Chapter 17
THEO
MY OVEN HAS a light in it. Three years in this apartment, and I'm finding this out today, on my knees on the kitchen tile with half my body inside the thing and a sponge in my fist.
A man should take care of his own place once in a while. That's all this is. My name is on the lease, and the lease comes with an oven, and today the two of us are getting reacquainted.
I've been at it since noon. The bathroom is done. The windows are done, both sides. I even pulled the couch away from the wall and found a fork, two pucks, and a sock I don’t remember owning.
Somewhere between the couch and the oven, a thought walked in without knocking: when something might get taken away from you, you fight for it.
I drowned that one in the bucket and kept scrubbing.
My phone buzzes on the counter above me. I back out of the oven too fast, catch my head on the roof of it, then check the screen, only to find a spam email. Again.
I don't know what I'm hoping for. That the report deleted itself out of shame, maybe.
Nope. Still up.
The radio last week was just noise. Everybody said so. I said so, loudly, to anyone who'd listen. But this guy is one of the real ones, an insider with actual sources and a smug little checkmark, and at eleven this morning he posted a tidy list of Vipers "available at the deadline."
Third name down. T. Moreau, LW. Destination chatter: Keep an eye on Anaheim.
Available.
I've read the word maybe forty times today and it hasn't improved once. Like I'm a couch somebody dragged out to the curb. Free to a good home, a bit too soft, some wear and tear.
A fan account has already photoshopped me into a Ducks jersey. I've zoomed in on it three times, which is totally normal and healthy behavior. I look terrible in orange. If you're going to ruin my life, at least color-match me first. This is supposed to be a professional league.
I navigate to my three-way group chat, again, and reread my own messages from an hour ago.
Me: good news boys i'm famous
Me: [screenshot]
Me: anaheim has beaches. do i look like a beach guy. don't answer
Patrick: Where are you?
Me: home. cleaning. Thriving
Patrick: Goalie session until six. Then I'm coming over.
Me: no need!! i'm great. ask the counters, they've never been cleaner
They're good texts. If I read them fast enough, I can almost believe the guy who sent them.
Somewhere around the beach one, Wall's three dots made an appearance. They showed up, sat there for five seconds, then vanished. Nothing came after. I've checked eleven times. Well, twelve now. Which is fine, whatever. Big quiet men have big quiet errands.
I'm still holding the phone when it goes off in my hand, full volume, and I nearly put it through the backsplash.
Margaux, says the screen.
The report is an hour old and it has already crossed the border. Nothing on this earth moves like the family news network.
I put her on speaker, set her down on the counter, and pick the sponge back up, because my hands desperately need a job right now.
"Maman saw a tweet," she says instead of hello.
"Maman needs to find herself a hobby."
"She lit a candle for you."
I go after a spot on the stovetop that's been clean for an hour. "For a trade rumor?"
"Two candles, actually. One for the rumor, one because you didn't call her yourself."
The second one is fair, so I sail right past it. "It's business, Mar. I'm an asset. Assets get moved. I'm extremely liquid."
"Mmhmm."
She's giving me nothing, which has never stopped me in my life. I can hear my own voice climbing, getting brighter the worse everything is, and I let it, because this routine is airtight. I've been polishing it since eleven a.m.
"Also? Anaheim is fine. Sure, it’s a giant parking lot with a Ducks problem, but it's sunny. I'd get a tan. I'd die alone, but tan. Maman would love the tan—"
"Theo."
"—they have a Disneyland, Mar, I could season-pass my feelings—"
"Theo. You're doing the funny thing."
I stop scrubbing.
She doesn't say anything else, just leaves the line open and waits, the way she's been waiting out this exact voice since the year I got cut from the U16 team and spent the whole spring being the funniest guy anybody knew. She let me run out that time, too. It took a week.
I slide down the cabinets until I'm sitting on my kitchen floor.
I know how this goes. You show up somewhere new and you're loud, and funny, and the room gets easier to be in, and everybody loves you for it.
I've been that guy on every team since I was fifteen, and every other March, or June, somebody in an office somewhere ran the math on me, and I found out from a phone call where I'd landed. It was never where I already was.
So it isn't really about Anaheim. Anaheim is just another zip code.
I'd hate the driving and survive. It's that a man with sources looked at my name and wrote available, and everyone who reads it is going to nod, because it checks out.
It always checks out. Except this time, everybody I love gets to watch it come true.
"Is someone with you?" Margaux asks, gentler now.
"I'm a grown man."
"So that's a no."
I tip my head back against the cabinet door. "I'm fine, Margaux."
"Call Maman. She'll pretend she doesn't know. It makes her happy."
She hangs up, and then it's just me and the apartment. It's very clean in here. And very quiet. The sponge is drying out in my hand. I should get up, put music on, call Mom, call a therapist. Anything but sit on my own floor, in my own head.
A knock on my door puts my misery on hold, and I wait for the second one to make sure I heard it right.
Nobody knocks on my door. The delivery guys text. Patrick has a key. I get up, my knees protesting, and cross the living room braced for a neighbor or somebody's lost pizza, crack the door open, and blink. Then blink again.
Wall fills my doorway the way he fills a net, which is entirely. Off-day hoodie, red hair ruffled on one side like he drove with the window down. And in his hands, and I do need a second to trust what I'm looking at, a foam cheesehead, and a bouquet.
I'm using the word loosely. Gas-station carnations, dyed a shade of blue no flowers have ever once been, plastic sleeve, price sticker still on, $6.99.
I look at Wall, and he lets me stare for a moment. "You're in Milwaukee," I say, finally.
"You're very observant."
I make a show of rolling my eyes. "It's my day off from you people."
He holds out the cheesehead. "For morale."
I reach out on instinct, and then it's on my head. Wall gives it one small nod, like a delivery confirmed.
I point at the carnations. "Are these for me or for a funeral?"
"They were the last ones. It was them or a car air freshener."
"You drove ninety minutes to bring me gas station flowers?"
Wall puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs his massive shoulders. "Your texts had a frequency problem."
"My texts were hilarious."
"They were. That's the problem."
I have to turn around and walk back inside, fast, because my eyes are doing something and he's not going to stand in my hallway and watch it happen. He never typed anything, because he'd already put the phone down to go find his keys.
"Well," I announce to my living room, arms out, voice doing its best. "Welcome. That's the couch. That's my plant. Tour's over. I have water, beer, and four kinds of protein powder, so really, it's a full bar."
Wall’s not listening. He's already in my kitchen, opening one cabinet, then the next, hunting for something, and what he comes up with is the only vessel I own with a neck: a protein shaker.
He fills it at the tap, unwraps the carnations, stands them up in it, and sets the whole arrangement in the middle of my counter.
Then he steps back, tilts his head, and moves it a centimeter to the left.
The worst bouquet in the state of Wisconsin, in a shaker that will smell like vanilla until the end of time, in the middle of the cleanest counter in America.
I open my mouth to say something about it, but there's nothing in there, so I dawdle to my couch and plop down.
Wall folds himself down next to me. The couch wasn't built with him in mind, his knees ending up somewhere around the coffee table.
He settles anyway, thorough about it, and then he looks at the dark TV and says nothing.
I grab the remote and put on my comfort show, the Québécois one, where a contractor named Gaétan has spent eleven seasons getting betrayed by other people's renovations. It's in French. Wall doesn't speak French. He leans forward a little and watches anyway.
A few minutes in, Gaétan starts shouting at an open cabinet.
"Why is he yelling?" Wall whispers, like we’re in a movie theater.
"He's disappointed in the hinges. It's a whole arc."
He nods and keeps watching.
So this is my day now. There's a cheesehead on my head and a goaltender on my couch, and the strange part is how hard this is turning out to be, sitting next to a person without performing a single thing for him.
He drove ninety minutes on his day off to watch a man grieve hinges in a language he doesn't speak, on a couch that fits two-thirds of him, and I keep waiting for him to get to the point of the visit.
It takes me way too long to understand that this is the point.
Gaétan finds water damage behind a shower wall and lets everyone know how he feels about it. And somewhere in the middle of his grief, quiet, at the television, I start talking.
"They can just do it, you know." My thumb picks at the seam of the cushion.
"Some guy with a checkmark types available at eleven in the morning, and by noon it's true, because he typed it.
And the team can do it too. They sign you, they play you, they tell you you're a big part of what they're building, and you believe it, because you're a moron.
And then one Tuesday two men in suits trade twenty minutes of phone calls and you're a future consideration.
" My voice is climbing again. There's nothing bright about it this time.
"And everybody shakes your hand and calls it business.
The rumor goblin gets his engagement, the team gets a pick, and I get shipped to a parking lot with palm trees, where nobody knows me, and I do the whole thing over, from scratch, and… "
It runs out. Just like that, mid-thought, nothing left. Like Margaux on the phone, except now there's no phone to hang up.
I brace, out of habit, to be saved from the quiet. Patrick would already be asking careful questions in his calm voice, and I'd grab the first exit those questions offered me.
Wall doesn't offer one. He sits next to me, solid, eyes on the screen, and lets the quiet come all the way into the room and settle between us. For a second I'm scared, because nobody has ever left me alone inside a silence and stayed. I keep waiting to fall through it.
I don't fall. It's just quiet, and he's just here. On the screen, Gaétan murmurs something almost forgiving about the subfloor.
Then, Wall’s eyes find mine and he says, "You're not a rental anywhere that matters."
I open my mouth, but nothing comes.
My hand finds his sleeve and holds on, and my head goes down on his shoulder, cheesehead and all. He turns back to the show like nothing happened, and we sit like that and watch a man repair a wall, my fingers still closed around his sleeve. He lets them stay.
At some point the episode changes on its own. Then it changes again. The light through the blinds goes from afternoon to something softer, and my eyes get heavy. The last thing I decide on purpose is that I'm not moving.
I’m not sure what time it is when the sound of a key turning in the lock wakes me.
I open one eye halfway.
The door clicks shut so carefully it barely counts as a sound. A gear bag comes down to the floor slow, by the strap, the quiet of a very large man trying to be a small one.
Patrick stops in the middle of my living room and looks at us. At Wall, head tipped back, mouth open, out cold, undignified, then at me, curled into his side, hand still fisted in his hoodie, cheesehead sliding half off my head.
He folds his arms over his chest, leans sideways against the wall, and smiles this warm smile he only allows himself to produce when he thinks nobody’s watching.
Saying goodbye to the Vipers will be tough, but I’ll manage. I always do.
I just don’t know how I’m going to survive losing this.