm the only person in the world who has ever bothered to look.
The room was still laughing.
I stood there with a grin on my face and felt the joke go to ash in my mouth.
I spent the next hour finding out something I did not previously know about myself, which is that hurting Nate Sinclair on purpose feels exactly like high sticking yourself. You do it, and there's a second where you don't understand what happened, and then it's your own face.
The sponsor party was in a room with a glass wall and a view of a fountain.
I was getting a drink when I heard a guy behind me say the word Sinclair in the wrong tone. It was a hedge fund guy, two drinks in, talking to a woman who did not want to be talked to.
"It's a lottery ticket, is what it is," he said. "Genetics. Kid's got the name, the dad's on TV, the trophy's basically mailed to the house. It's not an award, it's an inheritance."
I turned around and smiled at him like an open net.
"Sorry," I said. "Hi. Say that again?"
And then I took him apart for four minutes.
I did the turnover count, which is fifth lowest among defensemen who play over twenty-two minutes.
I did the zone exits with possession, which is a stat nobody at that party had ever heard of and which I recited to one decimal.
I did his numbers against the other team's top line, which is the only number that means anything and which nobody looks at.
And then I did the part I hadn't planned.
"And nobody ever says the next part, so I'll say it," I said.
"He plays eighty-two games as the only guy in the building who has to be perfect.
Every single night. His last name's in the rafters in two buildings and his old man's got a headset on upstairs, and if he has a bad shift it's a referendum.
Do you know what that does to a person? You've never had to be perfect at anything in your life.
That kid's been on camera since he was sixteen and he has not made one mistake in public, not one, and you're standing here in a rented tuxedo calling it a lottery ticket. "
There were people watching by then. Quite a few of them.
"Anyway," I said. "Congratulations on holding an opinion that bad with a straight face, that takes real commitment," and I walked off.
My pulse was going and my drink was gone and I did not remember drinking it.
And a few steps out of that room I understood, with total clarity, that I had just defended Nate in public with more heat than I've ever defended my own name in my life.
At one in the morning I knocked on the door of Nate’s suite with a bottle of the good champagne from the sponsor party inside my jacket.
I stole it. I walked past a table and put a bottle in my jacket like a man in a movie and got in an elevator with it.
Riley: offering you my entire roster and three first rounders for the rights to one conversation. this is an insult and you should be offended
He opened the door already laughing.
"You stole that," he said.
"I liberated this."
"That's a $400 bottle."
"Then they shouldn't have left it standing on a table in a room I was in. That's not theft, Nate, that's a design flaw."
The rule was a few months old. Rule three, never during awards weeks, ratified on Marriott notepaper in February and never once tested.
It died on the threshold and neither of us filed a grievance.