17. Timothy
Chapter seventeen
Timothy
After the next practice, I stay on the ice, carving lazy circles while the Zamboni driver waits by the boards and checks his watch for the third time.
Peters, one of the rookie defensemen, is still on the ice, trying to figure out why he keeps overcommitting on his crossovers.
I skate over and show him how to fix it. He nails it on the third try and grins at me.
For once, helping someone does not feel like proof that I belong here. It simply feels good.
Then Coach calls my name.
"Brenton. My office. When you're done."
Every mistake I have made this season reports for duty in my mind.
Did I miss curfew? Say something stupid in the group chat? Has Coach finally noticed that I spend most games trying not to make the mistake that gets me benched?
Peters glides past and says, "Thanks, that actually helped."
"Anytime," I say, and mean it.
After changing, I sling my bag over one shoulder and follow the rubber-matted hallway toward Coach’s office.
The door sits open a crack, a yellow wedge of light spilling out. I knock on the frame.
"Sit," Coach says, not looking up from whatever he's scribbling. I sit.
The office is cluttered. Coffee cups have accumulated behind the monitors, and a dead plant leans toward the wall. The whiteboard is crowded with crossed-out names I work very hard not to study.
I catalogue the room because the alternative is cataloguing every reason Coach might have called me in.
The silence stretches long enough that I start drafting an apology for something I haven't done yet.
Whatever it is, I can explain.
The sentence nearly escapes before I remember that would be insane and clamp my mouth shut.
Finally he caps the pen and looks up.
“Brenton, you’re a good player. You make the game easier for everyone around you.”
He leans back in his chair. “The younger guys watch you. Sometimes more than they watch me.”
I sit a little straighter.
“But making things easier for everyone else isn’t the same as leading them," he continues.
The warmth evaporates so fast I can almost hear it hiss. My shoulders sink back against the chair.
He swivels a monitor toward me and pulls up game footage, cued to a shift from Tuesday. “You read trouble before anyone else,” he says, replaying the shift. “Then you wait for somebody else to make the first decision.”
On screen, the play develops exactly the way he describes. I see the opening. I hesitate. By the time I move, I am cleaning up someone else’s mistake instead of shaping the play myself.
“I stay ready,” I say. “That keeps me in the lineup.”
He looks at me. “I’m asking whether you want to be more than the guy we trust to clean up after somebody else.”
I stare at the frozen image on the monitor.
Coach taps the screen.
“You’ve built a career around avoiding the mistake that costs you your place,” he says. “That worked. Now it’s limiting you.”
I want to argue. The frozen image on the monitor makes that difficult.
"Give me something I can work with," I say. "Tell me what to fix."
“Trust your gut. Call the play sooner. Commit to the first pass. When you see the opening, take it instead of waiting for someone else to prove you were right.”
He leans back. “I need you making decisions before the play falls apart, not only after. And to trust your gut.”
I nod, but my mind is sifting back over the years to all the times I wanted to move, but hesitated. Not just in hockey, but in life.
With Bethany, I always know what to do once something breaks. A gate needs measuring. A dryer quits. Somebody ignores her instructions.
Give me a problem and I can step in.
It is everything that comes before the problem that I do not know how to handle.
Coach goes back to his notes like the conversation's over.
I remain in the chair until he glances up.
“That’s all, Brenton.”
Right.
Dismissed.
***
I fold myself into the passenger seat of Bethany's truck, knees jammed against the dash. I try to angle my shoulders in smaller, which is not, it turns out, a thing shoulders do.
Bethany mentioned the supply run over lunch, and I volunteered to go with her.
The guys noticed.
Of course they noticed.
Now I am sitting in her passenger seat, pretending volunteering was a completely ordinary decision.
The supply list glows on my phone.
Bethany comes around the front of the truck with a coffee in each hand and a level wedged beneath one arm. She somehow gets the driver’s door open without dropping anything.
She hands me a cup without looking, already talking logistics before her seatbelt clicks.
"Two-by-sixes, the good screws, and whatever they've got for the boards," she says.
I answer with something equally practical while my brain loops You should have gotten more credit for Maxon’s goal from Tuesday’s game.
She noticed the pass. She waited after the game to tell me.
Apparently, my mind plans to keep that information forever. One sentence from her has somehow lodged itself more firmly than an entire season of teammates shouting my name.
Her coffee is balanced between her knees while she fastens her seat belt.
The truck pulls onto the main road. She takes one cautious sip of her coffee at the next stoplight and immediately makes a face because it is still too hot.
The level is jammed between the seats, and receipts spill from the cupholder every time she turns.
I pick one off my knee and tuck it back into place.
“This filing system seems vulnerable to sudden braking.”
“It’s chronological.”
“It’s a pile.”
Every time she reaches for her coffee, her elbow comes close enough to mine that the console between us feels much narrower than it is.
At the next light, she glances at me.
“You always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Help set up goals and then pretend it was nothing?”
I shift the supply list on my phone. “He scored. It's called teamwork.”
“Because you put the puck exactly where he needed it.”
I look down at the supply list, although I have already read it enough times to recite it.
We pull into the contractor's yard, gravel crunching, cold air knifing through the door the second she opens it.
The yard is short on the boards she ordered, but Bethany does not blink.
She asks about the treated stock, checks the dimensions herself, and talks the manager into honoring the original price. By the time he revises the delivery slip, he is asking her what she wants to do next.
I am supposed to be checking the lumber.
Mostly, I watch her take control of the problem.
I carry the first stack of boards to the truck while Bethany finishes the paperwork.
It gives me something productive to do.
I adjust the boards against my shoulder, and my sleeves pull tight across my arms.
When I turn back, she is watching me.
Not my face.
Her gaze is somewhere around my shoulders. Her gaze is moving with my muscles and it takes her a moment to realize I have caught her.
Her eyes snap up to mine. Color rises into her cheeks.
Well.
Maybe I am not imagining this.
Loading the truck bed, our shoulders bump once, twice, an accident that doesn't feel accidental enough.
Her fingers have gone red around the cold metal bracket.
I pull off my gloves and hold them out.
She looks from them to me. “Then what are you going to wear?”
“I’m carrying lumber. You’re handling frozen metal.”
“Thank you, Timothy."
I watch her slide her hands into my gloves. She gives a contented sigh.
The contractor comes back with the wrong fasteners entirely, and Bethany catches it and sends him back for the right ones.
"The rink's basically held together with zip ties at this point," I say, mostly to fill the silence.
She laughs, head tipping back for one brief second.
I forget what I was going to say next.
On the drive back we fall into an easy rhythm. We argue, lightly, about whether the rink needs more warning signs, given what I personally know about amateur impulse control on skates.
The light outside slides toward dusk, gold going gray on the dash.
She turns the heat down and watches the road for a moment.
“This one feels different,” she says. “The rink, I mean. Most of the things I fix will need fixing again next week. This might actually last.”
I look at the revised invoice in my lap.
“You do more than maintenance.”
She glances at me.
“You make things better.”
The words feel dangerously close to something else I mean, but she does not laugh or wave them away.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
For one unguarded second I let myself hope she might see me as something other than Jenna's brother. I wonder whether things feel different to her too.
Then she reaches over to turn up the heat, and the sleeve of her coat brushes my arm.
I lose my thread of thought.
We pull up to Hockey House and the guys are already outside, waiting like vultures with opinions.
“Cozy drive?” Jonah calls as we climb out, and I consider putting him through the boards we just bought.
Bethany handles the teasing easily. She stays happy and unbothered, which only makes me admire her more.
The unloading gives me somewhere to look besides Bethany.
I am grateful for the interruption and annoyed at the same time. Saved by my idiot friends.
By the time the truck is unloaded, Bethany has gone inside with the invoice and the guys have scattered.
My phone buzzes.
Jenna:
Mom reminded me Bethany turns twenty-four next month.
A second message appears before I can respond.
Jenna:
Ring any bells?
The old promise surfaces immediately.
Thirteen-year-old Bethany in the pantry, trying not to cry.
Me promising that if boys were still too stupid to recognize what they had by the time she turned twenty-four, I would marry her myself.
Back then, twenty-four sounded safely fictional.
Now it is next month.
My thumbs hover over the screen.
Me:
We were kids.
I do not send it.
The problem is not that Jenna remembers the promise.
It’s that I’m starting to want what I promised her.