Chapter 21 Beckett
The rule is that I can be anywhere by Tuesday.
Nobody writes it down. It is the actual physical fact of the job. The ones with families know it better than anybody. I've been moved four times. I get a phone call and a flight number. Eleven days later a woman from the equipment staff of another building asks whether I want my name on the bag.
She was twenty weeks.
She was up before me, which has happened twice. I came out at five and the kitchen light was on. Tessa was at the counter in the grey cardigan with the sleeves over her hands, doing nothing, with the kettle not on.
"You're up. It's five."
"It's a Tuesday," she said. "Do you want eggs?"
"You don't cook."
"I can cook eggs, Beckett, I'm not a child."
She cooked eggs. They were not good and I ate all of them. She stood with her back to me and unloaded a dishwasher that was clean and had been clean since Sunday.
"Are you doing the runs before you go?"
"Did them."
"You did them at four?"
"Four-fifteen."
"Right." She put a plate in a cupboard that plates do not go in. "There's soup in the blue one. The lid's the one that goes on properly. Don't take the red one, the red one is a liar."
"Tessa."
"And I put the thing in for Sofia about the Sheridan referral, so if she asks you."
"Tessa."
"What."
"Look at me."
She did not.
"I've got a skate at nine," I said. "Then I'll be at the rink until it's over, because that's where I have to be. If anything happens I'm going to call you before I call anybody. Before my agent. You'll know first."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
"It's a business," she said, to the sink. "It's the most normal thing in this business. It happens to eleven guys a year. Everybody understands it. It's not a personal…"
"Tessa."
"It's fine," she said, with her hands flat on the edge of the counter. She has said that word to me maybe four hundred times in five months. That is the only one I've not believed.
I got my bag. At the door she said my name. When I turned around she was right there. She came up on her toes and got a fistful of the back of my jacket. She kissed me hard enough that my teeth got involved. Then she stepped back and said, "Take the blue one," and went into the clinic.
In the truck at five past seven my phone went. It was a number I had in my phone and had never once had a message from.
Eli: if you get traded I’m keeping the dog
I sat in that lot and read it four times.
I typed he'd rather be with you anyway and deleted it. That is a joke. A joke would have been a way of not answering a man who had just told me something.
Understood, I sent.
Three dots came up and went away and came up and went away, twice, over about a minute.
ok
That is the entire conversation and I would not trade it for a first-round pick.
A deadline day from the inside is worse than it looks.
We skated at nine and it was a bad skate because everybody was doing arithmetic. Wheeler told a story about a guy in Ottawa who found out from a taxi driver. Somebody said do not look at your phone, and everybody looked at their phone.
Auggie set up in the corner of the lounge with three of them fanned out on a towel like a man laying out instruments.
"This one's the aggregator, which is an account that collects every rumor. This one's the guy in Toronto who's right about sixty percent of the time. This one's my cousin Dez, who is right zero percent of the time but is very fast."
"Put them away."
"Beckett, I'm load-bearing right now."
I had known for eleven days. I knew because my agent started calling more and saying less.
The reason it was happening is the thing that makes it stupid.
I had been playing the best hockey of my life since January, on a one-year deal.
A contender two time zones away had a goalie with a groin injury.
In September the columnists wrote that I was finished.
In February the same men wrote that Denver would be foolish not to sell high.
I had no say in where I went. I signed that deal in July because it was the only one on the table.
At ten-forty I walked down the hall to the general manager's office and knocked on the frame of an open door. Marc Delisle has had that job six years. He looked up at me like a man whose morning had just gotten stranger.
"You got two minutes."
I had thought about how to say it in the truck and every version was a speech, so I did not use any of them.
"I know how today works. I know what a goalie playing like this on an expiring deal is worth to a team that thinks it can win. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it isn't good business, because it is."
"Okay."
"I've never asked anybody in this game for anything. Eleven years, four organizations. I got told."
Delisle put the pen down.
"My daughter's going to be born in this city in June," I said.
"Nine minutes from this building. Her mother's business is on Federal and it doesn't move.
It can't. It's a shelter and a clinic and a house on one lot.
I'm not asking you to make a bad hockey decision.
I'm asking, if it's close, for the chance to earn the rest of my career here. "
He did not say anything for a while. "You know I can't tell you anything."
"I know."
"Beckett." He picked the pen back up and turned it over once. "How long have you been standing in that hallway?"
"About six minutes."
"Go get a coffee," Delisle said. "Do not sit in your car."
The last hour is the long one. At twelve-nineteen Auggie's cousin Dez reported a deal was done and it was us. At twelve forty-one Skoglund's phone rang and the room went so quiet I could hear the ice plant. It was his mother.
At twelve fifty-five I went and stood in the tunnel by myself, which is the only place in that building where nobody has ever come to find me. I put my hand flat on the middle of my chest through my shirt.
At one o'clock the window closed. The aggregator posted the last three deals in the league and there was not a Denver one. Auggie made a noise like a kettle and went down onto the floor on his back with his arms out.
"Nothing!" he yelled. "They did nothing! That's the best thing I've ever seen a hockey team do!"
Delisle came through ten minutes later and shook hands. When he got to me he said, "Have a good practice tomorrow." He did not look at me one second longer than he looked at anybody else. I've decided that was on purpose.
I sat down in my stall. In eleven years I've been in four rooms on this day and in two of them I was the guy. I've never once been in a room on the 4th of February and had a place to be.
I got my phone.
Staying. Home soon.
I came south on Federal at ten to two and I could see her from a block away.
There is a strip of gravel between the clinic and the fence where the van goes.
She was standing in it in the cold with no coat on, in the cardigan.
She was holding her phone down by her side with the screen still lit, watching the road.
When the truck came around the row she turned toward the clinic door like a woman who had been about to go in the whole time.
I got the truck in park and got the door about halfway open.
She was there before I was.
"You're an idiot, get out of the car," Tessa said.
"I'm getting…"
"Get out."
I got out and got about eight inches of standing room before she was up against me with her fists in the front of my jacket and her face in my neck. I got an arm around her and one hand on the back of her head. Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then she kissed me in front of a passing bus, and it was not a soft one. It went on until somebody in a hatchback at the light did the thing with the horn, two short ones. Tessa put a hand up over her shoulder at them without looking and did not stop.
When she stopped she stayed where she was with her forehead against my sternum.
"I wasn't watching the road," she said.
"No."
"I came out to look at the gate. The gate's been sticking."
"Tessa, you're not wearing a coat."
"The gate has been sticking, Beckett," she said. Then her shoulders went, once. She said, in a completely level voice, "I'm not crying."
"I know. It's cold out. Your eyes water."
"They water," she said. "That's a documented thing."
"Get in the truck."
"I have a two o'clock."
"Sofia's got your two o'clock."
"You don't know that."
"I called her from the parking garage," I said.
Tessa lifted her head off my chest and looked at me for a second. Then she made a sound that was half a laugh and definitely half something else. She got in the truck.
We sat there with the engine running and the heater on because she was shaking. It was not the cold.
"Say it again," she said.
"I'm staying."
"Say the whole thing."
"They didn't move me. The window's closed. I'm here till at least July." I had both hands on the wheel of my own truck, which I had not turned off. "That's all it is, Tessa. It's five months. It isn't a…"
"Don't." She had her head back against the rest. "Don't do the part where you make it smaller so I don't have to have a feeling about it."
"Okay."
"Do you know what I did at one o'clock?"
"No."
"I was in a room with a nine-year-old lab and a family, and the wife was crying.
I did the whole conversation properly, all of it.
I was good. The entire time there was a part of my head standing in a parking lot doing this.
" She held up her phone. "And I've never done that in my life.
Not when the equipment people called. Not when my mother… I don't do that."
"I know."
"So don't tell me it's five months."
"Okay," I said.
She turned her head on the rest and looked at me. "Come here."
I went there.
She has one hand she uses on the side of my face and I know it now. The heater was going and the windows were doing what windows do. It went on until a woman with two dogs came past the fence and looked directly into my truck. Tessa put her face into my shoulder and laughed for about a minute.
"That's Denise Petrocelli," she said, into my jacket. "She has a schnauzer. She does the block newsletter."
"Let her do the newsletter," I said.
And then Tessa Reeves sat back in the passenger seat with the heater roaring.
She put both her hands flat on her own stomach and said, to the windshield, "The 26th of June.
" Her voice was completely different, like a woman reading a date off a wall and finding out it was a place she was allowed to go.