Rafe #2
“I feel good. It’s a great team and an excellent organization. Just excited to play hockey.” I gave them a warm smile and a small shrug. Varga had taught me how to respond to the media in my first month—be boring on purpose; boring is a superpower. So far it had worked.
“Rookie year, small town in Saskatchewan. This is a big city moment for a farm kid. Fans are already—“ Deckert flipped his phone around briefly. “There’s a whole thing forming out there. The polite prairie kid. You’ve seen it?”
“My mom sends me most of it,” I said. It was the boring truth, and it got a laugh.
“Okay—enough,” Varga announced, arriving into my scrum like a snowplow. “This is my media time. He is contractually uninteresting for two more years. Ask me the things.”
“Lucas, one more on the relationship announcement—“
“It was beautiful; I cried, he cried, and the cat doesn’t care about us. We’re done here.” The group laughed as they broke up and stashed their equipment.
Varga was quiet for a few steps as we walked toward the gym. “You’re good at that,” he said.
“You taught me.”
“I did. Guess I’m a brilliant teacher.” He held the gym door open for me. “You’re the best student I’ve ever had, honestly. Little bit scary how fast you take to it.”
It was a compliment.
The gym at the North Branch facility ran the length of the building’s east side, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the river. In January the water moved dark and slow between crusts of shelf ice.
The board said conditioning, which after eleven days off was less a workout than payment on a bill that came due. I racked plates for front squats and tried to remember what my legs had felt like in December.
Kieran was already at the next rack over, working through goblet squats. It was too easy. He’d trained over break. He caught my eye between reps.
“Next week,” he said. “You eat spicy?”
“Sure.”
He set the dumbbell down and looked at me. “That was fast,” he said. “The short ribs have gochujang in them. It’s not polite fast-food gochujang. If you show up next week and sweat through dinner and tell me it’s great, Heath will believe you, and I won’t.”
“I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan,” I said. “The spiciest thing my mom makes is a dill pickle.”
“There it is,” Kieran said, satisfied, and picked the dumbbell back up. “I’ll make a milder batch on the side. Not for you, officially. Officially it’s for Heath, who grew up in Wisconsin with salt and pepper.”
“I heard that,” Heath said from the pull-up bars.
“You were meant to.”
I got under the bar for my first set. Trier appeared at the rack on my other side somewhere around rep three. He set up for Romanian deadlifts and worked in silence long enough that I made the mistake of relaxing.
“So,” he said. “Big morning. Announcement and everything.”
“Yep.”
“Very composed. Very smooth. I just want you to know that nothing changes for me. You were already on thin ice with the haircut.”
“The haircut is fine.”
“The haircut is a cry for help, and now that I know you more fully as a person, I hear the cry more clearly.” He loaded another plate. “Congratulations, by the way. Genuinely. I can introduce you to a stylist here in the city.”
“Thanks.”
Trier’s phone buzzed on the bench behind him. He checked it between sets and frowned.
“Problem?” Heath asked, dropping from the bar.
“The vet moved the cat’s appointment, and now it conflicts with my treatment slot, so I have to see if I can move that.”
“You’re moving your treatment for the cat,” Heath said.
“I’m moving my treatment for a senior cat with a thyroid condition who does not enjoy the carrier and needs the morning slot when she’s calm.” He set his phone down and picked his bar back up. “She was there for my whole rehab summer. She can have this.”
“How old is she now?” Kieran asked.
“Fourteen.” Trier finished his set. “She’s in great shape. We’re managing the thyroid thing.” He looked over at me. “You’ll eventually meet her. Everyone does.”
I didn’t know what to say. It had been six months already, and Trier had never invited me to his home. I said, “Okay.” Apparently, it was the right answer because he nodded as if we’d settled something.
I pushed through the last two sets with my legs complaining. Outside the windows, a barge worked its way up the river, low and patient, breaking the skin of ice ahead of it.
***
My phone was waiting in the stall cubby with messages stacked up.
Hal (my agent): Proud of you kid. Call when you can, nothing urgent.
Mom: Dad says the Hendersons’ Wi-Fi is out so we saw your news on Marlene’s phone. We love you. Are you eating?
The team group chat had forty-some messages, of which roughly six concerned me and the rest were snowblower stories inspired by Kieran’s dad. I sat down in my stall in a towel and answered all the direct messages.
Trier interrupted. “You’re going by the pro shop.”
“I wasn’t planning on going by the pro shop.”
“Sure, you are. Jamie there said it would take about fifteen minutes more. They’ll be done by the time you get there.”
I returned to the messages. It took me twenty minutes. When I finished, I picked up my bag, grabbed Trier’s skates from the pro shop, and headed down to the garage.
The players’ garage under the practice facility is the quietest place in the whole building. The cold comes up through your shoes off the concrete in January, and the overhead lights lay a flat white sheen over the parked vehicles.
I was alone as I dug for my keys with Trier’s skates under one arm. A door clicked somewhere behind me. I heard the voice of Mark from PR. “There he is. The man of the hour.”
He hurried across the garage to me. “Big day,” he said. “How are you feeling? Honestly.”
“Honestly, good. Everybody was great.”
“They were. The room was impressive, and you were great. Your comment to the media in the hallway was perfect. The power play was bigger news for us.”
He shook his head, genuinely pleased, scrolling something on his phone without looking at it. That was a skill they must have taught in PR school.
“The response out there is—it’s very good, Rafe. Very warm. People like you. That’s not nothing. It’s kind of rare, and it’s worth keeping.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say after a comment like that.
“Which is sort of what I wanted to grab you about.” Mark stuck his phone in his pocket. “Got a minute tomorrow? Nothing bad. Might even be fun.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Great. Ten thirty, my office. I’ll put it on the calendar. It’s a good idea, I think, and you’ll like it. A couple of sponsorship people got excited over the break. They think you’d be a great fit for this one guy. Nothing complicated—we’ll talk tomorrow.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He drew it out again, glanced at the screen, and grimaced. “That’s Deckert wanting a call back. Gotta handle that.” He was already moving, keys out, walking backward two steps. “Hey—good day today. I mean it.”
I got into my truck and sat there a minute without starting it. Trier’s skates were on the passenger seat.
It had been the biggest day of my life, and it had gone better than anything I’d let myself imagine. What I mostly felt, sitting in the cold in the concrete quiet, was that I couldn’t remember why I’d been so careful about it.
I reached over and squared my phone to the edge of the console, and then the skates so the blades sat parallel to the seat seam, and then I started the truck.
This one guy, he’d said.
Whatever Mark wanted, I already knew what I was going to say. I always did. That was one thing people liked about me.