Chapter 8
ALEX
I approach the front of Perks and Rec and wonder if there’s a back entrance I’ll be able to use to get to and from my apartment.
Going in and out of the front door of the coffee shop-slash-bar where most of the town gathers, seemingly all day long, will ensure my life is front and center for everyone.
How will you get Nora in and out, you mean.
Yeah, especially because everyone greets the woman like a long-lost friend every time she sets foot inside the shop.
But for now, I go in through the front door, tinkly bell over my head and all.
Sure enough, everyone turns to see who just arrived.
And I definitely don’t get the warm, “Alex!” greeting welcoming me in.
It’s about twenty after eight and I’m sweaty and annoyed from hockey practice. The team is coming over to the bar after everyone cleans up, so I need to head upstairs to shower before they arrive.
At least I don’t have to go far to meet them.
And I don’t need to worry about driving home after a beer or two.
I spot Ruth sitting at the coffee bar working on what looks like homework. I’m so relieved to have a friendly face that I bee-line for the girl.
“Hey, Ruth!” I give her my best smile, trying to hide the exasperation I’ve been feeling since…well, since I got on the plane this morning.
“Hi!” Her smile is big and wide. “How was your first practice?”
Easily the most bonkers thing I’ve ever done. “Great. Everyone was really nice,” I say. That much is true. The team seems great.
“Oh, good.” She hops off the stool. “I’m supposed to tell Grandpa when you’re here. He’ll take you up to the apartment.”
“Great.”
She starts for the kitchen. “Could you, uh, help show me around?” I ask.
Do I feel like I need my twelve-year-old fan to buffer between me and my gruff landlord? Yes. One thousand percent.
“Sure!” she says enthusiastically. She pushes the kitchen door open. “Grandpa! He’s here!”
“Fine. Just a minute,” comes his brusque reply.
She looks back at me. “There’s only one apartment up there. And it’s small. You wouldn’t have any trouble finding things. But it’s probably really different from where you live. I saw pictures of your apartment in Portland in Hockey Hunks magazine.”
Her cheeks flame red, and I rush to cover her embarrassment.
“Oh, they did a great article. They made my place look really cool.” I rack my brain for something, someway, I can relate to a twelve-year-old girl.
The only thing I know we have in common is hockey and Nora.
“Which room did you like the best?” I’d love to ask her all about Nora, but that would probably come off creepy.
I can talk about my apartment easily enough. So, the kid looks at Hockey Hunks magazine online. A lot of dudes do, too, actually.
It’s called Hockey Hunks, and yeah, they take a bunch of photos of us, and sure, some of them are shirtless, but they also do in-depth stories.
They highlight where we live and our favorite restaurants, movies and books we like, giving a behind-the-scenes look at our lives.
At least that’s the idea. Their goal is to appeal to a demographic they think might be less into stats and offensive strategy and more into the players as men.
But my experience is that women know just as much about the game as men, and men are just as into what our apartments look like, what cars we drive, and how we like to spend our free time as women are.
“Your living room,” Ruth answers without even pausing to think.
“You don’t cook, and you don’t seem to spend much time in the other rooms. But you hang out a lot in your living room.
Plus, you have that really great view. Of course, you’re not gonna have a really great view here.
But you probably won’t be here a lot either.
The town is going to want to get to know you, and there are a lot of activities for you to attend. ” She’s a chatterbox now.
And she’s observant. She’s completely right about my apartment.
I don’t spend a lot of time in any of the rooms other than the living room.
That’s where I kick back and watch TV and movies, play games, and entertain.
Sure, my bedroom gets some use… But I don’t expect a girl this age to really think about that.
Now her cousin Nora, on the other hand, may be a different story.
I’d like Nora to do more than think about my bedroom, though.
“Well, come on then,” Bruce says, coming through the swinging door. He sets a hand on the back of Ruth’s neck and steers her around the edge of the counter.
He doesn’t ask if she wants to come with us, and I wonder if he wants a third person to dispel some awkwardness between us, too.
In the corner of the restaurant, behind a tall potted tree that is, no shit, growing lemons, there’s a pink and orange curtain-covered doorway, and beyond the curtain is a staircase.
I follow them up the fourteen steps to the second floor.
Bruce opens the door on the landing, and it swings in with a groan.
He steps in first, and Ruth follows. I have to duck slightly to avoid hitting the doorframe with my forehead.
Bruce crosses to a lamp and clicks it on.
“This is yours while you’re here,” Bruce says, walking into the middle of the apartment, which is also the middle of the living room.
“One of the hockey players from last year’s team lived here.
Most of the other guys stayed in town, so there aren’t too many places open.
But if you can find something better that you like more, feel free to go. ”
I arch my brows. Warm welcome, this is not.
“My sister seems to think this is the perfect place for me,” I tell him. I notice my bags sitting at the end of the hallway that I assume leads to the bedroom and bath. “Have you met Astrid?”
Bruce stands with his feet shoulder-width apart, his hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans.
The bright orange T-shirt he wears reads Perks and Rec, and has a coffee cup leaning against a beer mug on the front.
He’s taller than the other three men that wanted to do me harm, and he seems a little younger.
He’s maybe in his mid- to late sixties, rather than mid-seventies.
He’s also got a rounder stomach, a broader chest, has a very neatly trimmed beard, and looks at me with an air of disdain that I have rarely experienced.
The three men at the airport seemed mischievous. This man looks like I tracked pig shit into his mansion, and I’m not even qualified to clean it up.
“I have met your sister,” Bruce tells me. “She seems used to getting her way.”
I chuckle. “That’s an understatement.”
“So you’re going to stay here because she tells you to?”
I shrug. “I’m going to stay here because it has a bed and a shower, and that’s really all I need while I’m in town.”
He looks around, then back to me with an eyebrow. “For what it’s worth, I saw the photos of your Portland apartment, too. Are you sure about that?”
I look around too. I’ve never seen this many flowers in one place in my life. The apartment’s decor can best be described as Grandma-core.
The floors are hardwood, but clearly old and not refinished.
The draperies at the window are lacy. The walls are covered in floral wallpaper with bold burgundy, gold, and greens.
The side tables are mismatched, and each holds a lamp.
One is a round porcelain lamp covered in flowers with a plain white shade.
The other has a brass base, and the shade is the flowered part.
Glass with bright red flowers that, again, don’t match anything else.
The couch in between is an oversized, lumpy, floral-upholstered piece—this time featuring pink and blue flowers.
There is a blue armchair, a scarred coffee table on a braided, multi-colored rug, and a television that easily weighs fifty pounds sitting on a very rickety stand.
There’s a ceiling fan, turning lazily overhead, and an air conditioning unit in the window, humming and rattling intermittently.
To my left is a half wall that divides the living room from the kitchen. From what I can see, there are more flowered curtains on the window over the sink.
I smile. Someone either did it intentionally or honestly did not care at all and just threw furniture into this room haphazardly. There’s no in between.
There’s got to be a flowered comforter or a quilt on the bed, and a wooden side table that was new sometime in the sixties, and if there’s not an armoire, I’m going to be very disappointed.
“All of this furniture was donated by people in town,” Bruce says. “So treat it well.”
I give a soft snort. This furniture has seen some stuff. I don’t think I can do anything to it that hasn’t been done.
He frowns. “And be careful what you say about it down in the café.”
“I would never disparage the furniture down in the café,” I tell him.
“Miss Dora says this is the most comfortable couch in town,” Ruth says, crossing to the piece and plopping down in the center cushion. She bounces up and down. “She says her husband took hundreds of naps on this couch.”
“Is that right?” I ask, eyeing the couch. I do like a good nap now and then.
“Yep, took his very last one right there,” Bruce says.
I look at him quickly. “Do you mean…he died there?”
Ruth nods. “Miss Dora said she didn’t know he was dead for hours because he always slept here.”
I take a step back from the couch without thinking. I have a sofa a guy died on. A guy was dead on that sofa. Terrific.
“Was that recent? In this room?” I ask.
Bruce shakes his head. “She had it in her living room for a couple of years before she donated it to us.”
I look at Ruth. “How do ghosts work? Do they stay with the furniture, or do they stay in the room where they die?”
She giggles. And doesn’t answer me.
That isn’t reassuring in the least.
“The refrigerator won’t be telling you the weather, or giving you the headline news, or making you different shapes of ice,” Bruce says. “There’re a couple of ice trays up in the freezer, and if you come to the café before eight, you can get all the weather and headline news in person.”
He really did read that article from Hockey Hunks. Yes, my fridge in Portland does all of those things. But I can live without all of that for seven months.
Probably.
“Washer and dryer are downstairs, back of the kitchen. You’ll have to share with the café.”
Now that makes me pause.
I’m going to have to do laundry.
I don’t do that in Portland. The same woman who cleans my apartment and cooks for me three nights a week also does my laundry and handles my dry cleaning. And yes, we had a housekeeper and cook when I was growing up. No one taught me to do things like laundry, and it’s never been an issue.
That’s not really my fault. It’s just a thing. Like people who are never taught to ice skate can’t play ice hockey. It’s not a mark against their character.
But I’m not going to say that to Bruce. He probably read that in the article and is just waiting for me to react.
I nod. “Sure. Great. No problem.”
Bruce rolls his eyes but turns on his heel and starts for the door. “I’m downstairs if you need anything. I’ll let you run a tab for meals, but only up to a hundred bucks before you pay it off.”
I wonder if a one-hundred-dollar tab is extending me a favor or if that’s like half or a third of what he lets everybody else do.
Ruth hangs back as Bruce stomps down the stairs. I can hear every step.
“Is the apartment really okay?” she asks.
“Sure. It’s fine.”
“I know it’s not as nice as what you have in Portland. I know how much you like your shower.”
Jesus. I probably said that in that article, too. I love my fucking shower. But I’ve stayed in hotels without rainfall shower heads and multiple heads in the wall. That’s been fine. It’s seven months. I can definitely survive seven months without a fancy-schmancy showerhead.
Probably.
“Okay, so you read that article in Hockey Hunks,” I start.
“Oh, yeah. And I’ve read a ton of other articles too,” she gushes.
That could be really helpful to me right now as embarrassing as some of that might be. “Great. So you know that I’m not very good at anything but playing hockey.”
She shakes her head. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Well, thanks. Let’s put it this way, I don’t do a lot of laundry.”
She nods. “You have to focus on your career. And there’s a lot of training. And promo and stuff.
I like this kid. I was a dick to her, and she’s still defending me. To me. “Yeah. And I am pretty spoiled, if I’m honest.”
She grins at that.
“Do you happen to know how to use the washer and dryer downstairs?”
Her whole face brightens. “I totally know how. Do you want me to do your laundry for you?”
She says that as if she’s eager for me to hire her.
I frown. “No. Absolutely not. No, I was kind of hoping that you could teach me to do it, though.”
She smiles as if this amuses her. “Totally. And you can ask Bruce stuff. I mean, he might kind of frown a lot. But eventually, he’ll come around. Everybody was a big fan of yours before…”
I wince. Right, before I was an asshole to everyone’s favorite person. “Everybody?”
“Well, half of town.”
“There was already half that didn’t like me? Before…?”
“The newer part of town doesn’t really care about hockey. They probably didn’t hate you,” she says as if trying to comfort me. “But they won’t be excited you’re here because if you make the hockey team great, then Sean Patrick can’t buy the arena.”
“But half did like me?”
“Oh, for sure! The half that hangs out downtown and lives around here. The ones you’ll see all the time!” she says enthusiastically. “They’re all really good friends of my grandpa Harley’s. Like Brewser and Wilson. They were the lawyer and doctor in town back when there was just one of each.”
I straighten. “Was Brewser the lawyer or doctor?”
“The doctor. Wilson was a lawyer. Before they retired. They grew up here, and everyone from here used them at one time. Those guys have always been around here. Lots of people are like that here. So they’re really close to my family, and they were big fans of yours because Harley and Leo were big fans of yours. ”
“Have I lost them forever?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Especially because you’re going to help this hockey team be great.”
Right. No pressure at all.
And I probably shouldn’t care too much about this tiny town and its people that I don’t even know.
Especially when I’m not going to be here for long.
A lot of my teammates would tell me that I’m already overthinking this.
I’m going to come and play hockey, to the best of my ability.
But that’s what I always do. It’s not fully on me if this team fails or succeeds.
Probably.