10. Gus
Gus
Teddy made a sign. June helped with the letters — I know because the E’s are steady and nothing else is. GO CASCADES, it says, and then smaller, where the poster ran out: AND ALSO DAD. I haven’t skated for a living in years. Teddy considers that a technicality.
Game nights, I work. Two suites of sponsors, a ceremonial puck, three periods of being Augustus Vaughn in a good suit — that’s the job now, and I’m good at it.
The kids are eleven rows up behind the bench, in the seats I’ve kept since Margot was born, and tonight is the first time June is in them too.
I shouldn’t be able to find one gray sweater from a suite full of people shaking my hand.
I find it all first period anyway, the way your tongue finds a sore tooth.
Hair down. She’s listening to Teddy explain the game with her whole face, and whatever he’s telling her is wrong, and she’s nodding like it’s gospel.
Margot brought her book. She reads during play and watches during the stoppages, which is backward, and which is pure Margot.
Midway through the third, up one, I run out of patience before I run out of sponsors. I make my excuses, take the concrete stairs down two at a time, and slide into my own seat next to Teddy for the first time all season.
“You came!”
“Suite ran out of pretzels.”
Four minutes later our center tips one in at the far post, and the building stands up.
Teddy is losing his mind, sign sideways.
Margot is on her feet — on her feet — with the book hugged to her chest. And June isn’t watching the goal celebration like eighteen thousand other people.
She’s looking at me. I look away first. That has not happened to me in this building in a very long time.
The family lounge after a win is all noise and sheet cake. Teddy reenacts the goal for anyone who slows down near him, playing all five skaters himself, plus me arriving late with pretzel news. June stands at the edge of it with his sign rolled under her arm like a diploma.
“I want it noted that I clapped at the right times,” she says. “Teddy told me when.”
“She called icing ‘the little whistle rule,’” Margot reports.
“It is a little rule. Nobody has explained it to me twice the same way.”
“That’s hockey,” I tell her. “You’re closer than most season-ticket holders.”
Mitch comes through on his way to somewhere, squeezes my shoulder, and says, “You look like you slept.” He says it the way he’d read a stat sheet he approved of, and he’s gone before I have to answer.
Our goalie’s wife has run this lounge since before some of our rookies had driver’s licenses. She hugs both kids, gets June a plate she didn’t ask for, and finds me at the cake table on her way past.
“About time,” she says quietly, to no one, looking at the cake.
“She’s the nanny.”
“Sure,” she says. She pats my arm twice and goes off to rescue her husband from a sponsor.
I stand there holding cake I don’t want.
Across the room June has crouched down to Teddy’s height so he can show her the goal again, slower this time, with sound effects.
I watch a woman fake astonishment for a five-year-old at ten-thirty at night, three days of her week gone to my family already.
And I try to remember what my face normally does.
“Can June come to all the games?” Teddy asks on the way out, sign under his arm.
“June gets days off, bud.”
“Not on game days,” he says, reasonably, like we’re negotiating a contract and he’s already won. June laughs. I don’t agree to anything, and I am very careful not to look at her while I don’t.
Teddy is asleep before the parking garage. Margot makes it to the highway.
* * *
The house goes quiet fast, both kids down without a fight, because a win puts kids to sleep easy. I’ve watched it work for twenty years. I’m coming up from checking the doors when June comes out of the laundry room and starts up the stairs with the empty basket, and we meet in the middle.
The staircase is wide enough for two people to pass, if they time it right. We mistime it completely. I step the way she steps, then back the other way, the whole dance, until she plants her feet on the stair above mine.
“House rule,” she says. “Whoever holds the basket has the right of way.”
“Since when?”
“Since I got the basket.”
She comes past me. Her shoulder crosses an inch from mine, and I get soap and clean cotton and something warmer underneath it. I hold the rail like the stairs are the problem. At the top she stops and looks down at me.
“Good game, by the way. Teddy says you did the thing exactly right.”
“Which thing?”
“I have no idea,” she says, and disappears down the hall, and I stand on my own staircase like a guest.
I don’t go up. The kitchen table is where I end up, in the stove light, facing the schedule grid on the fridge. Her handwriting is in most of the squares now. Some of mine is inside her squares, and some of hers is inside mine. Neither of us has ever said a word about it.
So, alone at my own kitchen table, I finally say it to myself straight.
I want her. Not a passing thought — a constant one.
It was at the arena tonight, eleven rows up.
Ten minutes ago it was on the stairs, holding the rail.
It has been at this table every morning for longer than I’ve been willing to know.
All right. Pretending stopped working the night she bought me a burger in a parking lot after the gala.
On the first of every month, an account with my name on it pays her salary.
That’s the whole problem in one sentence.
She lives under this roof because I hired her to.
If I reached for her and I’d read it wrong, she couldn’t just be a woman turning a man down.
She’d be an employee managing her boss in the house where she sleeps.
She’d get careful with me. I’ve watched her be careful.
I won’t be the reason she has to do it here.
There’s also the number I keep to myself.
She’s twenty-seven. I have suits older than some of the things she remembers.
Between the two of us the years barely show — she runs that kitchen older than I’ve ever been, and I know exactly how old my knees are.
But I know what the number looks like from the outside, because I’d look too.
Rich man, fifty in sight, the young woman down the hall.
Whatever this is deserves better than being that sentence in somebody’s mouth.
And Margot. Three months ago my daughter wouldn’t lean an inch toward a living soul.
Now there’s a rubber volcano on the kitchen windowsill, and a daughter who sat side by side with somebody in a parked car for sixteen minutes on the worst school day of her year.
Every bit of that runs through June. If I gambled that and lost, Margot wouldn’t just lose a nanny.
She’d get to be right about people, permanently.
I’m not putting my daughter’s worldview on the table so I can find out what happens if I touch June’s hand for real.
And there’s Nora, which is what everyone would assume the reason is. It isn’t. I notice that it isn’t, and I set that down carefully, and I don’t examine it tonight.
So: nothing. That’s the decision. She keeps the job and the house keeps her. Whatever this is can sit in my chest where it’s been sitting, nobody’s problem but mine. Grown men make decisions and keep them. I’ve kept harder ones.
I do the last check — doors, stove, both kids down, her light still on under her door at the end of the hall.
Then I go up the stairs one at a time. I’ve taken stairs two at a time my whole life.
Every rink, every hotel, this house on day one, carrying her boxes with the WINTER marker showing.
One at a time tonight, slow, with nowhere I’m trying to get to.
Nothing is going to happen. I’ve decided. I’m very sure.