Chapter 23
Emile
I make the plan at Bev’s counter, which is where you make plans in this town when the plan is going to cost you something. Where else would you make it? Voyons donc, nobody makes a cheap plan at Bev’s. And you make the expensive kind, the kind you have to eat your way toward.
Stack’s is open before the rest of the world is decent, before the sun has properly committed to the idea.
Bev is behind the counter where Bev is always behind the counter, like the diner got built around her and not the other way.
The coffee is already going. The griddle is already warm.
There are two old-timers in a booth by the window who’ve been having the same argument since before I was recruited, and they don’t look up when the chime goes.
I come in with the cold coming off my jacket and she takes one look at me.
One. She doesn’t ask what I want. And Bev never asks.
Why would she, when she can read you off the top of your own face like a spray chart, every shot you took last night and every one that beat you?
She puts down in front of me a breakfast I didn’t order, the off-menu one, the one that doesn’t have a name on any board.
And it only shows up when you walk in wearing the thing I must be wearing this morning.
Eggs and the good potatoes and too much of everything.
The heartbreak special. The plate she slides across the counter, wordless, to whoever came in looking like the world took something off them in the night.
She doesn’t say a word about my face. She refills the coffee I haven’t touched. She moves down the counter. She lets me be alone in a room with another person in it, which is the exact thing I needed and didn’t know how to ask for.
My phone is face down on the counter next to the ketchup, and it’s been face down for a while now.
There are Sunday calls on it I let ring out.
Three of them. In my whole life that has happened exactly never, not from tournament hotels, not from the side of a highway with a dead bus, not once.
Under the missed calls sits the wall she sends after, no periods, no punctuation of any kind, just Manon running downhill.
it’s okay if you don’t want to talk mon grand just tell me you’re eating and I’ll leave you be that’s all I need I don’t need the rest of it
Not one word about the net. Not one about the shutout, which she watched on a laptop propped against the sugar bowl at the kitchen table back home. There’s a basement under that kitchen with every second-place trophy I ever won in it, and she has not once in my life asked me for a score first.
I look at the plate Bev put down in front of me without being asked for it.
I’m eating, I write back. Promise. The good potatoes and everything.
The dots come up right away, which means she’s had that phone inside arm’s reach this whole time, waiting on me. She sends another wall. At the bottom of it, the same two words she has put at the bottom of every message she has ever sent me. Eat something.
She doesn’t ask what for. She’s watched me haul things up a hill my whole life and she has never asked me to set one down where she could see it.
I eat. I think.
I worked out the whole shape of my problem at a bar with Denny’s bottle at my elbow.
The shape is this. I courted a man like a depth chart and called it love.
That was a while back. Knowing a thing and doing something about it are two different rinks, and I’ve always been better at the knowing.
I’ve spent every day since watching this team skid and doing nothing about it, dropping two of my own, letting in the kind of goals that have never gone past me in my life.
A half-beat late on both. A room this poisoned gets into a goalie’s hands whether he signed for it or not.
At Bev’s you don’t sit with the thing you already learned. You decide what it’s going to cost you. So the question on this plate isn’t what did I do wrong. It’s what am I willing to hand back to undo it. Bev feeds you the heartbreak special. And she doesn’t warn you it comes with homework.
So. Stop trying to win. That’s the instruction, and it’s the hardest one anybody has ever handed me. Winning is the only shape my wanting has ever taken. I don’t know how to reach for a thing without competing for it.
So what does the opposite of winning even look like? Do the one thing a man running a con would never do, not in a hundred years. The one move that can’t be read as anything else by anybody, not even by a man who has spent his whole life reading every move for the trap in it.
Give the net away.
I sit with it. I turn it over the way he turns a glove over in his hands, checking the lace, feeling for the flaw. There’s no flaw. It holds. Nothing else all season has held.
I make myself count the cost out loud in my own skull, because I’m not going to do this thing and then flinch halfway.
The audition, gone. The little book with my name in it, closed and set on a shelf.
And every hour I’ve earned toward this exact window, spent, on purpose, handed to the man who was standing in my way.
There was a version of me who’d have called that the dumbest trade a hockey player has ever made in the whole history of the sport.
That guy was a different guy. And he doesn’t get a vote in this room anymore.
He can file a complaint with the front office, which in my case is a diner counter and a woman who won’t take a tip.
The trade is only dumb if the net is the thing you want most, and is it?
It stopped being the thing I want most somewhere between a dark film room and a bar where a man didn’t move away from me. I’m just the last one to admit it.
Bev refills my coffee without being asked.
She clears the plate I somehow emptied without tasting a bite of it.
She doesn’t comment. Bev never comments.
She feeds you the thing you walked in needing, then lets you find the rest of it yourself.
I leave more on the counter than the food costs, because you can’t pay Bev for the other thing.
She pretends not to see me do it, which is Bev for you’re welcome.
I go to Marquette that afternoon. I don’t ask for a favor.
I don’t perform the whole confession, because the whole of it isn’t Marquette’s to carry.
It belongs to a man in an equipment room.
I keep it simple. I tell him I want to sit.
I tell him I want Casimir to start the rest of the way, the showcase, the playoff push if we claw our way back into one, all of it.
His crease, his spring, his door, uninterrupted.
Which is how a senior’s last season is supposed to run, before the clock takes it from him for good.
“I’ll take the net next year,” I say. “When he’s gone and it’s mine clean. When taking it doesn’t mean taking it out of the one season the man’s got left.”
Marquette looks at me like I’ve skated into the boards head first and stood back up talking. “You’re the hot hand, Fortin,” he says, careful, like you talk to a guy you think might’ve taken one to the head. “You know that. The scouts are here for you now. This week. Not next year. Now.”
“I know it. You think I haven’t done that math about nine hundred times?”
“You’ve got a shutout on tape and a man with a notebook who came back because of it.
You dropped two after and looked rough doing it.
That happens to everybody who ever put the pads on.
You play through it. Guys wait their whole careers for the crease you’re standing in and it never comes at all. And you want to hand it back?”
“I want to sit,” I say. “I want him to start. All of it, the rest of the way. That’s what I’m asking for.”
He leans back in his chair. He taps the desk once, like he does, one knuckle, the sound of a man deciding whether a thing is real. “Why?”
I give him the part that’s his. “Because he earned his last season, and I don’t want mine a year early if the price of it is taking his.”
“Then they can come back next year,” I say, when he still doesn’t answer. “I’ll still be here. This year the net is his.”
He studies me a while longer, hunting for the angle, because a coach’s whole job is hunting for the angle in a thing that looks too good.
He doesn’t find one. And there isn’t one.
There’s no version of this where the guy running a con gives away the exact thing the con was for.
That’s the point of it. That’s why it’s the last move left on the board, the one move that says the true thing loud enough for a man built like Casimir to hear it over his own walls.
“I told that man he’d have to take his net back on the ice,” Marquette says.
“In the open. Everybody watching.” He taps the desk once, one knuckle.
“And here I sit, handing it to him across a desk with the door shut. I hear it.” He goes back to the paper in front of him.
“The net’s his. Get out of my office, Fortin. ”
And here’s the thing I don’t expect, walking out of that office into the cold.
I’m lighter than I’ve been in weeks. Lighter than after the shutout, which weighed nothing in the wrong way, which floated up out of my hands like helium.
This is a different nothing. This is the good empty, the kind you feel when you finally set down a bag you’ve been hauling up stairs so long you forgot it was optional.
It doesn’t feel like losing. I stand on the step outside the office and I check, because I don’t trust my own read on myself, and I check again.
It’s true. Wanting him more than I want the net has never once felt like losing, not for a single second, going all the way back to a night at the Hitch where I wanted him to not move away more than I wanted the toast or the room or the win.
I just needed to stop being a coward about it.
I’ve only ever said it with silence, with a bottle turned label-out over the boards. Now I’ve said it where it costs.
The net was always the wrong math. I see it clean now, standing in the parking lot with my breath going up white.
I don’t have to take it from him. I was never going to have to.
It’s coming to me anyway, on the clock, when he graduates and the crease empties out.
It’s mine with nobody’s blood on it. I was so busy fighting like a dog for the thing I already had coming to me that I nearly lost the one thing I’ll never get a second run at.
He said it to me in the equipment room without knowing what he was saying.
You got into my head so you could get into my net.
And I got the net so completely, so publicly, that I finally understood I never wanted the getting.
I wanted to be let in. There’s a whole country between taking a thing and being let into it, and I’ve spent my life on the wrong side of that border, banging on the gate, telling myself that if I hit it hard enough the breaking-in would feel like an invitation.
Now I have to go find him and tell him. All of it. Not the clean part. Not the part that makes me look good, the grand gesture, the net given away, the boy falling on his own sword. That part is easy, and because it is easy it is not enough. The whole of it. The ugly part included.
If I only bring him the pretty half, it’s one more con in a nicer costume, and he’d smell it in a second.
He’s spent his whole life smelling exactly that.
The person who came to fix him, the person who wanted something and dressed it up as love.
So I carry the ugly part in with both hands too, and I set it down in front of him, and I let him decide what it’s worth.
I zip my jacket. Outside the light has gone the color of a bruise, a storm sitting on the ridge where it likes to sit.
I point myself at the barn. My hands aren’t steady.
I notice it, and I decide it’s a good sign.
Steady is what I do when I’m performing, when the grin is loaded and the exit is picked.
Not steady is what I do when a thing is real.
For once in my whole talking, chirping, deflecting life, I’m walking toward something with nothing rehearsed, no way out scouted in advance.
It’s the most honest I have ever been on my way anywhere.