Chapter 5 #2
Nicole hunched her shoulders. “Shut up. I don’t post that often. I only got Instagram so I could follow my favorite Hallmark movie stars.”
“Wow.” Penny whistled. “That’s both adorable and incredibly pathetic.”
Nicole flipped her off.
Dabbs looked around for the Keeper of the Cup, wanting to include him in the conversation, but Ken was half asleep in a Barcalounger by the living room window. Considering how often he’d traveled with the cup, he’d probably seen it all at this point.
The cup stood next to the coffee table, tall and gleaming, while the coffee table itself was littered with empty pizza boxes and several empty bottles of wine.
Dabbs was feeling a little wine drunk and enjoying it, and when Steve—his stepdad—returned from the kitchen with yet another bottle, Dabbs let him fill his cup.
He was on vacation. Wine was basically a given.
He’d brought his dogs along on the drive to North Bay from Burlington, stopping every couple of hours so he could stretch his legs and they could run around and let off some energy.
Nicole and Penny had managed to time their arrival at Pearson International Airport in Toronto so that they landed within less than an hour of each other—Nicole from Ottawa where she worked as an analyst for the federal government, and Penny from Vancouver where she worked at a bike rental place downtown—so Dabbs had picked them up on his way north, and they’d spent the three-hour drive alternating singing along to the radio and catching up.
His dogs had been thrilled to have a lap to curl up in.
His mom disappeared into the kitchen while Penny and Nicole debated the value of hashtags, and when she came back, she had a bag of all dressed chips, a bag of sour candy, a box of two-bite brownies, and a bag of Oreos.
Clutching them to her chest as though she planned to devour them all herself, she peered into the top of the Stanley Cup.
Glancing at a sleeping Ken, she whispered, almost guiltily, “Can we drink the wine out of this?”
Dabbs couldn’t help but laugh.
He’d already cleaned it of sticky 7Up residue, so he waved a hand lazily to indicate she should go ahead and tried not to laugh as she poured an entire bottle into the cup’s bowl, giggling madly.
“Do you think anyone’s ever taken a commemorative pee in the cup?” his wine-drunk brain asked.
“Ugh, gross.” Penny shuddered.
“Why are boys so disgusting?” Nicole muttered.
“You could ask Ken when he wakes up,” Steve offered.
Nicole made gagging sounds. “That’s not a question I want an answer to.”
“I do,” Dabbs told her.
“You’re no longer part of this conversation.”
Dabbs laughed until his stomach hurt.
After another two—or maybe it was four—glasses of wine, Dabbs stood and stretched his arms over his head.
In the kitchen, he drank a full glass of water, then brought four glasses to the living room for the rest of his family.
Mom and Steve were passing the bag of Oreos between them, and Penny was pretending to be a ballerina, using the cup as her dance partner.
“I’m naming him Nespresso,” she announced, executing a wobbly pirouette.
“You’re naming the Stanley Cup Nespresso?” Dabbs asked, just for clarification.
“Yes. Because it’s an all-star trophy. And Nespresso is the all-star of coffee.”
Nicole held up one finger. “Incorrect. Kicking Horse Coffee is where it’s at.”
The debate reminded Dabbs of hanging out with Ryland in Maplewood—“We could go together like Timbits and coffee”—and since he had nothing to contribute to a debate about coffee, he stepped out onto the back porch to get some air.
It was almost midnight, yet the heat of the day lingered.
The porch steps led down to a fire pit surrounded with Muskoka chairs, and beyond that, the waters of Lake Nipissing lapped gently at the shore.
Dabbs sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the scents of home, and sat on the top step of the porch.
His phone buzzed in his pocket—a teammate asking how his day with the cup had gone—but because he was sufficiently drunk, he ignored it and called Ryland instead. Only belatedly did he recall what time it was, but Ryland answered with a questioning “Dabbs?”, so obviously it didn’t matter.
“Ry . . . ” In his inebriated state, Dabbs’ tongue tangled itself around the second half of Ryland’s name, and what came out on his second try was, “Rya?”
Muffled laughter. “Dabbs, are you drunk?”
“A little.”
“Oh my god, is this a drunk dial? My life is made. Are you at a bar or something?”
“Uh, no? Just had a lot of wine with my family. A looooooooooot of wine.”
Ryland snort-chuckled. “You’re going to regret that tomorrow.”
“I had pizza to soak up the booze. There was pineapple on it, though, so it wasn’t very good.”
For whatever reason, that set Ryland off, and his laughter in Dabbs’ ear made something in his stomach tumble.
“What were you doing that required so much wine?” Ryland eventually asked, still laughing.
“Talking. Catching up. Taking pictures with the cup. It’s my day with it, you know? Oh, wait, I seem to remember there were chicken wings at one point?”
“You don’t remember?”
Dabbs grinned at Ryland’s laughter. “The evening’s a bit hazy.”
“Sounds like you had a good day at least.”
“It started at a local hockey camp. There was no wine there. Just 7Up that the kids drank out of the bowl.”
“Aw. That was nice of you to do that.”
“It’s where I played hockey. Seemed appropriate. The kids let me take the first sip of 7Up out of the cup.”
“Photos, or it didn’t happen.”
“Oh. Hm.” Dabbs frowned. “There must be some floating around online. Most of the kids had phones, and so did their parents. Send them to me if you find them.”
He hadn’t taken any of his own, too busy with everything else to remember to take any, a fact he was regretting now. He wanted something to commemorate his afternoon at the arena.
“I’ll take a look later,” Ryland said. There was a rustling sound on his end, and Dabbs tried to place it.
“Are you in bed? Did I wake you?”
He tried not to think about Ryland in bed, but he was just drunk enough to imagine Ryland all tanned and messy-haired with the sheets pulled temptingly up to his waist, one leg enticingly exposed.
“I was just watching a movie on my laptop,” Ryland said. “My dad and I went kayaking on Lake Champlain, and we got back late. I was too wired to sleep, so I put on a movie.”
Dabbs rose and descended the porch steps, the wine making him restless. “You and your dad are close?”
“Yeah. He’s the best. Pretty much raised me, Jason, and Brie.
” Another rustle that had Dabbs’ brain going places it shouldn’t.
“My mom moved out of Maplewood after they separated. Not far, but far enough that we’d have needed to change schools if we lived with her.
So we stayed with my dad during the week, and my mom had us every other weekend until she moved to France. ”
“I thought . . . ” Dabbs paused and attempted to align his thoughts. He sat in one of the Muskoka chairs, the purple one that was Penny’s favorite. “The way you talked about your parents’ divorce when I was in Maplewood, it sounded like . . . I don’t know. Like maybe you had it tough growing up.”
“Sure,” Ryland murmured. “Divorce is hard on kids. But as I got older, I eventually realized it was just as hard for my parents. As an adult, I can appreciate how difficult it must’ve been for my dad to single-parent us until my stepmom came along.
” A thump came from his end of the line. “Ah, fuck.”
“Did you drop your laptop?”
“My water. I forgot I had it next to me in bed, and when I shifted . . . damn it, it went everywhere. The mattress is wet, the carpet too. Gah. Hang on, I’ve got to put you down.”
A wet mattress. Christ. Ryland was sending his mind into the gutter without even trying.
“Okay, I’m back,” Ryland said a moment later. “I moved to the other side of the bed. I don’t want to sleep in the wet spot.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Dabbs pinched the bridge of his nose, picturing an altogether different sort of wet spot.
“What are you doing anyway?” Ryland asked, oblivious to Dabbs’ state of mind. “Not still drinking, are you?”
“No, I’ve switched to water. I’m sitting in a Muskoka chair in my parents’ yard, looking up at the stars.”
“What the actual fuck is a Muskoka chair?”
“It’s similar to an Adirondack chair.”
Ryland grunted his understanding. “Cool. Soooo . . . not that I’m not glad you called, but . . . why did you?”
“Would you believe it was a butt dial?”
Ryland snorted a laugh. “No.”
“Well, good. Because it wasn’t,” Dabbs said, the wine forcing honesty out of him.
“I just wanted to talk to you. But I’m thinking I need to get some sleep.
My dogs did the smart thing and bunked down together in my room hours ago.
I think I need to join them. Plus, there’s a cricket eyeing me from the chair next to me, and I’m a little concerned it’s going to attack.
” Dabbs squinted at it. He would’ve sworn it squinted back.
“A . . . cricket?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like, the bug?”
“I think it’s technically an insect.”
The line went quiet for a few seconds, then Ryland said, “Dabbs.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Are you afraid of bugs?”
Dabbs shuddered, recalling being starfished on his back in the middle of the night on Ryland’s farm. Anything could’ve crawled on him. “Uh, yeah.”
“But . . . you said you were an outdoorsy person.”
“There’s enjoying the outdoors, and there’s enjoying multilegged creepy-crawlies with antennae. The two are not mutually exclusive.”
Ryland laughed long and loud, his guffaws making Dabbs grin against the night.
And if the sound of his laughter unfurled something warm in Dabbs’ chest, that was okay.
Surely, it was only temporary.