7. Maren
Maren
Two and six. We’re two and six, and I’ve started dreaming in talk-radio.
That’s where we are eight games into the season the city was supposed to fall in love with.
Two wins, six losses, a power play that couldn’t score in an empty rink even with Rylan Cooke dragging it, our best winger, the one genuine star, the only name on this roster the radio still says anything kind about, and a fan base that spent all summer buying MERCER jerseys and is now wearing them to games where they boo.
The honeymoon lasted exactly two wins. I knew it would.
Knowing it doesn’t make the four o’clock show easier to listen to, and I listen to all of it, every segment, because my job is to know precisely how bad it is at all times, which is a wonderful thing to be the world’s leading expert in.
Today’s segment is the one I’ve been bracing for since training camp.
“…and look, nobody wants to say it about a legend,” the host is saying, in the voice these guys use right before they say the thing, “but there’s a clause in Mercer’s deal.
Make the playoffs or the front office cleans house.
That’s reported, that’s real. So the question isn’t whether Crowns fans are patient.
The question is whether the kid GM has the stomach to fire his own father.
Because at two and six, friends, we are having that conversation in November. ”
I turn it off. It doesn’t help. The conversation’s already out of the building and into the city now, the way these things go, and there’s no statement I can write that puts it back.
The clause was always going to leak. Knowing that doesn’t help either.
Apparently nothing helps; that’s the whole texture of being two and six.
I spend the morning doing triage. I kill one bad story, soften two more, talk a national reporter out of a “Is the Mercer Experiment Already Over” piece by promising him a sit-down he’ll get more out of later.
By noon I’ve held the line. Holding the line is the entire job now.
Nobody gives you a parade for the fires that didn’t happen.
Losing changes a building. The hallways go quiet in a way winning never makes them.
People stop making eye contact in the elevator because eye contact might turn into talking about it.
My inbox triples and the tone of it curdles, sponsors “just checking in,” ticket reps forwarding angry emails “for awareness,” a board liaison I’ve never met suddenly copied on things he was never copied on before.
Nobody says the word firing. They don’t have to.
The whole building is holding its breath to find out whose head it’s going to be, and my entire job is to make sure the head everyone’s already looking at, the famous one, behind the bench, stays attached to its body long enough for the team to remember how to win.
What I don’t do is go down to the rink, because Rhett’s down there, and Rhett and I are being extremely professional at each other.
We’ve been professional for eight days, since the film room, since the almost that we agreed never happened and both know happened.
We prep before every availability. He hits his two messages.
I write him clean lines and he says them and neither of us looks at the other one second longer than the work requires, and the carefulness is loud in its own way.
You can hear two people not-doing-something from across a room.
I’m pretty sure the whole comms staff can hear it.
I’m pretty sure that’s a problem for later.
The problem for now is that two and six means more fires, and more fires means more late nights, and more late nights means more rooms with just the two of us in them, being professional so hard our teeth hurt. The universe has a sense of humor. It’s not a good one.
So I do the cowardly, useful thing, and go looking for a fire that isn’t him. I meet Tobin Pratt because the locker room is on fire and he’s the one carrying the extinguisher.
I go down after the morning skate to grab a player for a community thing, anything positive, a counter-program to the radio.
The room’s quiet in the bad way, guys with their heads down, a couple of the young ones looking like they’re already counting the cost of a lost season to their own careers. Losing has a smell. This room has it.
And in the middle of it there’s a guy holding it together with a folding chair turned backward and a running commentary, thirty-eight years old, gray in the stubble, the oldest skater on the roster by a decade.
Tobin Pratt. Alternate captain. He’s got two rookies cornered and he’s telling them some story that’s clearly ninety percent invented, and they’re laughing, actually laughing, in a two-and-six locker room, which is a magic trick.
The room tells you everything if you know how to read it, and eight months in I’ve learned to read this one.
The veterans dress slow and quiet in the corner that’s been theirs for years, conserving.
The young guys overcompensate, too loud or too silent, no middle setting.
There’s a kid by the far stall, Voss, the teenage defenseman they called up in September with the fresh terror still on him, taping a stick he’s already taped twice, and Tobin keeps drifting into his orbit between sentences, a hand on the shoulder pad, a joke pitched two degrees off to the side so the boy can laugh without being looked at directly.
I’ve sat through leadership seminars run by men in expensive glasses who couldn’t do in a weekend what Tobin Pratt does without appearing to do anything at all.
He clocks me in the doorway and doesn’t stop the story, just folds me into it. “—and that, gentlemen, is why you never let a defenseman order for the table. Hi. You’re the comms lady. The one keeping us off the front page.”
“Trying to. Maren.”
“Tobin. Tobes, Pratter, Old Man, depends who’s mad at me.” He stands, and his knees announce it the way Rhett’s do, the whole-body editorial of men who’ve given the game their cartilage. “You’re looking for somebody to go be cheerful in public.”
“I’m looking for somebody who won’t make it worse.”
“That narrows it.” He grins. “Take me. The kids’ll say something honest and you’ll spend a week cleaning it up. I’ve been media-trained since before half of them were potty-trained. I’ll go hug some children and say we believe in the room and it’ll be very boring and very useful.”
He’s right, and he knows he’s right, and he’s offering me the easy save without making me ask for it. I’ve been here eight months and I can count on one hand the people in this building who make my job easier instead of harder. I’m adding him to the list before he sits back down.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask. It comes out more direct than I mean it.
He looks at me for a second, and the clown thing drops a notch, and what’s under it is shrewder than the chair-backward routine lets on.
“Because the room’s scared, and a scared room loses, and the only thing keeping the wheels on right now is that old bastard behind the bench, and you’re the one keeping the city off his neck while he does it.
” He shrugs. “Help you, help him, help us. Same thing this year. We’re all the same thing this year. ”
He says it light. It isn’t light. He’s just told me, in a locker room full of guys pretending not to listen, that he knows exactly how thin the ice is under Rhett, and that he’s decided which side he’s on.
“He’s lucky to have you,” I say.
“He’s lucky to have a lot of people he doesn’t know how to thank.” Tobin picks his gloves back up. Then, easy, not even looking at me, pitched just for me: “You too, apparently.”
I don’t ask what he means. I’m afraid I know. I add Tobin sees too much to the list of problems for later, which is becoming less a list than a lifestyle.
***
The clause stops being theoretical at the worst possible moment, which is the only moment things ever stop being theoretical.
We lose number seven that night, at home, in overtime, which is the cruelest way, and I’m in the tunnel afterward when a TV reporter gets to Rhett before I can and asks it straight to his face.
Not coded. Not a think piece. Out loud, on camera, in his own building: “Coach, your own son holds your job in his hands at two and seven. How does that conversation go at Thanksgiving?”
I move to kill it. I’m three steps away, I’ve got the line ready, we’ll keep family at the family table.
And Rhett, who’s tired and whose knee is bad after sixty minutes plus overtime of standing on it, looks at the reporter for a second too long, the dangerous second, the one I’ve been dreading since camp.
And then he doesn’t take the bait. He finds it from somewhere. “My job’s to make the playoffs,” he says, flat, done. “Caden’s job’s to make the calls. We both do our jobs. Thanksgiving’s fine.” And he walks, and it’s clean, and I exhale like I’ve been holding it since the summer.
He found the line. The one I would’ve given him. He found it himself, tired and hurting, because somewhere in the last eight days the prep took, or because he saw me three steps away with my mouth already open and didn’t want me to have to clean it up.
I don’t know which. I tell myself it’s the first one. I’m getting good at telling myself things.
That night I do the report.
It’s the weekly one, the one Caden asked for in his office a lifetime ago, the boring template with the one-to-five scale.
Media readiness. Room cohesion. I fill it in at my kitchen table at midnight with a glass of wine I’m not really drinking.
Media readiness: he’s improving, he found his own line tonight, I write 4, trending up.
Room cohesion: the room’s scared but Pratt’s holding it, I write 3, fragile but intact.
And then I sit there with the cursor blinking, the way it blinked at me in the press room the night this all started, and something about the document bothers me.
I can’t name it. It’s just a form. Ownership likes paper, Caden said.
Document the transition like any account.
I’ve filled out a hundred of these. But I’m grading a man on a scale tonight, a man who found his own line in a tunnel while his knee screamed, a man I almost kissed in the dark eight days ago, and I’m sending the grade up a chain I can’t see the top of, and for one second the whole thing feels less like paperwork and more like, something.
A receipt. Evidence of something I don’t have the shape of yet.
I dismiss it. Of course I dismiss it. It’s a form. I attach it, I send it up to the front-office address Caden gave me, and I close the laptop.
The wine’s still full. The cursor’s gone.
The unease isn’t. It sits there in the dark of my kitchen, small and shapeless, the feeling you get when you’ve signed something without reading the line at the bottom, and I tell it the same thing I tell the four o’clock show, the same thing I’ve started telling myself about him.
It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. Go to sleep.
I almost believe me.