Chapter Four #2
Mom hadn’t called him that in sixteen years.
Whatever Charlotte had done to make herself unwelcome with the family, Mom had decided he was the right port of call.
She’d called in favors before, though nothing as huge as “take in this person you’ve never met.
” More often than not, it was a request to mail some item or good the church didn’t approve of, like caffeine or alcohol, so the purchase couldn’t be traced back to her.
Sometimes, she asked him to get in touch with another ex-member to relay a message or make a request. Having a person on the outside was useful because their family was so strict about the doctrines.
At the same time, Ben got to keep a lifeline to his family.
Mormons encouraged insular relationships with other Mormons.
Close friendships and relationships outside the church were hard to maintain, and once you left, the church expected those you left behind to cut ties completely.
Ben knew Mom had broken the rules by keeping his number at all.
Charlotte must need someone very, very badly.
“Okay. I’ll figure something out.”
Blank silence followed in which she should have said thank you, and he should have told her he loved her.
Instead, she said, “Happy Thanksgiving,” and hung up.
Ben groaned and collapsed into the winged back of his stupidly big chair.
For such an active sport, being part of the NHL had introduced him to the world of comfortable office chairs, and he didn’t know how he would give it up.
On the bright side, if Phil had this kind of furniture in the guest room, maybe he had enough space for another surprise guest for a night or two until Ben figured out what the hell he was going to do.
He’d forgotten to ask how old Charlotte was. Since Mom said she could get a job, it would probably be fine, right? She had to be of age. She’d stay a day or two, figure out her next steps, and then she’d be gone.
Ben thought of how naive and unprepared for the world he had been when he’d left for college.
He was in such deep shit.
Of course, Phil chose that moment to come hobbling up the stairs, much too fast for a man on one crutch, and bang on the door.
“Ben? Ben, I know you’re in there.”
“What?”
Phil ripped open the door. “How did you manage to miss a full locker room blowout?”
“A what now?”
“You know, the D-core splitting themselves apart? Bigotry? Slurs getting thrown around? Any of this ringing a bell?”
Ben rolled his eyes to the ceiling. It was probably the wrong time to admit he could not care less about hockey player drama.
“Come with me,” Phil snapped. He turned and left the doorway before Ben could properly protest.
He caught up to Phil at the staircase.
“How is it you took all of one day to fix the stairs for me,” Phil said, “but you completely ignore Hayes saying racist shit in the locker room?”
Oh shit. No wonder Trout thought Hayes would be traded.
If Ben had missed that, he was really shit at this job, both the coaching and the other part.
“I guess I had other priorities?”
“I know you’re weirdly hands-off, but this is exactly the sort of shit a coach is there for. What were you even doing?” Phil carefully made his way down the stairs. Seeing no alternative, Ben followed.
“I can’t do my job,” he said, “if I have to spend all day babysitting temperamental hockey players!”
Two of said temperamental hockey players, Tom Crowler and Jax Grant, sat at the kitchen table, chopping vegetables. They both looked up, apparently interested in Ben’s opinion. What a nightmare. Ben didn’t have any opinions beyond “oh fuck oh fuck, what am I going to do?”
“Babysitting temperamental hockey players is your job,” Phil insisted.
It wasn’t. But Phil didn’t know that. “Phil—”
“Nope. You’re doing Thanksgiving with us, and you’re going to solve this clusterfuck.”
“Phil.”
“We all want a functional hockey team, don’t we?”
Debatable. Ben mostly wanted to get this job done so he could get Pulvermacher off his back.
He wanted not to have to deal with a wayward niece; he wanted to be able to afford a decent apartment, and he wanted all of it without having to disappoint Phil.
He did want Phil to have a functional hockey team though.
Sighing, he took a place at the kitchen table. “Stuffing smells good.”
“Uh…” Tom Crowler stared at him like a deer in the headlights.
Right. A coach living with a player was a weird situation.
Ben repeated the lie he’d told Phil. “My apartment is being renovated. I moved in here to help Easton until his knee is better. Win-win.”
With the stairs fixed, Phil hardly needed his help. Ever since Ben had gotten back from the road trip, he’d been pretending not to realize as much. He hadn’t started looking at new apartments yet, but with his niece showing up in the next few days, Ben had no choice. He couldn’t stay.
Phil maneuvered his way into one of the kitchen chairs, and Ben pushed the spare one out so he could put his bad leg up on it.
“So the new lines were a bad idea,” he asked without asking. Experience had taught him the quickest way to get to the point was to tell people what you thought you had heard and let them correct you.
“No!” All three of the hockey players in the room shouted.
“Luca really is good. Did you see his assist in the third period in Montreal?” Phil whistled. “He plays smart. That’s a defenseman who can stop goals going in and rack up his own points while he’s at it.”
It was news to Ben that defensemen were supposed to score goals. He thought their job consisted of blocking goals. “But Hayes—”
“Jimmy’s thirty-one. He’s not bad, but he’s slowing down, and if he can’t accept playing less minutes for the good of the team, it might be time to pursue other options.
” Phil had a stubborn set to his jaw. Understandable given he’d just discovered a man he’d thought of as a friend was a closet racist.
But Ben couldn’t let him inadvertently fulfill Trout’s plan of getting Hayes traded. How to dissuade him without condoning the racism?
Luckily, Crowler interjected. “Hayes isn’t bad by any means. I could see him doing well on the second D-pair and PP2. And from his perspective, we did petition to trade him out for the new guy three votes to one. He might be worried about losing his place on the team entirely.”
They had ambushed Hayes a little. Ben hadn’t thought much of it when Crowler and Grant approached him about switching up the lines; they’d done it before.
He took it as a comment on his coaching skills, which were definitely subpar.
Sure, Hayes had been annoyed, but Ben had taken it for regular hockey player stuff.
Jax Grant added, “And getting traded from a team you’ve been on for years is rough.”
He would know. It had happened to him only a few months ago.
They made solid points, and in the world of professional sports, maybe those points seemed valid. In Ben’s world, no heated moment or professional disappointment justified racism.
“But he reacted by using a slur against a fellow player,” he said.
“Technically, ‘Mexican’ isn’t a slur,” Grant pointed out. “The way he said it made it sound like one, which is shitty and racist, but it is not, in fact, a slur.”
Phil shook his head. “I can see Howie saying something thoughtless and cruel. Kid’s been in the show for five minutes, and we all know what that’s like. He just wants to fit in. But Jimmy? I’ve known him for years. Camille and I used to go on double dates with him and Allie.”
Ben wanted to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder.
It hurt, finding out people you thought you knew didn’t live up to the most basic expectations.
But coaches didn’t offer comfort. Instead, Ben asked after the player who had the most reason to be upset, the only actual Hispanic person on the team. “How has Lunes reacted?”
Judging from how Grant and Crowler looked at each other, they had no idea.
While they rectified their oversight, Ben rummaged through the fridge in search of an alcoholic beverage with actual flavor and ABV.
Hockey players sacrificed a hell of a lot for their admittedly very nice bodies, chiefly food that tasted good and alcohol that could get a person drunk.
Ben complained about it as he shifted aside three different light beers.
“Buy your own damn groceries,” Phil grumbled. But in no time, Ben found a locally brewed, hazy IPA nestled in between two plastic containers of leftovers, tart and fruity. Phil must have ordered it for him while he was away.
He didn’t deserve to stay here any longer. Phil no longer needed help since he could manage the stairs fine on his own, and Ben was taking advantage of his kindness and hospitality by lying about who he was, even as Phil had special-ordered him his favorite drinks.
The thought continued to plague him all through a very awkward Thanksgiving dinner.
This wasn’t the worst one Ben had ever sat through.
That award went to the year he had come out to his parents, and they’d spent the holiday leaving him pamphlets for various retreats where he could “pray the gay away.” It was a close thing though.
He’d found that hockey players turned out to be surprisingly gracious.
Breezy, possibly one of the most clueless human beings Ben had ever encountered in the wild, had come up with an idea for the whole team to sponsor a shelter for homeless LGBTQIA+ teens.
The hapless way the rest of them jumped on board to support the idea made Ben feel a little overcome.
If his family had thought to address their own bigotry by looking for ways to improve themselves, so much about his life would have been different.
Ben did his best to vocally support the idea.
So long as they believed he was their coach, his words had weight.
Otherwise, he let the evening wash over him.
Loud, boisterous conversation passed him by.
Ben knew Phil wanted more engagement from him, but his head pounded as he tried to parse everything he needed to do to get out of this coaching gig and how on earth he was supposed to do it when he’d be meeting his niece at the Greyhound station in two days.
How was he supposed to take care of another person? At forty-two, Ben was living in another person’s house on a nonpermanent basis. He had next to no savings, and he’d only made it this far due to lucky breaks. He couldn’t offer a teenager meaningful life advice.
And what would he even say to Phil? Sorry, my possibly traumatized and potentially underage relative needs to stay in one of your other spare rooms?
No, Ben couldn’t do that to Phil on top of everything else.
If the Charlotte situation turned complicated, Ben would just have to suck it up and find something affordable, maybe in Oakland or the outskirts of Berkeley.
He could handle the commute. He couldn’t handle the guilt.
Ben tried to focus on the meal instead of the conversation around him or the buzzing of his own brain. The stuffing tasted as good as it smelled, but most everything else was bland and unappetizing. Or maybe the panic steadily crawling its way up Ben’s throat robbed the food of flavor.
He stuck it out because Phil, clearly still agitated, kept shooting him significant looks every now and again when anyone mentioned the power play.
Ben was so goddamn sick of the power play.
The guests left before nine. Breezy and Luca Mazetti were the last to go; they helped load the dishwasher, which was very sweet. Breezy’s girlfriend had taken an Uber home at six, citing having to get to her own family’s festivities.
“All right. But do you like anything about her besides that her family knows yours?” Luca asked as he rinsed off a serving platter.
“I—” Breezy started, sliding cutlery into the dishwasher basket. “Um. I don’t. Hey.”
Phil watched the display with amusement, leaning against the counter and sipping his third light beer of the evening. Ben had always liked laugh lines on a man.
“He makes a good point, Breezy,” Phil said.
“She’s nice, okay? She wants to work with kids.”
“Yes.” Luca nodded seriously. “I could say the same thing about my grandmother.”
“Her hair is pretty?”
Drying off the last platter, Luca looked him dead in the eye and intoned, “Oh, the burning passion.”
“Okay, shut up.” Breezy continued carefully loading the plates.
They were nice plates, probably also a relic from Phil’s ex-wife. Somehow, Ben couldn’t picture Phil picking out china patterns. The delicate dishware in his big hands would be—ludicrous. Yes. Not at all attractive in a weird domestic way.
“Phil, tell him to shut up,” Breezy whined.
Phil drained his beer. “You’re on your own with that one, kid. Also, you guys know I have a cleaning service, right?”
Breezy shot him an affronted look. “You don’t leave the host to do the dishes alone.”
“And you don’t leave dishes out overnight,” Ben added. “It attracts ants.”
“Fine, fine.”
There wasn’t much left to do anyhow. Breezy and Luca finished up and left, still bickering, and then they were alone.
“Do you need help with the stairs tonight? Or a shower?” Ben had helped Phil with the shower a number of times since he’d moved in. It hadn’t gotten less shockingly intimate. “Or do you want to watch TV?”
“Ben.”
“No, probably not. All those Black Friday ads are really awful—”
“Ben, why the fuck are you not coaching this team?”
Ben turned away and started wiping down the counters.
“Ben—”
The words crowded up the back of Ben’s throat, begging to be released. I’m not a hockey coach, all right?
Phil was a good person who cared deeply about the success of the team.
He had a notebook full of coaching tips to help Ben out for no other reason than an honest desire to help.
Maybe he would understand. Maybe he wouldn’t hate Ben.
But if Ben had uncovered Trout’s plot earlier, Phil’s knee might never have been injured.
And admitting that Ben had failed to protect Phil by doing the one thing he’d been hired for was impossible.
Instead, Ben did the only thing more self-destructive than telling the truth.
He stepped right up into Phil’s personal space, grabbed hold of his shirt collar, and kissed him.