17. Brody
Their winger sees me coming and gets rid of the puck, which is the smartest thing anybody in a red sweater has done all night.
I hit him anyway.
It’s clean. Shoulder to chest, half a step after the pass, close enough to the whistle that their bench comes up screaming for a call they’re not going to get.
He goes into the glass and comes down on all fours, and the boards are still booming when I skate out of the corner.
The crowd is on its feet roaring, and for about four seconds the inside of my head goes quiet.
Four seconds is roughly what a hit buys me these days. I’ve been buying a lot of them.
Their defenseman leans in over the next faceoff and says something. I don’t catch it and I don’t ask him to repeat it. He’s the third guy tonight to try me, and all three of them are losing, so it can’t be going that well.
Sacco keeps sending my line out. He’s not stupid. Whatever’s wrong with me is winning hockey games.
On the bench Ozzy leans over, cage to cage, sweat running off his nose. “Whoever you’re mad at,” he says, “I hope you two never make up.”
He grins. I don’t grin back.
Late in the second, one of their guys finally answers for it, shoving at me in front of our net at the whistle with his gloves half off, and the crowd gets loud, hoping. He thinks better of it with his sweater half over his elbow. Smart.
I serve my two minutes staring at the ice between my feet.
Eleven games into the new season, and I still catch myself doing last spring’s math.
Two points. That’s what we missed the playoffs by while I sat out four games in the heart of the push in my living room.
Four games of me, two points. I ran those numbers all summer and they never once came out anywhere good.
Midway through the third I pin their center to the wall behind his own net, dig the puck off his stick, and shovel it out front.
Linus one-times it in before their goalie is even set. The kid has had months of rehab and a whole summer of watching from his couch, and the shot came back like it never left.
He hits the glass with both gloves in the air. He’s fine. He’s better than fine. He scored, and Dorn can rot.
During the TV timeout, I look up at the owner’s box.
I don’t decide to. It’s a thing my neck does now, a habit I can’t seem to break.
The lights are on up there. Belanger is front and center with a sponsor on either side, all of them laughing at something. Everybody loves Belanger. Same way that everyone loved Gordie. I wonder if Belanger has any secret children.
Everett only sat in that box once. I know all that. I look up anyway, every home game, like one of these nights he’ll be standing at the rail instead of an ocean away — looking down at the ice he hates, and then at me — and I don’t know what I think comes after that.
The horn goes.
We win 4–1. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the fourth goal.
I do the lap with my stick up, half a wave to the seats, and I’m down the tunnel before the song changes.
The room after a win is supposed to be the best place on earth. The music is always too loud. Tape balls fly. Everyone’s buzzing. I used to live for it.
But the volume dips when I walk in. It’s only half a beat, like a skip in a song, and then everybody’s loud again and very interested in their own gear. That’s mine, that half-beat.
I strip my gear and head for the showers without talking to anybody. Nobody tries me.
I stand under the water too long. I know exactly what I’ve been since I got back. I know I’ve been a moody son of a bitch since last spring. I just don’t know how to smack myself out of it.
The boys blamed the suspension at first — figured the hearing knocked something loose — and gave me space. The space never closed back up.
When I come out, the club’s media guy puts his head around the door and gives me a hopeful look.
I give him one back with nothing in it. He takes Marchetti instead, and everybody will go home happy.
I pull my shirt on and don’t look at anybody.
The schedule is on the whiteboard by the door, next week blocked out in Sacco’s handwriting.
Tuesday. Home. The Marauders.
That’s Dorn’s team.
I stand there in a towel looking at it and catch myself very nearly smiling.
I’m almost looking forward to it. That’s the kind of thought a captain is supposed to flag to somebody — the psychologist, the leadership group, his omega if he had one.
I towel my hair and keep it to myself.
I dress fast and I’m gone before half the room has hit the showers. Ozzy yells after me about McNally’s. I lift a hand without turning around.
A good captain stays. A good captain sits in the corner at McNally’s making one beer last, buys the kid’s pitcher himself.
I know every line of that job description. Tonight I can’t make myself care. I don’t even feel bad about that until I’m out of the parking garage, and then only a little.
The truck warms up slow. I sit while the windshield clears and my head turns to the same thing it always does.
Grown alphas do not lose whole months to some omega who doesn’t want them back.
I’m sulking like a teenager over somebody I fucked with for a handful of days. I’ve known that for a while now. Knowing it doesn’t help.
Some nights I want more than a do-over. I want all the way back — back to whatever the last ordinary day was, before I knew Gordie Rourke even had a kid.
The man was in my life for fifteen years. Not once did he say the word son.
I heard about it the way the rest of the team heard about it, after the funeral, from lawyers.
There’s a version of things where it stayed that way — a name on a document, a signature we’d never meet — and in that version I mourn Gordie, hate the sale, and go on being a hockey player, and my house is just a house.
Instead I drive to Rosie’s.
*
This close to closing, the chairs are up on half the tables and the kid behind the register is pushing a mop in slow drags. He sees me, leans the mop against the wall, and reaches for a large cup, because we are long past the point of pretending I might order something else.
“Pumpkin spice, extra shot,” he says anyway. Ritual is ritual.
The first time I came in here after Everett left, I told myself it was curiosity.
A man ought to know what the fuss was about.
After that I told myself I’d developed a taste for them, which was a bigger lie and lasted longer.
They’re terrible. It’s mostly syrup, it barely qualifies as coffee, the cinnamon is far too strong. I order one after every home game and drink it to the bottom every single time.
They sell the syrup here in squat glass bottles. There’s a shelf of them right by the register. I picked one up once and stood there reading the ingredients, and then I put it back. A latte a week is a habit. A bottle in my own kitchen is a terrible idea.
I take the corner table, back to the wall, and get out my phone.
I have a system, and the system is healthy or so I tell myself.
One hour, once a week, in this chair. For that hour I’m allowed to think about him as much as I want. Look him up, read whatever there is to read, wallow straight to the bottom of the cup. When the hour’s up, that’s it until the next one.
That’s my obsession contained.
The system has only one flaw, which is that it doesn’t work. He gets into the other six days anyway. Anytime I see a gray suit. Anytime London is mentioned on the news.
On the last road trip I stopped dead in a hotel corridor because somebody’s citrus soap was drifting out of a doorway, and it took me the length of the hallway to get my face right again.
But my hour is my hour. I’m allowed this. Guilt free.
I do the rounds in the usual order.
Instagram: nothing. The account has been dead for years. Still nothing new.
The fund’s website: “Mr. Rourke is based in London.”
It’s still present tense.
The club statements don’t mention him at all. He’s not on Facebook. He’s not on X, or at least not that I’ve been able to find.
Which leaves LinkedIn.
God, I hate LinkedIn. It’s a website where smug jerks pat each other on the back for being smug jerks. Everybody is humbled, everybody is honored, everybody is thrilled to announce.
It’s also the only place on the entire internet where Everett Rourke is demonstrably alive.
So I go there every week, same as church.
His profile photo is the gray suit and a polite smile. Still, I stare at it from the fake account that I set up purely to stalk him because apparently LinkedIn lets you know when someone views your profile.
His activity is links. That’s the entire show.
No posts, no announcements, nothing humbled or honored.
Every week or two he shares an article — bond yields, fund structures, some regulator circling some other regulator — with no comment attached.
I could not possibly care less about any of it, and I have read every single one to the end.
Tonight there’s nothing new. Same link at the top as last week. Same photo. I scroll down through the older ones anyway, as if something might have grown in the gaps since last week. Nothing has.
I refresh it anyway. Why can’t the guy get into arguments on social media like other people? He’s making this really hard for me.
The bell over the door goes, and I don’t look up until somebody pulls out the chair across from me and sits down in it.
I flinch hard enough to knock the cup, and then I’m looking at JP.
He’s showered and dressed for McNally’s, a to-go cup already in his hand, which means he ordered, paid, and crossed the whole shop while I was nose-down stalking Everett Rourke.
For a big man, he has always been quiet when he wants to be.
“Cap,” he says.
I turn my phone face-down on the table. There is no guiltier gesture known to man, and we both watch me do it.
“So this is the place.” He has a look around — the syrup shelf, the chalk menu, the chairs up on the tables. “Cozy.”
“How did you—”
“Brody. Everybody knows.” He says it kindly, which is worse.
“You do this after every home game. Ozzy calls it your decompression stop. There was a whole thing in the group chat about whether somebody should come check on you, and Marchetti said give him space. So we give you space, but that was months ago.”
“Decompression,” I say.
“You want the working theory?” He tips his cup at me.
“Theory is it’s the suspension. You come here, you chew on the hearing and ownership hanging you out to dry, and then you drive home and you’re fit to live with for about a day and a half.
” He looks at my cup. “It’s a decent theory.
Explains the mood. Explains the schedule. ” A pause. “Doesn’t explain the drink.”
I don’t say anything.
“That’s his drink, right? I’ve never known you to drink anything like that.” JP’s voice stays level, friendly. “I watched you not look at him on that last day. Takes work, not looking at somebody like that.”
“It’s a latte, JP.”
He lets that sit for a moment. Outside, a bus goes by and rattles the window in its frame.
“Go get him,” he says finally. “If it’s like this — and it’s been like this for months, I’ve watched it — then get on a plane. London has airports. Worst thing he can say is no, and then at least you’d have a no instead of—” he nods at my phone, face-down between us, “—whatever that is.”
“You don’t know what he did.”
“So tell me.”
So I tell him.
“And I asked him,” I say. “Straight out. Did you even try? He looked me in the eye and said no. Said the league was right. Said it was long past time an example got made. His exact words.” The seam on the cup lid has come loose under my thumb. I press it flat.
JP is quiet for a long time.
He turns his cup a quarter, and then another quarter, and looks at the syrup shelf. I let him take as long as he wants. He is the only living soul who knows any of this.
“Okay,” he says at last. “I get it. If Sacco picked up a phone to put me down, I’d never say his name again either.”
Another quarter turn of the cup.
JP shrugs, slow. “It was a knife. I’m not arguing that. But maybe it didn’t have your name on it.”
“He owns the team, JP.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t ask for it and never pretended he wanted it.” He drains the coffee and stands and puts the chair back where he found it, one-handed. “Hockey isn’t everything, Brody.”
He knocks twice on the table on his way past.
My hour ran out ten minutes ago and I’m still sitting here.
Hockey isn’t everything. Maybe not, but it’s been everything to me for most of my life.
But it doesn’t matter anyway.
He doesn’t want me back. He made that clear. He said so at the beginning. He made it clear after.
You can turn that over as many ways as you like. If any part of him had wanted any part of this, I’d know.
There’s no point mooning over somebody who doesn’t want you. Every sixteen-year-old on the planet knows that one.
The latte has gone cold. Cold, it’s even sweeter. Syrup all the way down, cinnamon thick in the last swallow.
I drink it anyway.
The kid calls “see you next week” while I’m shouldering the door open. Automatic, the way he’d say it to anybody. I lift a hand without turning around, and I don’t correct him.