chapter 16
Gus
“You’re. In. Reyes,” Cameron panted, skating into the box and flinging himself onto the bench, injecting water into his mouth from his Gatorade bottle. “You, too, Father. Get out there. Last shift before we pull the goalie. Don’t let anything through.
I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t stay warm. Couldn’t keep my thoughts on the game, my skating, my passing or puck handling. All I was thinking about was what I’d done to fail Decca. Yet again. Because at every turn, I was disappointing her somehow.
Since my ordination, she’d barely said two words to me. I’d tried to talk to her. Tried to ask her to be patient with me while I worked on myself.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe I wasn’t giving her enough space. So much had changed in the past month. My job. The house.
I’d thought I was doing her a favor by tidying the house. I thought she’d left it for so long because she hadn’t had time to emotionally sort through everything from the three-year-old dirty Kleenexes to the collection of cracked-spined paperbacks about angels and chicken soup. I thought I was making it a home for us. But all I’d done was driven another wedge between us.
Forget hockey. What I really needed to be learning was my wife.
“Stick down, Padre! Keep your stick down!” Waylon shouted, itching to come out of the penalty box and make one last attempt at a goal. Shit. The puck slid right by me. I turned and sprinted after it, but since I could barely skate, my sprint wasn’t worth much.
With my eyes laser-focused on the ice in front of me, I’d actually been able to pick up some speed. I turned my head toward the bench. Were the guys seeing this?
I looked up too late. The hit slammed me backward, flat on the ice, knocking the wind out of me. “Sorry, Padre,” said a man the size of a brick wall, as he skated off after the puck.
The other team fell on the puck and sent it straight down the ice in the opposite direction. I watched, still fumbling to get to my knees, as number seven pulled his stick back and shot it straight into the upper right corner of the goal.
And straight into George’s glove!
Waylon, Cameron, and the rest of the guys cheered. I could almost register the surprise on George’s face. The man was actually good.
Thirty seconds later, I was getting booted off the ice by a scowling Waylon, as he came on to win the face off in the last minute of the game, but ultimately lose the game five to four, because the rest of us were still shit.
I’d always been pretty decent at picking up sports, but apparently my skills ended on the ice. Reyes was becoming a good skater, but he was a Ferdinand the Bull type—with all his bulk, he was too hesitant to actually block an offensive play. Cameron was a good shooter, but couldn’t catch passes. And George had thrown himself in the path of a lot of pucks tonight, but still... five four.
“We doing beers after?” Reyes asked as we waited in line for the handshakes.
“Beers. And they’re on you until you can learn how to block your zone.” Waylon shoved him in the back.
“Good game.”
“Good game.”
“Sorry, Father,” said a guy who’d gotten a penalty for tripping me, even though I’d really tripped over my own skates.
“Good game.”
We were the worst team in beer league hockey, but the losses still felt like we played for the Predators and just lost game seven of the playoff finals.
Waylon felt it the hardest, since he was the only one of us who regularly played.
He was the cruise director of this ragtag group of deathcare spouses, which basically meant he had gathered up all the thirty-something men he knew and figured out something we could do as a bonding thing. And since making friends after college seemed like an impossible feat, we were all pretty fast to admit we needed the guy time.
Except hockey might not have been the best choice of activity. Waylon was a center and won us a shit ton of face-offs. Javier Reyes and I, who flanked him, were still figuring out how to catch passes, so we lost the puck just as quickly as Waylon won it.
Ewen Cameron, a Williamson County District Attorney, was roped in as a defender, since he was tall, fast, and strong. Just not on the ice.
And then there was George: loner, grump, perpetual weirdo. He was our goalie. Anyone who willingly stood in the path of a puck careening towards his chest at ninety miles per hour—probably closer to fifty in the beer leagues—had to be slightly off kilter. It fit my brother to a tee and the only reason we ever won games was because he was off kilter enough to stop a lot of pucks.
Thus, the Puck Bearers were born. Our logo, designed by George’s stepdaughter, featured a cartoon Grim Reaper wielding a hockey stick instead of a scythe.
Because, of course, we were all married to the dead.
“I only request we go somewhere outside,” Reyes said. “‘Cause we smell like shit, and none of us are showering in that gross-ass locker room.”
“You share a bathroom with five kids. I’d think you’d welcome the relative privacy of a locker room shower,” Cameron said.
“Dude. Have you seen my shower? I’ve got, like, nine shower heads built into the wall and ceiling. No kids allowed.” Javi shot Cameron a for-fucks-sake look. “Besides, I clean the bathroom of my five kids, and it sparkles like diamonds when I’m done. Who knows when the last time the locker room bathroom was cleaned. That grout is black. And I’m not into communal showers, unless the commune is Tiff and me.”
Reyes’s wife, Tiff, was an autopsy tech. She laid out the bodies, performed the initial exterior examinations, did the imaging, and was Soula’s right-hand woman in the county morgue.
“I request somewhere closer to home, since I have the farthest to drive,” I said.
“The Pig it is,” George sighed. “I just hope someone good is playing tonight. Not some pop-country duo trying to suck enough dicks to open for a bigger pop-country duo.”
“Way to keep it positive, George,” I said.
“My pleasure,” George grinned.
Waylon stormed in and threw his stick into the corner of the locker room. “Fuck. We had them. I thought we had them.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this pissed,” I said to Reyes.
“Dude. You know you fucked up, right?” Reyes hoisted his shoulder pads over his head.
“Yeah, man. I tripped him. It was an accident.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You left your brand-new wife alone at your parents’ house for dinner.”
“What do you mean? Her friends showed up. She’s used to being there without me.”
Reyes gave me side-eye so bad it looked like he might have an aneurism.
“You weren’t married then. And your mom was there.”
“So?”
“Yeah… don’t do that.” Reyes looked shell-shocked. Then he cringed like a ghost walked over his grave. “Don’t ever leave her alone with your mom. You deal with your family; she deals with hers. I don’t give out marital advice very often. That’s the freebie. Saved Tiff and me a lot of unnecessary squabbles over the years. And it saves Dec from that common trap of doing all the mental heavy lifting for both of you in a marriage. Don’t be that guy. Don’t pawn your family of origin off on your wife.”
“He made a commitment to the team, too,” Waylon said. “He supposed to leave us without a wing so he can babysit his wife? She’s a big girl. Decca can take care of herself.”
“We might as well have played without a wing,” Cameron said. “I don’t know where Gus’s head was at tonight.”
“You’re one to talk, the way you keep hanging out in our zone. You gave Forty-Three a clear shot at the goal.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Waylon’s eyes narrowed as he shoved his pads into his bag. He stopped zipping and looked up, pointing to me. “We’ll recap your game at the bar, Padre.”
George raised his eyebrows as we threw our sticks and bags in the back of the truck.
“You really sucked out there, man,” he said after we’d been on the road for several minutes.
“I should go back to skating clinic. Stick and shoots,” I said to the window.
“No, like, you always suck, but you extra-sucked tonight. What’s going on? Are you and Dec—”
“Yeah, yeah. Everything’s good. It’s an adjustment, being married.”
“Well, yeah. That’s true for everyone. And in your case, the adjustment’s colossal. But it’s more than that. Don’t bullshit me. You don’t seem very happy.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I am happy. It took a lot of work. It takes continuous work. I don’t have the natural inclination towards it. You do. And it’s lacking right now. I know how you feel about Decca. This should be the best time of your life. Before all the petty annoyances kick in, and you need the break of hockey because you can’t stand that your wife keeps forgetting to wring out the sponge and she just drops it, sopping wet, in the bottom of the sink and walks away.”
“Did Bethany forget to wring out the sponge?”
“Hypothetical.” He gritted his teeth. His hands gripped the steering wheel tighter and twisting the black plastic. “It’s like a germ bomb waiting to explode all over your plates. Clean plates you’re supposed to be able to eat off of. And there’s nothing you can do once the germs start breeding. It’s like an abdominal cavity in a corpse. The cell walls break down and bacteria feast and feast, creating more and more gasses until…” he made an explosion gesture with his hands. “And you can’t microwave it or throw it in the dishwasher. That only kills the good bacteria. All you can do is throw the sponge away.”
“Luckily…” I looked at my brother. “It’s a sponge. It costs what? A dollar fifty?
“It’s the principle.”
“Right. It’s a conundrum,” I said, pretending I didn’t understand the metaphor.
“But you don’t have that excuse. You don’t have a sponge non-wringer-outer causing bacterial plague in your house. So, what were you thinking about out there on the ice?”
I sighed. “It stays between me and you, right? I’d rather not rehash this in front of the team.”
“That goes without saying.”
“I haven’t been able to…” I gestured to my lap. “With my wife.”
He glanced over with a look of confusion. “At all?”
I shook my head.
“Have you seen a doctor? That could be ser—”
“I can get it up, George. God, I’m hard all the time. The night of our wedding—it was really fucking hot, and I wanted to more than… But I just… couldn’t. I look at her face and…“ I exhaled and ran my hand down my beard. “I see Eleni.”
George winced, but quickly recovered, nodding.
“And I see you. And all the women who were just meaningless interactions.”
“And by nature of Decca being your wife, she’s the opposite of meaningless.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t leave her. You have to love her. She’s your sexual partner for life,” he said, breaking it down in starkly clear terms.
“What if I fail? What if I never know the right way to treat her?”
“Well…” He tilted his head to the side and took a slow, deep breath. “What if those other women weren’t meaningless either?”
“What do you mean?”
“You always received their enthusiastic consent. You never really lured them into your bed under false pretenses or promised them relationships. Just because you had a lot of sex with a lot of partners doesn’t make it unethical.”
I chuckled. “The Church might disagree.”
“I’m not talking to the Church, I’m talking to my brother, who once told me to get my head out of my own ass, so now I’m telling him the same. All those women you fucked? They wanted to be fucked. Stop retroactively robbing them of their consent.”
“Well, shit.”
“Decca deserves for you to love her fully. And she deserves your expertise.” He gave me a pointed look. “No one said your marriage has to be immediately physical. It’s only been a few weeks. Take your wife out on a date. Have fun together. Didn’t you used to FaceTime constantly? Go back to that.”
“You want me to FaceTime Decca from my room to hers?”
“You have separate rooms?” He raised an eyebrow. “Never mind. My point is, you’ll have sex when it’s perfect; not because you’re forcing yourself through issues.”
We’d reached the Bunganut Pig, and George put the truck in park. Neither of us moved.
“Do you take Bethany on dates?”
“Uh, not exactly. We’re a bit... She’s not into romance. But we do things other things and try to schedule as much time off as we can without putting too much strain on the interns.”
“I don’t think Decca and I have spent one full day together since the wedding. We’re ships passing in the night.”
“Have you made an effort to spend time with her to get to know her in this new light? You can’t expect your relationship to transition seamlessly from a crush, to roommates, to married, loving partners without any of the work. Or any of the fun.”
“It was always seamless before.”
“Sometimes you get lucky and find a friend like that. But when that happens, you don’t develop feelings for that friend, marry them, try to fuck them, emotionally shut down, and then pretend you don’t know why it’s not working.”
“No. You don’t.”
“That requires some seams. Heavy tailoring at that. You don’t think she might be internalizing it all? Thinking about what she might have done to turn you off? And that’s why she’s become the USS Never There?”
“She… Fuck.” No. She couldn’t have thought that there was anything that would turn me off. She could fucking disembowel me, and I’d probably still reach for her as I bled out.
She didn’t want me like that. Not really. Not yet. We’d talked about one day, but we’d agreed one day was far in the future, not the first night of our marriage. She hadn’t signed up to be groped the night of her wedding. Even if she’d been going along with it, it wasn’t because I’d swept her off her feet. It was because of her thing about doing anything for her friends.
Wasn’t it?