Chapter 2 #2
The child considered this. Hockey stick in one hand. Frowning. He was working through something.
“That’s still kind of like being her boyfriend,” he said. “Because you’re in her house at night.”
I did not answer that. The logic was not entirely wrong.
The child squinted at me. Tipped his head sideways, studying my face the way I had been studying his.
“You don’t smile.”
“I do.”
“When.”
I did not answer that either.
The child waited. He stood on the landing in his snowsuit and waited like he had all the time in the world.
I did not move my face.
After a long beat the child said, with the satisfied finality of a person settling a court case, “Mr. Grumpus.”
He turned. He went down the stairs. The hockey stick clanged twice against the railing. The sound was loud. It echoed off the side of the house. Then his boots disappeared into the snow at the bottom of the steps and he was gone.
I stayed crouched in the doorway for a long minute after the kid was out of sight.
The cold caught the corner of my mouth in a way it had not caught it in two years.
I did not move it. I did not smile.
I went back inside and finished my soup. The soup had gone cold. I ate it anyway. Calories were calories. My body burned them the same way whether the soup was warm or room temperature or cold.
I cleaned the bowl. I put it in the rack.
I did not sleep that night. I lay on my back in the bed that was too small for me and listened to the house settle and creak and do the things houses do in the dark.
I listened to the wind move through the gable window.
I listened to the heater work. I listened to the sounds of the woman in the house twenty feet away, moving around in her kitchen, reading books I could not see, living a life I was not part of.
I lay on my back and let myself count the seconds between the porch light flickering and the wind hitting the window.
Six seconds. Five. Four. Three.
I fell asleep at four-thirty.
At six-forty-five in the morning I walked the one block to her diner.
The sky was gray. The sidewalks had been cleared but not salted. The bell over the door rang when I pushed it open and Maple looked up from the espresso machine and went still for a moment that was a fraction of a second longer than any look was supposed to last.
I sat at the counter. Same stool as yesterday.
“Coffee,” I said. “Please.”
She poured it without speaking. The pot was the bad pot. I could see her decide to use it. I could see her hand hesitate over the fresh pot, hover, and then go to the warmer pot anyway. It was a choice. She was choosing.
I took the cup. Drank.
“Bitter,” I said.
“I know.”
“Pie.”
She stopped wiping the counter. She had been wiping the same spot, over and over, the way people do when they need to do something with their hands.
“Pie?”
“Apple. Whatever you have.”
She held my look for a beat. Two. Three. Four. She was deciding something. I could see it in her face, the moment when she chose not to gloat. The moment when she chose kindness instead of vindication.
She did not say I told you so. Maple Sutton, twenty-six years old, looked me in the eye for five full seconds and decided not to rub my face in the fact that I had come back for exactly what I had refused.
She slid the slice across the counter without comment.
I ate it.
It was the best apple pie I had eaten since my grandmother’s. My grandmother had been dead nine years. That was nine years since I’d had pie this good. Nine years since I’d had a lot of things.
I did not say anything about it being good. Saying it was good would have been admitting something.
I left a twenty on a five-dollar check. I left it where she would see it. Where she would know it was intentional.
When I stood up she was at the espresso machine again, not looking at me. I could see her hands moving. I could see her concentrate on the task.
I said, “Maple.”
She turned. There was foam on her wrist. She was careful not to touch her face with it.
“What time do you close.”
“Eight at night,” she said. “Six on Sundays.”
“Got it.”
I left.
The Frostbite Arena was four miles east of town, set back off the highway in a stand of pines. I parked my truck in the staff lot at eight-fifteen and sat in the cab with the engine off until the cold started to find my hands.
Maddox Ash was at the rink-side door when I came in.
“Iron.”
“Maddox.”
Maddox clapped me on the shoulder twice.
The clap had weight. Maddox’s hand, I knew from twelve years of friendship, was the hand of a man who had played one season in the show and lost the rest of his career to a knee that had bent the wrong way.
The hand had a particular kind of strength in it.
The strength of a man who had decided to stay in the game from the wrong side of the glass.
To build something instead of playing in it.
“You ready.”
“No.”
“Good. Anyone says yes is lying.”
The locker room was full. Eight men in various stages of dress.
Six were still pulling on jerseys. Two were doing tape work on their wrists.
I had seen photos of all of them. I had read every one of their stat sheets.
I could have given any of them their plus-minus from last season.
Their numbers were a language I still spoke when I was alone in the apartment in the dark.
Maddox brought me into the room.
“Boys. Knox Kovak. Twelve seasons in the show, two Cup runs, two of the best save percentages in Eastern Conference history. Coaching our goalies now. Listen to him. He is going to make you better.”
There were nods. Hands extended. Names traveled past me and lodged where they were supposed to lodge — Wilder Pratt with the green eyes, Banks Bankhurst who looked too thin around the edges of his face like grief had taken shape, Theo Nash who did not look at me directly, Hudson Vance in the corner who looked like he could break things and probably had.
Beckham Cole, the head coach, was already on the bench. He came over once and shook my hand and said welcome home, like home was a place I could go back to instead of a place I was running from.
Then he went back to watching the kid in the net warm up.
The kid was nineteen years old. AHL contract. Sixth-round pick. I had read his file on the plane. The file said the kid was good. The file did not say the kid was scared.
I could see the scared from the bench. It was in the way the kid’s glove hand trembled. In the way he was overcommitting to the left. In the way he was thinking instead of feeling.
I sat on the bench and watched him take twenty pucks before I said anything to anyone.
When I stood up, I let the breath out slow. I had not been on the ice in two years and one month and four days. The kid was waiting. The crease was waiting. I was the one stalling.
I stepped onto the ice for the first time in two years and one month and four days.
My skates remembered. The blade edges found the ice and the ice held. My body remembered what to do. My ankles remembered the position. My hands remembered the reach.
The cold remembered me too. It hit me in the ankles and the wrists and the back of my neck the way it had when I was nineteen and standing in the crease at Boston University the first day Caleb had told me, kid, you’re going to be a goalie.
That’s just what you are. The cold was familiar. The cold was home.
Maddox skated past me going the other way, slow. He bumped his shoulder against mine once. Not hard. A greeting. An acknowledgment.
“Welcome back, Iron.”
I watched Maddox’s shoulder leave my shoulder. Watched him keep skating toward the boards.
I put my hand on the back of the kid’s net. The mesh was cold. It was the right temperature. It was exactly what I needed.
I did not, I would think later — when I was lying again in Maple Sutton’s grandmother’s bed in Maple Sutton’s grandmother’s apartment in a small house on Birch Street in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota — I did not, in that first long minute with my glove resting on the cold steel mesh of a hockey net, quite believe that I was allowed to be back.
But the net held my hand up. And the ice held my skates. And the kid in the crease turned around and saw me, and dipped his head once, the way a young goalie dips his head when an old one walks up behind him. The way a student dips his head when a teacher enters the room.
It was not a smile. It was something that happened in the body, before smiling. It was acceptance. It was belonging.
I let it happen.