Chapter 16
PATRICK
"GOT A MINUTE?"
Nobody in the history of professional sports has ever been asked for a minute and received good news. Good news doesn't need a minute. Good news gets yelled across the locker room with somebody's towel in the air.
Practice is over, the ice is emptying, and Lindqvist stands there with his helmet under his arm and his face set to Swedish neutral, which tells me nothing, which is the point of Swedish neutral.
I follow him toward the bench running a full audit the whole way.
Contract year. Deadline looming. Captains hear things before goalies do.
If this is about my future, I'd appreciate a moment to throw up first.
"You've seemed somewhere else lately," he says.
There it is. That's front-office vocabulary, a phrase that lives in somebody's meeting minutes, right above a salary figure with a red line through it.
"My numbers are the best they've been in three seasons," comes out of me on autopilot. Real smooth. "But if the staff want more, I can add some extra ice time. Whatever they—"
"Patrick," he cuts off my spiel. "It's not your game. Your game is fine."
Oh.
"You drift, though," he goes on, maddeningly calm. "Mid-conversation. Dziedzic asked you about the blocker repair twice on Tuesday, and you answered differently both times." His voice drops out of captain and into friend. "I'm not asking as the C. I'm asking if you're okay."
My heart restarts in a new, less embarrassing rhythm.
"I'm fine. There's just... a lot on my mind."
He studies me one moment, and I'd bench myself for how readable I must be right now. Then, he nods, either satisfied or polite enough to fake it.
"Okay." He picks up his stick. "If the 'a lot' ever needs a second set of ears, you know where my stall is."
Then he's gone, and I'm alone with the world's most useless victory.
I should have just asked. One question, that's all it would have taken. Have they said anything about next season? Five seconds of courage, and I'd know.
Two seasons of wondering whether the management thinks I'm aging like wine or like milk, and when my opening skates up and taps me on the shoulder, I hand it the same quote I give reporters after a loss.
A coward, that’s what I am. Because right now, nobody has said no to me yet, and that's the kingdom I live in. Nobody has said no yet, and every morning I choose not to find out, the kingdom stands one more day.
Other men talk to somebody. A therapist, or a barber.
I open a spreadsheet.
Don't laugh, it works. It's worked for years. Every mess my life produces goes in as a row, gets split into columns, and gets handled by the part of me that has never once panicked.
But lately, there are two rows I can’t seem to be able to fill in. And believe me, I've sat there, cursor blinking, wine going warm.
The first row is labeled contract, and every time I look at it and try to find the right formula, it turns into fortune-telling. You can't do math with fortunes. I've tried. The cells just look back at you.
The other one simply says them.
***
"—AND AT THIRD spot—and Milwaukee, my inbox is open, I know you'll have feelings—the Vipers' Patrick... Grezkowski—"
The horn in my Mercedes goes off. Not at a car, at the radio.
"Third?" Theo's palm is still flat on the horn, and he sways into the other lane for a second. "Did he watch the paddle save? Was he conscious? Was he employed that night?"
"Road."
"He put you third, Patrick."
"Third is a compliment." I even mean it. Especially since the name at number one is six-foot-seven, and I have zero dignified options for having feelings about that, so I'm electing to have none.
"Okay, the big one at number one, fine, I'm not insane. But behind Larsen? Larsen—"
"Theo."
"—plays like he’s been a rookie for ten years running, and this— This… podcast-voiced coward has him at two."
The man whose honor is being defended is fine, calm and hydrated. The man defending him is doing seventy-five and steering with his knee while gesturing with both hands at a windshield.
“Focus on the road, I’m begging you.”
The host comes back from the commercial break a few minutes later.
"And speaking of the Vipers, they are the definition of a bubble team, so let's get honest about that roster.
You're not touching the young defense, so you shop the margins.
Rental-grade deals. Your Moreau types. Listen, great motor, the building loves him, but that's a fourth-line engine.
You can rent one anywhere for half the price. "
The car goes quiet.
Not the radio. The radio is thrilled with itself.
Just Theo’s side of the car, where nothing is being yelled for the first time in two counties, and my side, where I'm now conducting the world's fastest silent debate.
Say something, and it becomes a thing that happened.
A thing that needed saying. Change the station, and I've announced it needed changing.
There's a third option somewhere, the one where I'm supportive and smooth about it.
I'm sure I'll find it around midnight tonight, staring at the ceiling.
"Oh, you're braking?" Theo is already leaned over the wheel, locked onto a sedan minding its own business a hundred feet ahead. "Now? On a straightaway? What did you see there, dimwit? A vision? Did the road tell you something?"
And we're off. The sedan gets a piece, then a landscaping trailer, then a minivan whose entire crime is existing adjacent to an on-ramp. The host moves on to somebody's groin injury, talked clean out of the car by a one-man traffic tribunal that has nothing.
He doesn't change the station either.
At the next red light I reach over and take the volume down two clicks, under cover of fixing the air. If he notices, he doesn't say. So we're even.
The shelter shows up before either of us has to grow as a person.
Theo swings into the lot and parks in one try. An eight out of ten by his own standards, which converts to roughly a two in regular scoring.
Inside, the kennel room has gone full studio. Backdrops, light stands, a folding table drowning in leashes. We wave to the few Vipers already milling around.
No Wolf in sight. Either they haven’t arrived yet, or they have and are all hiding somewhere. I can’t really put anything past them.
We make it four steps before Mama Paws claims us both, hugging us like we invented dogs. Wanda materializes at her elbow and puts a clipboard in my hands before I've finished saying hello.
"You're keeping the schedule, sweetheart. The artist runs the camera. You run the clock."
I look down. Run-of-show, twelve setups, plus five spares, timestamps. Forty seconds on site and I've been promoted to management, which is fine by me. Give me a clipboard over a camera every day of the week, and twice on media day.
Theo has already stolen the assignment sheet from the table.
"July." He says, beaming. "They gave me July, Patrick."
"The algorithm gave you July," Wanda corrects.
"The thirst month, Wanda. The best month."
Wanda seems skeptical. "It's a dog wash. You're washing a dog."
"In July."
I get one look at the sheet before she repossesses it, long enough to find my own name.
It happens to be followed by a comma, and then by a Wallace, and the month is February.
Wall and I, glaring at each other over the shortest month of the year, which also happens to contain Valentine's Day, a detail whoever planned this either missed or enjoyed very much.
Twelve months in this calendar, and mine is the one where I get paid in exposure to be publicly hateful at a man I—
At a man. At two forty.
I write 2:40 on my clipboard, then I cross it out, because it's already printed right there.
"Fair warning," Wanda adds, already moving off. "I hear the big one has his own problems today."
I open my mouth to ask what that means, but she’s already gone, arms linked with Mama Paws.
Above all of it, on the tallest light stand, sits Hendrix. Menacingly, if you ask me.
Oh, well. I didn’t put him there and I will not be removing him. He's the photographer's problem. And God's.
Theo is mid-oration about July—there's a vision now, apparently, and the vision is him—when the door bangs open and Becker enters the building backwards.
"—I'm telling you, team aesthetics are a democracy. We vote on things. Nobody voted on this."
"It's his head," Kane says, following him in.
"It's a shared visual environment!"
"In Russia—" Petrov’s voice enters before he does, followed immediately by Groover’s, “Please, don’t.”
Behind them comes Ace with his arm around a guy I recognize as Devon, his very public boyfriend, and on the leash between them, a medium-sized dog who is very obviously the one walking them. Then half the Wolves roster, all mid-argument about something nobody's naming, and I can’t read.
Then Wall fills the doorway, and the thing reads itself.
The red is back, full blaze, fresh from the bottle and louder than a certain parrot.
Last time I saw him, it was dying quietly at the roots while Theo delivered its eulogy. Wall said nothing.
But apparently, he's decided something.
My chest attempts a maneuver I have focus to stop, because there are forty witnesses in this room and my face has become a liability I can't afford. Across the room, Theo has gone up like bread in an oven. He catches my eye. I give him the look. He receives the look, performs a full-body update, and redirects all his feelings into crouching down to whisper at Ace’s dog. Whatever he tells her, she keeps.
Becker, meanwhile, is circling Wall like unfinished business. "I want it on the record," he says, "that when I lose a bet, I serve my sentence with dignity."
"You cried," Wall says.
"With dignity." He gestures at Wall's head. "And when my sentence ends, I move on. I don't go back to the salon and order seconds."
"I told you, it grew on me."
Becker stops walking. Something behind his eyes buffers. "It's a punishment. It's not supposed to grow on you. That's not—" he turns to the room at large "—that's not how justice works."