Rafe #2
Cross: you parked in the media spots again.
Trier: the media parks in OUR spots. this is a war and I’m recruiting soldiers for my side.
Further down, Varga organized our night in Denver without asking anyone.
Varga: after the game we’re going to the Rickhouse. I checked the flight, we don’t leave till noon. Denver is a mile up and one beer works like three. Plan accordingly.
Varga: not you Mikkelsen. you can order a pop. you’re still coming.
Rook: he’s been researching the altitude thing since Tuesday. there are tabs open.
Varga: red blood cells don’t lie, Mattias.
Then Heath, pinned to the top of the chat: dinner at his and Kieran’s, the Tuesday night after the trip, short ribs.
Kieran: mild batch available, no questions asked.
I typed “I’ll be there” and hit send before I saw that six guys above me had answered the same.
At 5:15, Max started texting.
Max: okay. tonight. what are we thinking, outfit-wise?
Rafe: I have stuff
Max: show me the stuff
I checked my closet. Everything hung where it always hung, evenly spaced, sorted by kind: practice clothes, travel clothes, and at the end the suits and the going-out stuff, bought in one afternoon when the team dress code arrived in my email.
The salesperson had put combinations together, and I’d bought what they suggested.
I laid two options on the bed and sent a photo.
Max: the second one. always the second one. the first one goes to a donation bin tonight, we don’t have time to burn it properly
Max: wear the boots not the sneakers. you own boots, yes? farm boots count, actually farm boots would be incredible, do you have your actual farm boots
Max: don’t answer that, we’re saving that, that’s a February move
I hung the first option back in the closet, in its spot, and got dressed in the one Max picked. It was easy. Someone with more experience made the call. Listening to experienced voices had always worked out.
The mirror on the closet door was the only one in the apartment big enough for checking a complete outfit. Max had been right about the second option. I looked good or close enough that nobody would look twice. I straightened my shirt and grabbed my keys.
The group chat buzzed once more before I picked my phone up. Trier had posted a photo of his cat sitting upright in a bathroom sink.
Trier: she does this when the vet day is coming. she knows.
Next was more from Max.
Max: car’s coming for you. trust me, parking there is a nightmare, and when we leave together, that’s the money shot. black SUV. driver’s name is Dmitri, don’t bring up the Bears, you have been warned
Rafe: see you in 20. this is going to be fun
***
Dmitri had opinions about the Bears, and he shared most of them on the ride to the West Loop. I nodded and said “makes sense” at the right moments. By the time we pulled up to the restaurant, he’d offered to introduce me to his nephew’s youth hockey team, and I’d said yes to that.
Max was waiting inside the door, and he was even better looking than the photos I’d seen. He wore a cream coat over dark, pressed pants.
“Rafe Mikkelsen.” He shook my hand with a two-handed grip while he started talking.
“Okay, first, you’re taller than your listed height.
My fans will love that. Second, here’s the setup.
Dinner’s private. Nobody watches us eat.
When we leave, one photographer is across the street.
I suggest your hand on my waist as we walk out the door.
We take three steps past the photographer, and we’re done. ”
“Got it.”
Max turned toward the back of the restaurant and then turned back, one finger up. “Also, the chef’s a fan of my videos. He may come out, and if he offers you the tasting experience, it’s four hours. Say no nicely. He’ll be fine about it.”
The back room had one table under a low brass fixture, a candle in a jar, and a door that shut, and when the door shut, Max slowed down. It wasn’t dramatic. He put his phone face down on the far edge of the table, sat back, and looked at me like we had all night.
“So, four thousand acres, mostly canola and wheat, with forty head of cattle. What I want to know is the part numbers don’t describe. What’s the best thing about it? Growing up on a farm. One thing.”
I considered my answer. “Harvest nights,” I said.
“You run the combine after dark when the moisture’s right.
Everything’s loud and warm inside the cab, and it’s black in every direction except for your headers lighting up the crop rows.
My dad ran one machine, and I ran the other, and we didn’t talk on the radio unless something broke.
It was the best five hours of the year.”
“Quiet. Really dark. So different from the city. Okay, menu. What do you like?”
I opened mine and read it. Four years of high school French was a big help, and the parts I didn’t know were the parts that made me curious.
There was a duck thing with cherries I’d never heard of and would have eaten out of pure curiosity, and then, near the bottom, walleye.
I hadn’t seen walleye on a menu in Chicago yet.
“What do you recommend? You know the place.”
“Nope, I’m not making you eat what I like. What do you like?”
“The duck thing,” I said. “With the cherries. I’ve never had that.”
“Good choice,” Max said. “I’m having the walleye.”
Dinner was two hours and felt like it took about twenty minutes.
Max’s walleye showed up looking like it’d gone to a fancy school.
It was a gold-seared fillet on a green sauce with three kinds of tiny vegetables arranged around it, but it was a quarter the size of what we pulled out of Last Mountain Lake fried in butter in a dented pan.
When I mentioned that, Max put his fork down and made me describe the dented pan in detail. “My followers die for stories like that.”
The duck came sliced and fanned out under a dark red sauce, cherries cooked down to something between fruit and syrup.
I resisted the temptation to take a photo and send it to Mom.
It tasted like somebody had worked on it all afternoon.
We had ducks on the farm, and my grandmother roasted them.
This was different, like the duck had gone pro.
I ate all of it, including a smear of something orange I couldn’t identify.
Max was funny. It came naturally to him. He told me about the worst video he ever posted: a tile-regrouting tutorial in which he gradually and visibly regrouted his own hand into the wall.
“Eight million views in the first week, Rafe. It was my most successful work. Who cares about real craftsmanship?”
He asked what nobody had warned me about in the NHL.
“Hotel pillows. Yeah, everyone says travel, but they mean pillows. Varga thinks there’s a conspiracy behind it.”
Max asked real questions. I gave him full, honest answers, a lot more than in the past four months of media scrums.
When our server had cleared our plates, Max checked his watch. “Okay,” he said, standing. “Showtime.”
I stood beside him, and he placed my hand around his waist. I was surprised how firm and muscular it was. “Three steps, and then Dmitri will take us home.”
The sidewalk was the easiest thing anyone had asked of me all day.
The door swung, the cold hit, Max tucked in against my side laughing at something I hadn’t said, and I pulled his body tighter against me.
One step, two, a flash from across the street turning the wet pavement white for a beat, three.
Done. I let go, and Max stepped ahead to get the car door like a gentleman.
“Flawless,” Max said, pulling his door shut. “Dmitri, he’s a natural.”
“Noted,” Dmitri said. “Bears traded up in the draft, by the way, I have concerns—“
“Later, Dmitri.”
As we reached my building, Max looked up from his phone.
“Oh,” he said, “one more thing. I have to grab a box from my brother’s shop tomorrow.
My building’s lobby has a package thief.
It’s a whole saga, so don’t get me started.
Please come with. It will be ten minutes.
It’s close to your practice, and there’s a bakery on that block that will change your life. ”
“Sure,” I said.