Chapter 23 Nate - July 2021, Toronto #2
I hung up and stood in the front room of a house with four floors in it and understood that I had just hired scaffolding, and that scaffolding goes up around a building somebody intends to live in, and that I was no longer certain about the building.
The last thing that happened at that gala happened at the end of it.
He left early, and I saw it from across the room. He got his coat and shook two hands on the way, and at the door he stopped and turned around and found me, thirty feet plus a ballroom, and gave me one nod.
That's all it was. A small one, chin up about an inch and back down, the exact greeting a hundred men gave each other on a plant floor in Hibbing.
I gave him one back, perfectly, on the beat.
And then he went out, and I stood there and watched that door until the band finished one song and started another.
The thread died in November and it died of a franchise milestone.
Pittsburgh moved him up to second all-time in something, one of those records the clubs manufacture. It was on every feed, and I sat in a hotel room in Nashville with my thumb over the screen for a long time.
Nate: Congratulations on the record.
A sentence with a period on the end. I've written more warmly to men whose fathers have died.
It went unanswered. I checked the read receipt for two days and it stayed the same, and after the second day I stopped checking.
I could not do half of it. There is no version of Riley Kowalski I know how to have a small amount of. Silence was the only whole measure available, so I took it, and told myself it was discipline.
My grandfather drove down in December and ordered a sandwich.
"You look tired."
"I'm fine."
He put his glasses on to read a menu he did not read. "How's the house?"
"It's fine. The art's still on the floor."
"Buy a hammer, Nathaniel."
"Everyone tells me that."
He ate for a while. Then he put his fork down and looked at the middle of the table. "What happened to the fantasy league?"
I did not answer immediately. "It folded. There wasn't enough interest."
"How many members were there?"
"Two."
"That's a small league," Big Jack said.
He nodded slowly and picked his fork back up and ate two more bites and then set it down again. I could hear the restaurant around us. "I ever tell you about Terry?"
"Your roommate."
"Four years. End of the sixties." He was not looking at me. "Best hands I ever saw, and I've seen a lot of hands."
"You've told me."
"He ironed his laces," my grandfather said. "Flat as paper, every game, on the board in the room, and then he'd check them again before he went down. Always twice. And I'd say, Terry, they're laces."
"And he'd say, Jack, you don't understand."
He stopped, and looked up at me for the first time in minutes. "That's right. That's exactly what he'd say."
We finished lunch. He asked about my hip and I asked about the boat and he told me the whole thing about the carburetor again, and I let him, and I walked him out to his car.
And at the door of it he stopped with his hand on the roof, the way he always did, and he looked back at me.
And he stayed there, one beat and then two and then three, which had never happened.
There was an old man standing in a parking lot in December deciding whether to say a second thing, and I did not help him, and I watched him decide not to.
"Drive safe," he said. "Call your mother."
I got in my car and pulled out onto the road and got about four miles before I had to put the indicator on and stop, because I finally heard it.
He had been telling me that story since I was a child.
My father did an impression of it. There was a family position on the Terry story, and it was that the story was charming.
I sat on the shoulder of a road in Pennsylvania and understood that a man had been leaving a door unlocked for me for a very long time.
Never asking, just going out onto the porch every month and turning the light on and standing there for one beat too long, and then telling me to drive safe.
The launch was in January and it was professional.
Photographs by somebody who had done it for twenty years. A charity thing at a museum. Her hand flat on my lapel, laughing at something I had not said, which is a thing she could do in an instant and which is, I'm told, worth a great deal of money.
The tabloids had it before we were in the car. Hockey's new power couple. A man on television used the word dynasty for the second time in my life about something I had not done.
The lapel her hand was on was the left one, and there was a breast pocket behind that lapel.
From April of 2017 until roughly the end of that season there was a cocktail napkin folded in my wallet with a phone number on it in dried ink, which had first arrived in that pocket, delivered by a knuckle that went past a pocket square on the way out.
I noticed that in the car, on the way home, looking at the photograph on my own phone, and then I put the phone face down on the seat.
That night we lost by four at home and I was on the ice for two of them, and I came in and had two drinks, which for me was a lot.
And at about half past midnight I went out onto the balcony in a t-shirt in January with a towel. I folded it square and hung it over the rail and pushed it all the way to the left end.
There was nobody in that city who could read it. There was exactly one man on earth who could, and he was in Pittsburgh, and the thread had been dead since November, and the last thing on it was a sentence from me with a period on the end.
I stood out there for a while in the cold looking at a towel. Then I took it in, because I was ashamed of it, and I put it in the hamper and went to bed, and I slept better than I had in a month.
Ginny Okafor did the bag inventory on the Tuesday before our first western trip.
She had done it before every trip for five seasons. She went stall to stall with a roll of tape and a clipboard, and she did not talk while she did it, and nobody talked to her.
She got to my bag and opened the side pocket and took out the little bubble wrap pouch, and she checked it once, the way she checked everything, and then she put it in the pocket of the road bag and taped around it on two sides so it would not move and would not be covered.
A UMD keychain with the enamel worn off the face of the dog.
Fifth season, and she had never once asked, never once mentioned it, never once looked at me while she was doing it.
And I stood two stalls down with a stick in my hands and opened my mouth to tell her to leave it home this year. I had the whole sentence. It was short and it was reasonable and she would have said fine and put it in a drawer and never referred to it again for the rest of her life.
I did not say it. I stood there with my mouth open and then I shut it and looked down at the stick.
And Ginny Okafor, who had never once asked me a question in five seasons, taped the pouch down and zipped the pocket and then straightened up and looked at me. Then she picked up the bag and carried it out to the truck.