Epilogue
Milo Vance did not enjoy college hockey arenas.
The seats were too narrow. The sightlines were wrong.
The boards rattled on every hit like they were held together by optimism and duct tape, and the student section had been screaming since warmups with the sustained intensity of people who had nowhere to be tomorrow and no concept of vocal cord preservation.
A kid three rows down was wearing a foam finger and a Viking helmet and no shirt, which was a choice, given that the building was roughly the same temperature as the inside of a refrigerator.
Adrian sat beside him with his hands wrapped around a paper cup of hot chocolate that cost four dollars and tasted like it cost two.
His glasses had fogged when they walked in from the parking lot and he’d cleaned them on his jacket and put them back on and they’d fogged again immediately and he’d left them.
He was watching the ice through a soft haze and he looked, to Milo, like a man who had never been to a hockey game and was enjoying himself enormously and had no intention of admitting either of those things.
“Your nephew is number seventeen?” Adrian said.
“Yeah.”
“The fast one.”
“They’re all fast.”
“The fast one who just hit that kid so hard the boards shook.”
“Yeah,” Milo said. “That’s him.”
Cam Reyes was a junior right wing at the University of North Dakota and he played the way Milo had played at that age, which was angry and fast and with the specific disregard for his own body that coaches loved and mothers hated.
His sister had called Milo after the last game to tell him Cam had two goals and a busted lip and that she was going to kill him if he kept playing like that and could Milo please talk to him.
Milo had called Cam. Cam had said “I’m fine, Uncle Milo” in exactly the tone Milo used when he said “fine” and Milo had hung up and texted his sister he’s fine and his sister had sent back a single emoji that communicated, across the entire Vance family tradition of understatement, roughly seven paragraphs of disagreement.
The game was close. North Dakota up one heading into the third, the arena tight with noise, the ice surface carrying the chewed-up quality of two periods of hard play.
The visiting team was good, organized, the kind of program that produced defensemen who read the ice before the play developed.
Milo tracked the game from the stands with the eye he couldn’t turn off, the unconscious calculus of positioning and timing that ran whether he wanted it to or not.
Cam took a shift in the third and went hard into the corner after a loose puck.
The visiting defenseman got there first. Number four, a left-handed D-man who was taller than Cam and played with his head up and his stick in the passing lane and the particular economy of someone who never worked harder than the play required.
He’d been doing this all night, Milo had noticed, arriving half a second before the forwards and making it look like the puck had come to him instead of the other way around.
Good feet. Good hands. The kind of player who’d go in the third or fourth round if scouts were paying attention, and scouts should be paying attention.
Cam came into the corner and the defenseman sealed him off, shoulder to shoulder, both of them grinding along the boards for the puck.
The contact was standard. The duration was not.
They stayed against the boards a beat longer than the play needed, Cam’s shoulder pressed into the defenseman’s chest, neither of them separating when the puck squirted free.
Cam’s head turned. The defenseman’s helmet was close enough that the cages were almost touching.
One second. Then Cam shoved off and chased the puck up the wall and the defenseman pivoted and followed and the play continued and it was nothing.
Milo watched the rest of the shift. Cam backchecked hard, won a board battle, fed the center. The defenseman cleared the zone with a clean breakout pass. The whistle went. Both benches changed.
Adrian was looking at the ice.
“What,” Milo said.
“Number four,” Adrian said. He drank his hot chocolate. “Your nephew seems to have a lot of opinions about number four.”
“They used to play together,” Milo said. “Before the kid transferred. Cam said they were close.”
Adrian’s mouth did the thing where it wasn’t quite smiling but wanted to be. “Close,” he said.
“What.”
“Nothing.” Adrian drank his hot chocolate.
His glasses were fogging again. But his eyes stayed on the ice for the rest of the period with the particular focus he usually saved for a canvas he was trying to figure out, and Milo had been with him long enough to know that when Adrian looked at something like that, he was seeing whatever was underneath the surface, the thing the painter was trying not to show.
North Dakota won 3-1. Cam had an assist and zero penalty minutes, which Milo would report to his sister as progress.
The arena emptied in the loud, disorganized way of college buildings, students spilling into the concourse with their chants still going, the cold of the parking lot reaching through the open doors.
Milo stood in the concourse and texted his sister. Good game. He looked strong. Played smart. Three sentences, which was practically a novel by Vance family standards.
She responded: Did he fight anyone?
No.
Progress. Then: Thanks for going. He won’t say it but it matters that you’re there.
Milo put the phone in his pocket. Adrian was beside him, the empty hot chocolate cup in one hand, the other hand in his jacket pocket.
His glasses had finally cleared. He was watching Milo with the look he got when Milo was doing something Milo didn’t know he was doing, which Adrian had once described as “your face when you accidentally care about something.”
“Good kid,” Adrian said.
“He’s all right.”
Adrian’s mouth curved. He bumped Milo’s shoulder with his own as they walked toward the exit, the contact casual and public and entirely unremarkable, and Milo’s hand came out of his pocket and found Adrian’s hand and held it through the doors and into the parking lot where the cold hit them both and neither of them let go.
The drive home was long and Adrian fell asleep in the passenger seat with his head against the window and paint on his knuckles and Milo drove with one hand on the wheel and thought about the game and the boards and the corner and the beat that lasted longer than it needed to and filed it in the place where he kept things he’d think about later or never.
The highway was empty. The headlights made their tunnel ahead of them and the road kept going and the heater worked and Adrian breathed beside him and Milo drove home.