Chapter 2
KNOX
The driveway was empty when I got there.
I killed the engine and sat for a long minute with the cab heater still running.
Five-fourteen on Monday afternoon. The snow had started about ten miles back.
The gauge on the dashboard said eighteen degrees and falling.
The radio had been going on for twenty minutes about a system out of the Dakotas the meteorologists were already naming.
I counted the windows on the front of the house.
Four. Plus a small one over the porch — bathroom, probably. And a single window high in the gable above the garage. That window was lit. The rest of the house was not.
The garage was the small building she had pointed at this morning, set back ten feet from the main house, with side stairs running up the right edge to a door at the top. The lit gable window was right next to the door. The light was warm. A single bulb, maybe, behind a curtain.
I picked up my phone. No new messages. Maddox had texted at noon — Sue gave me her keys, swing by the rink before practice tomorrow, get your jersey — and that was it. No one else needed me for anything.
I had made it to age thirty-two and the people who needed me for anything in a given day fit on a screen the size of my palm.
I cut the heater. Got out.
The cold hit me in the chest and went straight to my shoulders, where it always went.
I had picked my coat for tonight on purpose — the long one, the one my agent had bought me after Caleb’s funeral, the one I had not worn out of the apartment in two years.
I needed pockets. I needed weight. I needed to feel held.
The duffels were heavy because I had packed them as if I might never come back to them. Hockey bag, two duffels, a small wooden box wrapped in my old practice jersey. I looked at the load. Counted the trips. Two if I was efficient. One and a half if I was strong.
The front door of the house opened.
Maple Sutton came out wearing a wool coat over her diner apron and a pair of heavy boots she had not laced properly.
Her hair was coming out of the same braid it had been coming out of this morning.
She stopped on the bottom step of the porch and pulled a set of keys out of her coat pocket like she was handing over a weapon.
“You’re early,” she said.
“I said five.”
“I expected six.”
“Your fault for hoping.”
Her mouth did something. I did not name it. Something in the corner. Something that might have been a smile if she’d let it be.
She walked the keys across the gap between us and held them out. I took them. The metal was warm — she had been holding them. I did not say anything about that, about the care she was taking, about the fact that she’d been waiting and watching for me to arrive.
“Side stairs,” she said, pointing. “Don’t use the front porch unless I call you. There’s a key for the side door of the garage on that ring too — that one’s only for the breaker box if the power goes out. Don’t go in the garage otherwise.”
“Understood.”
“The apartment door is the brass one. The deadbolt sticks if you turn it the wrong way. You have to lift up while you turn. Like this.” She made a small motion with her wrist. The gesture was careful. Instructional.
I copied it back to her. She nodded.
“Heater’s in the bedroom. Don’t run the kitchen one — the wiring is original and I haven’t had it inspected in three years. Propane line for the stove runs behind the wall to my grandmother’s workbench. There’s a shutoff valve next to the fridge if it ever smells funny.”
“Funny how.”
“Sweet. Like rotten eggs but sweeter.”
“Got it.”
“There’s a number list on the fridge. That’s the propane company at the top.
My number’s below it. Heather Park is below mine — that’s Theo Junior’s mother — she watches the place when I’m at the diner past closing — and below her is the police non-emergency line, which I have never used in seven years. ”
“Maple.”
She stopped. Looked at me. Her eyes were hazel. I had not registered that this morning. They had hazel in them, and uncertainty.
“I am not going to burn your house down.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just nervous.”
She had not meant to say that. I could see it in her face the second the words were out. She closed her mouth and tried to take it back by looking somewhere else.
I let her.
I let the silence sit until it was long enough to be a kindness. Long enough that she could feel that I had heard her, and that it was okay.
Then I said, “I will use the side stairs. I will not run the kitchen heater. I will replace the deadbolt if it breaks. I will pay for the propane I use. The rent goes to the diner on the first of every month, in cash, in an envelope. Is there anything else.”
“No.”
“Then I will move my things in. Thank you, Maple.”
She watched me walk back to the truck. I felt her watch me. I did not turn around. Turning around would have been acknowledgment. It would have been weakness.
She was still on the porch when I made the second trip. By the time I made the third — I had needed three after all, because the wooden box was heavier than I’d calculated — she was gone.
The apartment was small and clean and smelled like cedar.
I stood in the doorway for a long minute, holding the wooden box.
My grandmother’s voice — my mother’s mother, dead nine years now — said in my head: clean is a kind of love.
That had been what she had said when she had come into the apartment in Saint Paul where I and Caleb had lived for the one year before Caleb died.
She had walked through it once, taking in every detail.
She had said clean is a kind of love, and then she had hung her purse on the back of a chair and stayed three days.
She had taught me to cook one thing in that time: a bread soup with tears in it. I had not made it since.
This apartment — Maple’s grandmother’s apartment, before it was Maple’s, before it was mine — had been kept clean by a woman who was no longer alive to keep it clean. I could feel that presence. The care. The intention.
I set the wooden box on the small kitchen table. It held Caleb’s things. The things from the box the priest at Saint Stanislaus had given me at the funeral. The things I could not throw away and could not look at.
I carried my bags into the bedroom one at a time.
The bed was a full, not a queen — too short for me by six inches at the foot — and the blankets were folded military-square.
Precise. Someone had cared about precision.
The closet was empty. The dresser had old paper liners in the drawers, slightly yellowed but clean.
I emptied my clothes into the dresser without unfolding them.
I set up the photo of my brother on the nightstand last.
Caleb at twenty-one, in his Boston University jersey, leaning against a goalpost. Smiling.
Always smiling. I had never been a smiler.
Caleb had been the one who smiled for both of us.
Caleb had smiled at me from across a classroom when I felt like the only person in the world who could not figure out how to be alive.
Caleb had smiled at me on the ice, ten years ago, when I had made my first save in the show.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the photo for a long time.
Then I reached into the inside pocket of my coat and found the rosary.
It was a wooden one. Olive wood. Caleb’s.
From the funeral mass at Saint Stanislaus in Saint Paul.
The priest had pressed it into my hand at the door of the church and said don’t give this back, I have more, in the voice of a man who had given many of these away.
The priest had understood that I was not going to pray with it.
That it was a talisman. A thing to hold when the hands needed to hold something.
I held the beads in my fist. I did not say a prayer. I had not said a prayer in thirteen years. I just held them until my hand was warm and the wood was warm and the apartment was warm around me.
I put the rosary in the drawer of the nightstand.
I put the wooden box on top of it. I closed the drawer carefully, the way you close something you’re not ready to look at again.
I went to make myself dinner with the food I had bought at the gas station two towns back.
I was eating canned soup at the kitchen table at six-fifteen when the small fist hit the apartment door.
I froze with the spoon halfway to my mouth.
The fist hit the door again. Lower this time. Like the puncher had decided the higher knock was not getting attention and tried again at chest level.
I set the spoon down carefully. I had learned to move carefully. It was a lesson my body had learned after Caleb’s death. Walked to the door. Opened it.
A child was on the landing.
Five, maybe six years old. Brown hair sticking straight up like he’d been electrocuted.
Snowsuit zipped to the chin. Boots untied, the laces trailing in the snow.
A hockey stick in one mittened hand that was substantially taller than he was.
He was looking up at me with his head all the way back, which meant I was taller than I appeared.
“Hi,” the kid said.
I said, “Hi.”
“Are you the new hockey man.”
I considered this. It was accurate and inaccurate at the same time.
“Yes,” I said.
“My dad says all hockey men have bad teeth.”
I said, “Some do.”
“Do you?”
I crouched down. The kid was close now. Close enough that I could see the freckles on his nose, the gap between his front teeth, the particular expression of a five-year-old who had decided to conduct an investigation.
I pulled my lips back like an animal, slowly, deliberately, and bared my teeth at the small person standing on my landing.
The child studied them with the seriousness of a jeweler.
“They’re okay,” the child said. He sounded disappointed. “Not bad. Just okay.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Are you Maple’s boyfriend.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“I just met her.”
“You’re sleeping in her grandma’s house.”
“I am renting it from her.”
“What’s renting.”
“Paying her money so I can sleep here.”