Chapter 24 Riley - August 2021, Hibbing #2
"And one night in February of eighty-eight we sat in that diner until four in the morning.
" Bo put his fork down. "And nothing happened.
Everybody wants there to be a moment, and there wasn't one.
We sat in a booth for six hours and talked about our fathers, and then we went back to the hotel, and neither of us said anything about it for two years. "
"Two and a half," said Michael.
"Two."
"You're counting from the wrong day again."
I sat there with my hands flat on the table. "Thirty-four years."
"And what did people call it?"
"Roommate," Bo said. "That's the only word there was. Thirty-four years of a word that means two beds."
"We bought this house in both names in 2015," Michael said.
He was not looking up, he was cutting something.
"The year it stopped being complicated on the paperwork.
We signed at a title company on a Wednesday morning and went to lunch afterward at a place with a laminated menu, and there was nobody there.
No family, nobody knew. We had the soup. "
"It was a good soup," said Bo.
"It was an adequate soup."
And I sat at that table and heard myself say it.
"I'm bisexual."
I did not decide to. There was no run-up.
I had been carrying that word since I was nineteen and I had said it out loud exactly one time in my life, at twenty-two, flat on my back in a Courtyard Marriott off exit fourteen, in the dark, inches from another man, and only because I'd lost a run of events and the debt was payable.
I said it in a dining room in the South Hills with the lights on, at a table, sober, with nobody owed anything.
And Bo Berglund said, "Michael, is there more of that bread?"
"There's more of the bread."
Michael got up and went to the counter and came back with the good bread, the one with the crust on it, and put it down on my plate, not on the table, and then he sat back down and picked up his fork.
"I played with a guy in ninety-one," Bo said, to his food.
"Winger. Good hands, no feet. He figured it out about me inside a month, faster than anybody else ever has, and he never said a word about it to me or to anybody in that room, and for ten years, every time somebody in a locker room started up, he'd say something loud about something else.
" He chewed. "He died in 2009. I went to the funeral.
His wife knew exactly who I was and she'd never met me. "
"Bo, you never told me that."
"Anyway. Eat the bread."
"The bread's the good one," Michael said. "He never gets the good one, he doesn't deserve it."
"I've had a hard year."
"You've had a hard thirty-four years, apparently."
And they were off about a date in 1982, and I sat there with a piece of bread in my hand and my ears going and my eyes doing something I had not authorized, and nobody at that table looked at me for a long time, on purpose, and I've never in my life been handled more gently by two people who did not appear to be handling me at all.
I drove home at nine o'clock.
I had my phone in the cupholder the whole way, and I did not call my mother or Dex or text one single person on this earth about the biggest thing that had happened to me in two years.
Because there was exactly one person, and there had been since a Marriott off exit fourteen, and the reason I could not tell him is that he is the reason there is a thing to tell.
The 19th of January, early, hotel gym in Tampa. I had been in that room before.
Treadmill, wall of screens, and the third screen from the left ran an entertainment segment.
Photographs from a museum. Him in a dark suit and Penelope Ostrander in something green, her hand flat on his lapel, both of them laughing. And the chyron said hockey's power couple.
I got off the belt. I did not slow it down, I hit the red button and stepped off onto the deck while it was still going, and stood there with my hands on the rail and my heart going and read that chyron over and over.
In 2018, in a room a lot like that one, the exact same thing happened and I put it in a folder called competitive analysis and did another four miles at a pace I had no business doing.
I'd run that filing system since I was twenty-two.
It had processed every single thing that ever happened to Nate Sinclair, a woman touching his arm at a gala in San Jose and a chyron with a little heart-shaped puck on it, and it had never once failed.
It failed in front of a guy from our fourth line who was doing a stretch.
I flew home that afternoon. There was snow coming across the state from Ohio and I got in the truck at nine at night in it anyway and drove on roads I had no business being on to a driveway in the South Hills. Then I sat at the bottom of the drive with the engine running and did not go up.
I sat there a long time.
Then the porch light came on and Michael came out in a coat over a cardigan with a container in his hands, and he came all the way down that driveway in the snow in house shoes, and he opened the passenger door and got in and shut it.
"It's chicken and rice," he said. "It's not the good soup, the good soup is Thursday. Eat it in the truck, I don't care."
"I'm fine."
"Yes," Michael said, and put it on the dash and did not look at me.
We sat there a while with the wipers going on the intermittent.
Then the door behind me opened and Bo Berglund got into the back seat of my truck, which took a while, because he was sixty-one and his knees were what they were.
Nobody said anything for another minute.
"How long?" Bo said.
I looked at him in the mirror.
"That's the question. It's not who. I've known who since about February of 2019, when you sat on my front step and told me a phone was a phone." He settled his shoulder into the corner of the seat. "So?"
And I heard myself answer it, and the answer came out with a specificity that frightened me more than anything else in that truck.
"Four years and nine months. Since the 12th of April, 2017. It was a banquet in Chicago. There was a seating chart and I read it upside down over a staffer's shoulder the night before, and I saw my name next to his, and I felt like I'd been handed a five minute power play."
The truck ticked. In the mirror I watched Bo Berglund shut his eyes and put his head back against the window.
"Okay," he said.
"That's the whole file."
"Okay, kid."
Michael handed me the container.
The hockey response was very me.
From the 20th of January to the end of February I had thirty-one points in twenty-four games. The Post-Gazette ran a column about a leadership leap. A national panel did a segment on the maturation of Riley Kowalski, and a man in a checked jacket said the word professional four times.
I won games furiously. I blocked shots in the first period of a Tuesday in Arizona. I smiled at absolutely nobody the entire month and no one noticed, because the press was busy describing my face as focus.
The hook came in late February and it was very small.
I was in my apartment at eleven at night with the lights off and the laptop open, and I did the thing I had been not doing for six weeks, which was that I found the launch photograph and made it big.
And I went over it like game film. I did it properly, quadrant by quadrant, the way I did a video package.
Background, foreground, hands, feet, eye line.
Her hand on the lapel. His weight on the back foot, which is what he did when he was being photographed and wanted it over.
A step and repeat with a museum's name on it over and over.
And then I got to the tie.
Navy, beautiful weave, half windsor, correct dimple, executed by a man who had been my client for four years whether he liked it or not. And completely generic.
There was no pattern in it, no small thing in it, not one grain of rice on that entire piece of silk.
It was the tie a stylist hands a man off a rail in a room where somebody is holding a clipboard.
I'd been rating that man's neckwear since November of 2017 and I've never once seen him photographed in a tie that did not have some ridiculous thing hidden in it that his mother put in a box and mailed him from Camden, Maine.
Zambonis. Paisley you could hear. Two hundred lighthouses the size of a grain of rice.
And I sat there with the laptop open on a photograph of a man on a red carpet with a woman's hand on his chest, and the thing that went through me was relief.
It came up from underneath and went through my whole body, and it was violent, and it was so shameful that I said something out loud in an empty room.
Because nobody who knows him dressed him for that. Somebody on a payroll did.
I closed the laptop. Then I sat in the dark for a long time with my hands on my knees, because a chyron can say anything it wants and a photograph can be arranged by professionals, and a piece of silk with nothing on it had just told me the truth, and I did not have one single thing I was allowed to do about it.