Chapter 3
Shane called his mother before he said yes, backward, because he’d already said yes in his body three days before his mouth caught up. He knew it the way he knew a play was dead the second the puck left his stick wrong. Some things land before they land.
“You sound weird,” Marion said. “Are you eating?”
“I’m eating, Mom.”
“You’re not eating. I can hear it. You get this voice when you’re running on coffee and spite.”
Shane sat on the floor of his rented bedroom in the place he shared with two other guys off Kishwaukee Street, his back against the bed, and looked at the water stain on the ceiling that he’d named Gerald sometime in November, and he did not tell her about the call to the clinic, or the no about the payment plan, or the number that had been sitting on his chest for a month like a man kneeling on it.
He had never told her any of it. That was the architecture of his life: she didn’t know how bad it was because if she knew how bad it was, she would refuse the treatment to spare him, and then she would get worse, and it would be his fault for telling her.
“I got news about the program,” he said. “The experimental one. The funding came through.”
The silence on the other end was a held breath. “Shane. Don’t you dare. If you’re—”
“It’s not me, Mom. There’s a fund. For families. I applied months ago.” The lie came out smooth, which scared him, how smooth it came. “They covered it. All of it. Up front.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You always click your tongue before you lie, you’ve done it since you were six—”
“I’m not lying,” Shane said, and clicked his tongue, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Mom. It’s covered. You start next month. The neurologist already has the paperwork. Please, please let me have this. Let me give you this one thing.”
His mother cried, then, the careful muffled crying of a woman who’d taught herself not to scare her kid, and Shane sat on the floor and listened to it and the yes finished closing over his head, and he thought, okay. Okay. Whatever it costs me. Okay.
* * *
He found Theo in the parking lot the next morning and said, “Yes, but I have terms.”
Theo nodded once and said, “Good. I have terms also. We will write them down.”
That was how Shane Novak ended up at a Denny’s at nine in the morning across a sticky booth from the human iceberg he was about to marry, watching Theo Lindgren uncap a pen and smooth a sheet of lined paper flat on the table like they were negotiating a trade.
“This is insane,” Shane said. “You know this is insane.”
“Order food,” Theo said. “You look like a ghost.”
“Don’t tell me to eat. I’m in a strict—”
“Performance diet. I know. Everyone knows.” Theo wrote a number 1 on the paper. “Money. I pay the clinic directly. Not to you. To them. It is not income, not a gift to you, nothing that looks wrong. The treatment, the monitoring, all of it, paid by me to the program. You never touch it. Agreed?”
The money never touching his hands made it harder to feel bought that way. He hated that the iceberg had thought of that. “Agreed,” he said.
“Two.” Theo wrote it. “We marry at the courthouse. Soon. Before any interview, so that on paper we have been married long enough to be established. We tell the team we are roommates. The story is: cheaper rent, closer to the rink, two guys saving money. This is normal. Half the league has roommates.”
“And when someone finds out we’re actually married? Because someone will. I’m the guy who has to do team media, Theo, I’m on the socials, I’m—”
“Then we are married,” Theo said, “and it is not their business, and we let them think whatever they think. The marriage is real. That is the protection. We are not hiding a marriage. We are declining to discuss our private life, which is allowed.”
Shane chewed the inside of his cheek. “Three?”
“Three.” Theo’s pen hesitated, the first hesitation Shane had seen from him in this surreal affair. “We live together. My apartment. It is a one-bedroom. I take the couch—”
“You’re like seven feet tall.”
“Six-three.”
“You won’t fit on a couch.”
“I have slept in worse places than a couch,” Theo said, in a tone that closed the topic, and wrote: T = couch. S = bed. “You take the bed. We share the bathroom and the kitchen. We split groceries. We are civil. We do not have to be friends. We have to be convincing, which is different.”
“And four,” Shane said, because he had one, he’d lain awake all night building it.
He took the pen out of Theo’s hand, which made Theo go very still, and he wrote it himself, in his own bad handwriting, pressing too hard.
Nothing else. “There’s a line. Whatever this is, it’s paper.
It’s a license and an apartment and a story.
We don’t — it doesn’t become a thing. You don’t get to be nice to me to make yourself feel better about buying my mom’s treatment, and I don’t have to pretend to like you.
We keep it clean. We keep it cold. We get you your status, we get her treatment, and then we get a divorce and never speak again. That’s the deal.”
Theo looked at the words for a long moment. Something moved behind his face, fast, gone before Shane could read it.
“Agreed,” Theo said, and took the pen back, and signed his name at the bottom of a Denny’s napkin, deliberate, and Shane signed under it.
Their names, together for the first time: two enemies and a smear of syrup.
Shane would think about it later, much later, as the realest thing in the whole document, because it was the only part neither of them had any idea how to fake.
* * *
Illinois has a mandatory 24-hour waiting period. Theo had picked up the license the day before; of course he had. The courthouse was beige.
Shane didn’t know what he’d expected. Not romance, obviously; there was nothing romantic about a Tuesday off-day and a fluorescent room that smelled like printer toner and a clerk named Donna who’d seen stranger things than two enormous men in their good flannel shirts shuffling toward her counter.
But he hadn’t expected beige. He hadn’t expected it to land so much like getting a license plate renewed.
“Photo ID, both of you,” Donna said. “And the witness?”
They didn’t have a witness. They hadn’t thought about a witness.
Theo and Shane looked at each other with identical expressions of low animal panic, more in sync than they’d been all season, and Donna sighed the sigh of a woman who’d seen this exact moment four hundred times and called over her shoulder, “Reggie. Need a body.”
Reggie from records came and stood with them, bored and kind, and so the only person who watched Theo Lindgren and Shane Novak get married was a man named Reggie who was thinking about lunch.
It went fast. There were forms. Shane’s hand shook signing the real one, the legal one, the pre-shootout shiver, when the building goes quiet and it’s just you and what you have to do.
Theo’s hand did not shake. Of course it didn’t.
Theo’s hand had never shaken at anything; he met every disaster with the same flat Nordic calm, like the world was a drill he’d already run.
“You’ll want rings, eventually,” Donna said, not unkindly, sliding the certificate across. “For the photos. People always forget the rings.”
“We’re getting rings,” Shane said before Theo could speak.
“Then by the power vested in me,” Donna said, with the enthusiasm of a woman reading a cereal box, “I now pronounce you married. Congratulations. Next.”
They stopped at a pawnshop on the way to the apartment. Theo found it on his phone without being asked, which annoyed Shane in a way he couldn’t articulate. The man had a plan for everything, a contingency for the contingency, even the rings, even the part that was supposed to mean nothing.
The shop sat on a block between a laundromat and a check-cashing place.
A woman behind bulletproof glass sold them two plain tungsten bands for thirty-eight dollars.
Theo put his on in the car, without ceremony, and it settled onto his left hand like it had always been there.
Shane put his on too, and it didn’t fit.
Too loose. It spun when he made a fist. “We will get it sized,” Theo said.
“It’s fine,” Shane said. “It’s not like it means anything.
” They drove the rest of the way in silence, Shane turning the loose ring with his thumb, the cheapest thing either of them owned and the heaviest.
Shane Novak stood in a parking lot and was somebody’s husband, and the somebody was the guy who’d told him that morning he announced his diet.
The toner smell was still in his nose. Outside, it was four degrees and starting to snow.
Theo held the door for him, which he’d never done before, and Shane walked through it into the rest of his life without the faintest idea what he’d done.
* * *
Theo’s apartment was exactly what Shane would have guessed if he’d ever wasted thirty seconds guessing about Theo’s apartment.
It was clean to the point of accusation.
One couch, gray, that did indeed look about a foot too short for the man who’d just claimed it.
One bookshelf, half books in Swedish and half a regimented row of protein and supplements, ordered by function.
A kitchen with exactly the equipment a person needed and not one item more.
A framed photo on the windowsill of a woman with Theo’s exact pale eyes and none of his stoneface.
She was laughing, mid-laugh, head back. Shane looked at it a second too long and Theo crossed the room and turned it away from him, which told Shane everything and nothing.
“Bedroom,” Theo said, opening a door. “Yours.”