Chapter 20 Riley - September 2019, Pittsburgh
The summer was quiet.
The thread came back on about a week after the charter landed, exactly the way it had always been, box scores and insults and a photograph of a tie, and neither of us said one word about a rooftop pool in Bratislava. We had a warehouse of those. We kept it locked and we never did inventory.
Camp opened the second week of September and on the fourth day the equipment guy handed me a sweater with a letter on it, an A, stitched and not ironed, which mattered to me for reasons I could not defend in court.
Alternate captain at twenty-four, and I stood there holding it like a guy who has been handed a baby.
Bo was leaning in the doorway with a coffee. "Don't look at me."
"I'm not looking at you."
"You're looking directly at me."
"Was it you?"
"It was a room full of people and I was one of them," Bo said, "and I talked for about four minutes, and I'd have talked longer if anybody had disagreed with me, and nobody did." He drank his coffee and went away.
The two transcripts were still taped inside the stall door.
I did the thing for the cameras on opening night the way I always have, the slap, the bit, free rent, boys.
But the accounting had changed. I read them maybe four times that whole fall, and I only believed them once, on a night in Buffalo when I had no points and a minus two and my back was seizing.
In my rookie year it was once a week. I did not examine what had changed.
I had a theory and I kept it in the warehouse.
Philadelphia named their captain on the 17th of September.
It was the biggest sports story in America for two days, because Nate was twenty-four and it was the youngest in the history of that franchise, and because a network had been building the story since he was sixteen and finally got to run it.
His father did four segments. There is a clip of Grant Sinclair saying the word dynasty with his hands flat on the desk and then having to stop because his own throat got him, and I wanted to be a bigger man about that clip, and I wasn't.
I watched the press conference twice. The first time was for content. He thanked the organization. "The letter belongs to the room," he said. "I'm only holding it for a while." Then he talked about the guys who had it before him, by name, in order, and it was flawless.
The second time was for cadence, which is not a thing I've ever admitted to anyone.
He does a thing before a hard question where he takes a quarter breath in and lets a quarter of it out, and it has been happening since he was twenty-one in a cinder-block hallway in Chicago, and there were four of them in that press conference.
Then I sat on my couch and drafted congratulations.
I drafted seven. Number one looked like it came from a bank.
Number two had the word deserved in it, which is a word we do not use, because if you use deserved with a Sinclair you are having a whole other conversation.
Number four had the phrase nobody else could carry that building in it, and I read it back and my ears went hot in an empty apartment. Number six was worse than four.
Number seven was one line. Proud of you.
I looked at that one for a long time. He had told me about that text once, at one in the morning off exit fourteen, in the flat voice he keeps for things that cost him something: forty-one messages on his phone the night he lost a national championship, and one of them from his grandfather, and it said proud of you, always, and it was the only one he read twice.
He handed me that for nothing, the way he handed me everything.
And if I sent those three words back to him now he would know exactly whose they were and what I meant by them, and there would be no way back.
I deleted all seven, and sent something else instead.
Riley: formally lodging a complaint with the league office regarding the stitching quality of the C on the philadelphia sweater.
it's crooked. it's visibly crooked on a national broadcast. proposing my entire roster for the rights to that letter, which I intend to have re-stitched by a professional and then destroyed.
this offer is an insult and I want you to feel insulted
Nate: It's not crooked. It's hand-stitched by a woman who has done it for this organization for thirty years and it is deliberately set two degrees off the placket because of the way the shoulder sits, which you would know if you had ever in your life looked at a jersey instead of chewing on one.
Offer rejected. Your roster is a tax shelter. Thank you.
I read that last one until the screen went dark.
Riley: shut up
Nate: Goodnight, Kowalski.
The referendum came the following Thursday over cards. Preseason, one of those hotel ballroom card games with four guys in it and a room service tray, and two of our veterans got going, the way rooms do.
"It's a nepotism C," said one of them. He is a good player and a good man and he has not said an interesting thing in years. "That's all that is. That's a network protecting an asset. That kid inherited that letter like a summer house."
"He's twenty-four," said the other one. "What's he done?"
And I was on my feet. I had not decided anything. There was no position in me that I was aware of, and then there was a chair going back and me standing up with a hand full of cards. "Okay, no."
"Riley."
"No, we're doing this, because that's the third time this week I've heard it and it's lazy.
" I put the cards down. "You want to know what he's done?
He's the best pre-scout brain in this league and I'm including coaches.
He knows sixty-odd goalies by tendency. He knows where your goalie goes when he's had to move twice inside four seconds, and he's got it in his head, no paper, and he's had it since he was twenty-two. "
"That's not captaining."
"It's all captaining! What do you think the letter is?
He's killed penalties against me for three years and I've been personally robbed by that man on a two-on-one twice, in this building, and both times I did everything right.
" I was going now. "And he plays every single shift like the building's grading him.
Every one. Sixty minutes, eighty-two nights, because his old man is literally in the building with a headset on describing his mistakes to a million people in real time.
You've had a bad shift in front of your father, Petro?
Ever? Has your dad ever told America what your bad shift meant, and then come down and had dinner with you afterward like it never happened? "
Nobody said anything.
"You get one bad night, it's a bad night. He gets one bad night, it's a referendum on the sport. He's been on camera since he was sixteen and I've never once seen him make a mistake in public. Not one. And you're sitting here at a card table calling it a summer house."
The room went completely quiet.
I stood there with my heart going and my ears hot and understood that I had just given a three-minute closing argument at a preseason card game about a man I was supposed to hate. So I sat down. "Anyway. Whose deal?"
Moose dealt the whole hand around, and when he got to me he put my cards down and did not let go of them for a second. "You argue cheap."
"I argue what?"
"Against everyone in this league you argue cheap. Little chirps. Nothing costs you anything." He let go of the cards. "For one person you argue expensive."
"Deal the cards, Ludvig."
"I have dealt them, and you have not looked at them, and that is also information."
The first Sunday in October, at Bo's, in the middle of the gravy going around the table, Bo Berglund said, "Careful is a full-time job with no pension." And went back to his meat.
There was no setup. We had been talking about a rookie defenseman and then we had stopped talking, and then he said that, to his plate, in his gravel, and did not look up.
Michael passed me the bread. "Bread, Riley. He does that. He says a thing and then he eats. You get used to it. Thirty-two years."
"Thirty-one," said Bo.
"Thirty-one and eleven months, and you're counting from the wrong day, and we're not doing this in front of the boy."
"The boy is twenty-four and plays professional hockey."
"The boy is eating my chicken and doesn't need a demonstration."
And they were off about a date in 1990, and I sat there with a piece of bread in my hand and a sentence sitting on the table in front of me like a tool somebody had set down where I would eventually need it, and nobody picked it up and nobody mentioned it again.
My mother called on a Wednesday in November while I was driving. "The furnace is magnificent."
"Ma."
"I'm telling you what your father says. He says it's magnificent. He said the word out loud in this kitchen, Riley, I nearly sat down." I could hear water running. "It made a noise last week and he was down there four hours and it turned out to be the dryer."
"How's the plant?"
"They're doing another one of those reviews. Bev's boy got moved to nights. Your father says nothing about it and mows the lawn about it."
"Yeah."
"Uh-huh." A cupboard shut. "So when are you going to tell me anything real about the Sinclair boy?"
I went straight over a pothole. "About who?"
"The announcers have been putting the two of you in the same sentence for three years, honey.
That thing in Slovakia was on our television at seven in the morning and your father made coffee for it, and then he stood up for the whole second period, and he has not stood up for a hockey game since you were in juniors.
" She said it exactly like she says everything.
Denise Kowalski has never once raised her voice and never once needed to. "So?"