Chapter 20 Riley - September 2019, Pittsburgh #2
And I gave her four minutes of statistics, unbroken.
His zone exits, the penalty kill, the power play in Bratislava and the give-and-go and how the coaching staff had seen it in practice, and a whole thing about how international ice changes the reads, at a volume and a speed that would have embarrassed a man with any self-respect at all.
When I finally ran out she let about two seconds go by. "That's nice."
"What is?"
"Hm," said my mother. "Drive safe. Call your aunt."
Nine days later a box came. It was not the first care box she ever sent. It was the first one that had two of everything in it. Two tins of the peanut butter cookies, two pairs of the wool socks, two jars of the pickles from the church thing, two of the good chapsticks. There was no note.
I stood in my kitchen with a box open on the counter and did not ask myself one single question about it.
The December game was in our building. We won by two. And at one in the morning we did the pilgrimage. Stan's, out past the turnpike, roof from another era, number three still dead on the scoreboard, and Stan behind the counter with the portable television going.
"Hour," I said. "Cash."
He pushed the notebook across with the pen tied to it with string, and Nate printed N.
Ellis in block capitals without looking at it, the way he'd done it every time since December 2017, fast, like a man signing for a package.
Then he set the pen down on the open page and turned it so the end of it pointed at me.
I put my hands in my coat pockets. "Fingers are cold."
Stan took the cash. Nate looked at me for about a second and then went and got his bag.
I did not sign that book. I stood there with a pen pointing at me and a name I've used since I was twenty-two sitting right there in my mouth, and I put my hands in my pockets and lied about the weather.
We skated an hour. It was good. We laughed at something in the corner.
The All-Star weekend in January was in St. Louis and the two of us conducted an entire second conversation in a hotel bar in front of about sixty witnesses.
There was no room and no proposal that night, because his agent had him at a thing at seven the next morning and because the lobby was full of people with credentials.
So we did an hour at a bar. On purpose. In public. Two famous rivals having a beer, which is content, which is what everybody wanted, and three different people took a photo of it and one ended up on the league's account with a caption about respect.
The audible conversation was about the flex schedule.
For the better part of an hour, out loud, in a normal speaking voice, we discussed the compressed schedule, the back-to-backs in February, the travel out of the Pacific, and whether the league should be flexing games for television.
A guy from a rights holder joined in and left saying it was the most interesting conversation he'd had all weekend.
The other conversation was conducted in glances and glass angles and took the same hour. He turned his glass a quarter turn when he wanted me to keep going. He put two fingers on the base of it and turned it and did not look up, and it meant keep talking, and I've never told him I know that.
When somebody came over, I got loud. When they left, I got quiet. Twice, when the guy from the rights holder was mid-sentence, Nate looked at me for slightly longer than a man looks at somebody who is not talking, and both times I had to look at the taps.
And at the end, when we settled up, I took a cocktail napkin off the stack and folded it in half, square, and put it on the bar at the left end of the wood, pushed all the way over.
That is not a signal that exists anywhere in North America. It exists on one balcony rail on the sixth floor of a hotel in Bratislava, and it means goodnight, and I did not think about it before I did it.
He looked at it. Then he stood up, and put his coat on, and said, "See you in February, Kowalski," in a completely level voice, for the room, and went to the elevators.
I sat there for a minute with a folded napkin on a bar.
The terror came in February and it did not come from the schedule. It came from a guy with a phone.
An insider went on a Thursday morning show with a segment about cap crunches, and partway into it he said that Pittsburgh has decisions coming and that rival executives believe Riley Kowalski is the kind of asset who could be moved to solve a structural problem, and then he said a western city out loud, and then he moved on to a goalie in Ottawa. Ten seconds of a man's mouth.
The club put out a statement inside three hours saying nothing was imminent, and every single person in professional hockey understands that nothing is imminent is not a denial, and the same statement said discussions on an extension were ongoing, and ongoing is a word that means nothing has happened.
I was in a hotel in Colorado. I did my media. I said all the right things, that I love Pittsburgh, that it's a business, that my job is to play. I gave them the rink rat line and they printed it.
Then I sat on the end of a bed for two hours and drafted a text about no-movement clauses.
I got it good. That's the worst part. It was funny, it was about the fantasy league, a whole bit about how my franchise was exercising a no-movement clause and how the commissioner's office had better be aware of the contractual position, and about a foot under the joke was a sentence that said what happens to us if they send me two thousand miles away.
I deleted it.
That Sunday I sat at Bo Berglund's table and asked him, out of nowhere, in the middle of the gravy, at what point in a career a guy gets the leverage to say where he lives.
Michael put the bread down. Bo did not look up from his plate, and he did not answer for long enough that Michael started to.
"When he's willing to lose something for it," Bo said. Then he ate.
And he did not ask me why I wanted to know, which is the only reason I got through the rest of that meal, and he looked at me once on my way out the door in a way I have thought about since.
Nothing happened. There was no trade. There was no extension either. It just sat there, unresolved, for weeks.
There was a thing running along the bottom of the screen in the room that whole month, a crawl, a number out of a foreign city that kept going up.
Somebody asked about it at an availability in the first week of March and a guy from the club said we were following the league's guidance and washing our hands, and everybody laughed, and I laughed, and we played a game that night in front of eighteen thousand people.
A week and a half later I was standing in the hallway outside our room with my phone in my hand and Moose beside me with his coat already on, and the league suspended the season. They said it in about forty words, effective immediately, no timeline.
The room was strange. Guys went quiet and then made jokes and then went quiet again. Somebody asked whether we should take our gear. Nobody knew. Our equipment staff started packing anyway because they always do.
I went out to the parking lot and sat in the truck and did not start it.
And what I sat there thinking was not about the virus and it was not about hockey and I'm not proud of it. We had two games left with Philadelphia, one in April, in their building, and that was the whole thought.
Everything the two of us had ever been given, every hotel, every room number, every argument on a loading dock and every hour on a fresh sheet of ice at one in the morning, arrived because a league office put two teams in one city on a piece of paper.
The schedule was the excuse and the alibi and the delivery system.
It was the only third party in the world that had ever reliably brought me to him.
And it had just stopped, along with everything else, on a Thursday afternoon, with no timeline attached.
I sat there with my hands on the wheel of a truck a signing bonus bought and did not start it for a long time.