Chapter 28 Riley - February 2024, Pittsburgh
The thread changed inside a week, and it changed the way a river changes, which is that it kept the same banks and put different water in it.
Riley: the rice incident is sealed
Nate: Nothing is sealed. There's no court.
Riley: there's a commissioner
Nate: There's a commissioner and he's had four hours of sleep and he'd like to say something that isn't a trade proposal.
Riley: say it
Nate: I've been up since five. You were the first thing I thought about and it wasn't a decision.
I read that in a parking garage in Detroit and stood there so long a guy from our video staff asked me if my car was gone.
We built the machine so neither of us would ever have to hand the other one a plain sentence, and then the plain sentences started coming through it anyway, hidden in the bylaws like contraband in a wheel well.
Neither of us said the other word. Not once that whole spring. It was not fear. It was two guys with a lead in the third who had decided, without discussing it, that nobody says the word shutout on the bench.
The March game was in my building and we lost it by two, which is the only detail of that hockey game I retained.
His team had flown home without him, a fiction about family that nobody in that organization believed anymore and nobody questioned either.
At one in the morning we came off the turnpike and went out past the field to Stan's.
Roof from another era, number three still dead on the scoreboard, portable television going behind the counter with the sound off.
Stan pushed the notebook across with the pen tied to it with string.
Nate printed N. Ellis in block capitals, and then set the pen down on the open page and turned it so the end pointed at me, which was the exact thing he did on the 17th of December, 2019, when I put my hands in my coat pockets and said something about my fingers being cold.
I picked it up and wrote H. Baker underneath. The last time those two names were on a page together was six years earlier. One line above them, in my handwriting, from June, was the date and the words Stanley Cup.
"That's an intimidating neighborhood," I said. "Two fake names under a Cup."
"Sign the book, Kowalski. The ice is paid for and you're the one who wanted it."
Stan turned it around and read the whole thing at his own speed, top to bottom, the way he read everything, and then he turned it back and took the cash and wrote 1:00 in the column.
And then Stan, who I'd known since I was twenty-two, who had said maybe nine words to me in that entire time, and who once communicated a standing ovation by putting his hands in his pockets, said, "Ice is better when it gets used. "
Both of us stood there.
"Say that again," I said. Stan went back to his television.
We took that as a papal blessing and skated for an hour. Forty minutes in he beat me clean on a keep-away thing that had no rules.
"The referee's compromised," I said.
"There's no referee, Riley."
"Exactly. That's my whole objection and you've just entered it into the record for me."
The brownstone happened on bye weeks and off days and it happened fast. I stood in that kitchen for the first time in the second week of March and turned around once with my hands out.
"This is a professional kitchen."
"You told me to buy the house for this room."
"That was advice, Nate. That wasn't a prophecy. You've had four years. How many times have you used that oven?"
"Twice. Once for the ramekins, and once for a thing my mother mailed me with instructions taped to the lid."
I cooked in that room like a threat. Michael Berglund had fed me every Sunday he could get me for three years, and he did not teach anything, he narrated it while he was doing it, and I turned out to have been taking notes without knowing it.
Pot roast. The horseradish that could strip paint.
The bread with the crust on it, which took two attempts and a phone call.
Then the crème br?lée, because there were six ramekins in that cupboard and one of them had ever been used.
"You strain it," he said, from the end of the island. "And I strained mine badly, so take that as a warning from the bench and not a note from the press box."
"Everybody does it badly the first time. That's not a character flaw, that's a sieve." I poured. "And I'd like it on the record that you made one of these alone at one in the morning while watching a man win a Cup on television."
"I told you that."
"At four in the morning, in the dark, in the middle of a list of other crimes. That's not telling. That's disclosure under subpoena."
Then the torch. There was a correct way, and the flame kept moving and left an amber sheet across the whole top with nothing dark on it anywhere. I'd watched Michael do it a hundred times. I had functioning hands.
I went around the outside rim twice.
"It's a signature," I said.
"It's burnt."
"There's precedent, and the precedent is a tray outside a door in a sealed building in August of 2020, which was received, and misread, and which I've had a grievance pending on ever since. You can eat the evidence or you can dispute it. You can't do both."
He cracked the top of it and ate it standing up at the counter with the light over the sink off, because that was the only way he had ever eaten one, and I stood four feet away and had to go and look at the refrigerator for a minute.
The rest of that house I fixed with my hands, because that was the only dialect I owned. There was a light in the second floor hallway with a fault in the switch and he had lived with it for four years, reaching out in the dark and hitting it twice.
"How long's it been doing that?"
"Since I moved in."
"It's a switch, Nate. It cost $9, and you've stood in this hallway hitting it twice a night for four years like a man doing penance.
" I had the plate off already. "Do you know what my father would do in this house?
He'd find this in a morning, and he'd fix it, and he wouldn't say one word about it, and then he'd be strange for the rest of the day. "
"Strange how?"
"Quiet. Unbearably kind. He'd go down and look at your furnace and come up with a whole other list." I got the screw out and put it in my mouth and took it out again. "Hold the light steady. You're the one who has to live with a working switch."
Then the art, which had been leaning against a wall in a row, still wrapped, since 2017. Two apartments and one house. Eight years of a man waiting for somebody to give him permission. I hung all of it in an afternoon and he held the level and did not say a word for two hours except numbers.
Then a bookshelf, flat-packed, with instructions in two languages and both of them wrong, and we had a real argument about it that ended with the shelf up and me on the floor with a screwdriver, laughing so hard my ribs hurt, while he stood over me reading the diagram out loud like a man reading a will.
Somewhere in there the house stopped being a question in the shape of a building.
Bye week mornings started lazy and ended late. There was no departure time attached to anything, and after seven years of hotel rooms with a bus in the courtyard, neither of us had any idea what we were like without one. We found out slowly, and then not slowly, and then slowly again.
Rule six got repealed on a Tuesday.
"Six," I said, into his shoulder. "Nothing that leaves marks. I'd like to move that six is repealed, effective immediately, no grandfather clause, no review."
"I remember six. I wrote six." He got a hand in my hair and pulled my head back, not hard, just enough, and looked at me for about two seconds. "Seconded."
And then he ratified it, visibly, an inch below his own collar line, in the exact spot where a February treaty once drafted itself around a bruise the size of a nickel. In the morning he stood at the mirror doing his tie and did not raise his collar, and I lay in that bed and watched him not do it.
"You've got a media availability Thursday," I said. "And that is not going to be gone by Thursday."
"Then I'll be asked about it," he said, and did the knot, "and I'll say I don't know what they're talking about, which I've been doing since I was sixteen, and this time it'll be the only lie I tell all week." He found me in the mirror. "Go back to sleep, Kowalski."
"I'm not tired. I'm supervising."
The other finding we filed jointly, under overdue, was that sex without a departure time is a different sport entirely.
Everything we knew about each other had been learned inside a window with a clock on it.
Take the clock off and we had to learn the whole thing again from first principles, and after seven years of road games it turned out we were built for it.
A key ended up on my ring in the third week of April.
He didn't hand it to me and I didn't ask.
It was on the counter by the fruit bowl one morning, and I put it on the ring next to a $2 bulldog with the face worn off it, and both of us clocked exactly what had happened and neither of us said one word.
Everybody else noticed in smaller pieces.
Ginny Okafor did the April bag inventory and found the bubble wrap pouch empty, and a kid from video was standing in the doorway when she did it, and it came back to Nate inside a day.
"She turned it over, and she checked the pocket next to it, and then she said, to nobody in an empty equipment room, well, there goes my streak."
"What streak?"
"She's been telling the assistants since 2017 that the pouch is a superstition and that touching it is bad luck.
She invented that herself. She has never once asked me what's in it and she has never mentioned it since.
" He put his coffee down. "That woman guarded a $2 keychain for seven seasons without a single piece of information. "
Moose came and stood at my stall in May.