Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Varga
Practice ran long, and by the time I had taken my skates off, the room had thinned to the guys who linger and the guys who couldn’t find their second glove. I was telling Trier about cooking duck.
“It’s a confit situation; you render it low and slow in its own fat, and what you get back is not a duck leg, it’s a religious experience. You, with your chicken thighs in your air fryer, you’ve never lived—“
“I’m happy with my air fryer,” he said, and headed for the shower.
“He’s happy,” I told the nearly empty room. “He’s settling. Write it down.”
Nobody wrote it down. It was late October and all the rookie-camp electricity had bled out of the season. The training room door was open, and Marco was swearing at somebody’s hamstring in Italian.
I was working a knot out of a lace when Rafe appeared and sat one stall over on Trier’s bench.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything. I’m a public utility,” I said.
He didn’t smile. He had a roll of tape in his hands, turning it over end to end. His bad haircut had grown out enough to look intentional.
“How do you do it?” he asked. “The before-the-game stuff. Keeping your head clear. There’s all this—“ He paused. “Everybody in the building knows who you are, or they think they do. And you still go out and play loose. How do you not let any of it in?”
“Okay, this might be a new rule one, or sub-clause B to rule fifteen. You choose.” I turned on the bench to face him.
“What they know about you out there is a costume. Nineteen thousand people think they know Lucas Varga, and not one of them has ever met me. They’ve met the guy on the bench mic.
That guy is great. That guy is load-bearing.
But that guy is not the one playing the game.
Then it’s just you and the puck and a sheet of ice that doesn’t care who your dad is. ”
“Right,” he said. He watched me like we were at hockey camp, and he’d have to repeat my words in front of the team.
“The trick isn’t keeping the crowd out. You can’t keep it out; the building’s too loud.
The trick is you build a guy who stands in front of you, and the loud stuff hits him.
Behind him is the quieter guy who actually plays the game.
The kid on the mic absorbs the noise, so the player doesn’t have to. ”
I shrugged. “You already do it, by the way. Out there at the table after Detroit, with the garage thing. You gave them one word, and it landed clean. That was you putting the costume on. You just did it by instinct that time. I’m telling you to do it on purpose.”
Rafe nodded slowly. He’d stopped turning the tape.
“So there’s a you that the room gets?” he asked. “And then there’s a different one?”
“There’s a you for the room and a you for you. Everybody’s got it. Mine’s just louder on the outside so the inside gets left alone.” I knocked his knee with the back of my hand. “That’s the whole job, Rafe. Be unmissable in the front so nobody goes looking in the back.”
He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Yeah,” in the flat Saskatchewan voice. “Thanks, Varga.” He stood, tucked the tape into his bag, and went.
He didn’t call me sir. I watched him walk down the rubber matting toward the tunnel. He had that long, easy stride that ate the ice and looked wrong in sneakers.
Be unmissable in the front so nobody goes looking in the back. I’d meant it for any rookie in any October. For Rafe, it was personal.
I sat there with one skate on and one skate off and tried to piece it all together, but I couldn’t. The kid had asked me how to block out the outside noise, and I’d explained to him in detail, with examples, like a proper craftsman.
Had I revealed something about myself? I shook my head. Probably not. The kid was twenty, homesick, and tired. He was asking the loud veteran how to survive his first November. That’s all it was.
I caught Heath in the hallway outside the video room. He was down on one knee with his foot up on the bench against the wall, working his hip flexor.
He looked up, but he didn’t say anything. He tipped his head in the direction the kid had gone and raised an eyebrow.
It was a silent question. Mikkelsen?
I rolled one shoulder. I don’t know yet.
Heath nodded once and focused on his hip. The conversation was over without any words spoken. Whatever he’d seen in the kid, he wouldn’t be the one to name it, the same as he’d never name what he saw in Rook and me.
I continued toward the parking garage.
***
Rook was at the stove when I arrived home. The kitchen smelled like onions and something with paprika in it, which meant he’d dug out the recipe my mother sent, and he was trying to make me homesick for the country I left at ten.
“You’re cooking the Hungarian stuff,” I said. “You can’t read the whole recipe, and you’re guessing.”
“I’m not guessing. I looked it up.”
“You typed into Google and made the internet translate?”
“That’s what I call looking it up.” He didn’t turn around. “Sprouts or no sprouts? They aren’t in the recipe.”
“Always sprouts.” I dropped my bag, walked around the island, and put my hand on the back of his neck. I kissed the side of his jaw. “Hi.”
“Taste this,” he said, and held the spoon over his shoulder without turning around.
I sipped from the spoon and then grabbed a beer out of the fridge. I leaned on the island, watching Rook push the onions around. The Rafe thing came out before I could stop it.
“Mikkelsen asked me something today.”
“Yeah?”
“He sat on Trier’s bench by my stall, and he asked me how I keep my head clear before a game.
He wanted to know how I don’t let the outside stuff in.
” I turned the beer in my right hand. “I told him the whole thing. I talked about the costume and the quiet guy behind the loud guy. I was good, Rook. Then he looked at me wrong.”
Rook turned the burner down. He didn’t turn around yet, but he stopped moving the spoon. “Wrong how?” he asked.
“Like I’d answered a different question than the one he asked.
He repeated it back to me: the room-you and the real-you, like he was holding it up to the light to see if it matched something he already knew.
Then he said thanks and left, and I sat there with one skate off and—“ I shrugged. “I don’t have the word for it. It wasn’t the mentor thing. It was under that.”
Rook turned around. He didn’t say the kid’s tired or you’re reading into it. He looked directly at me.
“Yeah, I’ve been figuring something out too.”
“Yeah?”
Rook took the pan off the heat.
“Luki, I have to tell you something.”
My stomach dropped a little. Not bad. It was like a small hill on the roller coaster before you climb the big one.
“Okay,” I said.
Rook opened his mouth, and my phone rang.
“It’s Mom,” I said. I had a specific ringtone assigned to her. “I have to—“
“Take it,” Rook said.
She was already talking by the time I got the phone to my ear. That’s where I get it from.
“Igen, anyu. Nem—I’m home, Mom, I’m not driving.” The Hungarian always came out of me when I talked to my mom. We still spoke mostly in English, but the other words drifted in.
“The dog dug up the whole back corner. The entire corner, Luki. I planted bulbs there in the spring and now—“ The phone made a clattering sound that meant she was gesturing at a garden I couldn’t see, five hundred miles away. “Your sister says it’s the squirrels. It is not the squirrels.”
“It’s probably the squirrels, anyu.”
“You sound like her.” A beat. “She says everything is fine. Her job is fine, so everything is fine. You know that voice. Do you know what it’s about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just work.”
“It is not work. You’ll call her.”
“I’ll call her.”
“When are you coming for Christmas? Before the twenty-third? I want you here for the twenty-third, Luki, not the day before. The day before is not enough.” It would be two days, the same as every year.
“What should I make? Tell me now so I can get the things. I have to order the good paprika. It takes a week.”
I wanted to say I’m bringing someone. I wanted to say anyu, sit down, there’s a man, there’s been a man for five years, he plants your trees and keeps your postcards on his refrigerator and won’t throw them out even though he can’t read them. I wanted to stop having two Christmases so badly.
I said, “Anything. Whatever you make.”
“I’ll make everything. You’re too thin.”
“I’m not too thin.”
“You look thin on the television.”
“It’s the pads. Everybody looks thin in the pads.”
“Hm.” She never once believed me about the pads.
The conversation went another four or five minutes. Mom doesn’t end a call so much as let you off it, slowly, the way you ease a hook out of a fish you’ve decided to let go.
After the call ended, I turned back toward Rook. “Sorry, she’s on Christmas already. It’s October, and she’s—“ I waved a hand. “You know how she is. You don’t, actually, because you’ve never met her. That’s a whole—” I stopped.
Rook had plated the food while I was on the phone.
“You were saying something,” I said. Careful. “Before. You had to tell me something.”
And I watched him not be able to.
His jaw set the way it did when something mattered, and he kept his eyes on me. The words were right there, but the phone call had let the air out of the moment, and he couldn’t get it back.
“It can wait,” he said.
“Rook.”
“Eat. It’s getting cold. It wasn’t a tonight thing anyway. I shouldn’t have led with it. Eat.”
And here’s the part I’m not proud of. The old me—the me five years deep in this, the one who decided way back that you don’t ask the sun to come closer—took the exit he held open.
Pushing meant he might actually say what he was holding, and I was tired, and the paprika smell was good.
Mom’s voice was still warm in my ear. It was so much easier to pick up the fork and let it wait.
***
The TV was on; some random cop show. I had my head on Rook’s thigh and his fingers were in my hair, lightly tugging and twisting. I always complained, but I would die without it.
On the screen, a ripped detective leaned against a doorframe and brooded.
“Him,” I said. “He’s doing a lot with just his jaw.”
“He’s fine.”
“Fine. The man is a cathedral, and you say fine?” I tipped my head back to look at him. “You have no taste. That’s obvious because you picked me.”
“Counterargument,” Rook said, not looking up from his book.
The detective’s partner came in, and I made a case for the partner, who had the better forearms.
“No,” Rook said before I’d said anything. I laughed and let it go. I didn’t care about the forearms. My favorite man in the world was tracing the back of my ear with his thumb.
I closed my eyes and hummed for a moment. Then my phone buzzed on the coffee table.
I almost didn’t reach for it, but I’m never able to let the phone just lie there. I grabbed it and looked at the screen without lifting my head off Rook’s leg.
It was a text.
Kovac: Hi Lucas — Daniel Kovac, The Athletic.
Working on a piece about veteran leadership in the locker room, and I’d love a few minutes on Rook specifically.
You’re one of the best teammates to ask, near as I can tell.
Mark passed along that you two go back a ways.
Any chance you’ve got a quick window this week? No rush.
I smiled a little after I read it the first time.
Somebody wanted to write about Rook, and they came to me.
Of course, they came to me. I’ve watched him longer and from closer than anyone.
That meant I could talk about him for a year.
I could tell this guy things Rook would never say about himself—the gap control and how he makes Pratt’s nights boring on purpose.
I lifted my head off his leg and started to type a response.
“Who is it?” Rook asked.
“It’s a reporter,” I said. “His name’s Kovac. He wants to talk to me. About you.”
Rook didn’t move. On the screen, one of the hot cops grabbed a perp and wrenched his arm behind his back.
“He thinks I’m the best guy to ask,” I said.