4. Jett
JETT
The Hideout on a Saturday night after a win was the closest thing to church I'd ever loved.
Not that I'd tell anybody. The whole point of The Hideout was that it wasn't church.
It was a dive across the street from the arena, far enough off the Strip that no tourist ever wandered in by accident.
Low ceilings, old wood, a kitchen that fried everything in the same oil it had been using since before I got to Vegas.
Marco still ran it the way he'd run it for twenty years, which was badly, with love.
It smelled like spilled beer and grease and home, and on a night like this one, the whole team packed into the back half, a fresh win in our pocket, it roared.
We'd beaten Phoenix four to one. I'd had two of the four. I was feeling expansive.
"Two goals," Moose was saying, holding up three fingers, because Moose couldn't count when he drank. "Two goals and he won't shut up about it. We get it, Sturgill. You're a hero. You want a medal?"
"I have a medal. It's called the championship. You were there."
"That was a team effort."
"Was it, though? Because I distinctly remember scoring the goal."
"Rhett passed you the goal."
I put my hand to my chest like he'd shot me. "Stone. Are you gonna let him take this from me?"
Rhett (Stone, Rhett, same man, you got used to it) was in the corner of the booth with a tonic water and lime, the way he always was now.
Watching us all be morons with that flat little half smile that meant he was having the time of his life and would die before admitting it.
He didn't drink anymore, hadn't in years, and nobody made it weird, because nobody was dumb enough to make Rhett Calloway's business their business.
"I passed you the goal," Rhett said.
"Betrayal," I said. "Absolute betrayal. From my own captain. I carried this franchise."
"You're insufferable when we win," Langley said.
"I'm insufferable always. The winning just gives me material."
The table lost it. I leaned back in the booth and let the noise wash over me.
All that warm dumb brotherhood. Twenty-some guys who'd bled on the ice together and would do it again Tuesday.
And I thought, the way I did about once a week and never said out loud, that I'd trade every dollar I had, and there were a lot of them, before I'd trade this.
Tank slid into the booth across from me with a basket of the loaded fries Marco was always threatening to cut him off from.
The conversation rolled the way it always did, downhill and dumb and fast. Somebody relitigated a hit from the second period.
Somebody else swore Phoenix's goalie had been chirping in Russian, and Moose, not Russian, did not speak Russian, did an impression of what he imagined Russian chirping sounded like, which was just Moose making noises.
Langley laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the table.
Rhett watched it all from the corner with that flat half smile, refereeing nothing, saying nothing, the still point the whole loud wheel of us turned around.
This was the part nobody back home would've believed.
That a kid from a church where laughter on the wrong day got you a look had grown into a man whose whole job, near as I could tell, was making a room full of enormous violent men laugh until they cried into fried potatoes.
I was good at it. Maybe the thing I was best at in the world, better even than hockey.
And it was a thing my mother would've prayed over me about.
Their loss, I thought, the way I always did. Their loss.
Brynn came around the bar with a tray of waters nobody had ordered and set them down in front of guys who were three beers deep, because that was the thing Brynn did, mothering us sideways while pretending she wasn't.
"Drink the water," she said. "All of you. I'm not scraping anybody off my floor tonight."
"Your floor?" Moose said. "I thought it was Marco's floor."
"Marco's at his sister's in Reno and I'm closing, so tonight it's my floor, and on my floor you hydrate." She cuffed the back of my head on her way past, light, affectionate. "Especially you, two goals. You've got media Monday and I'm not letting you show up hungover and embarrassing my mother."
That landed funny in my chest. I'd been not-thinking about Monday pretty successfully all night.
"It's gonna be a disaster," I said. "You know that, right? Your mom hand-picked some magazine writer to follow me around and ask me about my feelings. Ninety minutes of me lying."
"Be nice." Brynn pointed a finger at me.
"Mom believes in this thing. And the writer's not some random vulture.
It's somebody good. Somebody who'll do it right.
" She got a look on her face, soft and pleased, the one she got about people she loved.
"Actually you'll probably like her. She's my person. Known her forever."
"Your person."
"My best friend. From college. She's coming into town to do the piece.
" Brynn started stacking empties onto her tray.
"She's a lot, honestly. Talks fast, zero filter, smarter than everybody in the room and a little mean about it.
You two will either get along great or kill each other. There's no in-between with her."
"Sounds like a nightmare."
"She'd love you, you absolute clown. You're the same animal." Brynn hauled the tray up onto her shoulder. "Just don't do your whole thing with her."
"I don't have a thing."
"You have such a thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you decide somebody's a threat and you chirp them till they hate you, so you don't have to find out if they'd have liked you.
" She said it light, breezy, already turning back toward the bar.
Not even landing it like a punch. Just an observation, tossed over her shoulder, the kind of thing the people who really know you can say without slowing down.
It hit the side of my head and went in clean anyway.
"That's not a thing," I said, but she was already gone, back behind the bar, and Moose was asking me something about Phoenix's power play, and the moment closed over like water.
I left before midnight, which for me on a win night was practically monastic.
Out in the lot the air had that desert thing it did after dark, the heat lifting off the pavement so you could feel the day still coming up through your boots even with the sky gone black.
Caldwell Arena sat dark across the street, the big curved bulk of it, the place I'd hoisted the trophy eight months back.
I stood by the car and looked at it a second, the way I sometimes did, just to remind myself it was real.
My phone was in my pocket. I'd turned it back on that afternoon, because you couldn't leave it off forever. Coach texted, the team group chat moved fast, life happened. I pulled it out to check the time.
Two voicemails. Both 931.
I stood in the lot of the bar I loved, under the building where I'd won the biggest thing a man can win in my sport, holding a phone full of a place I'd cut out of myself with a dull knife at eighteen and never let grow back.
My mother's number. My sister's, probably, on the second. They tag-teamed it sometimes, when one couldn't get through, they handed it to the other, like I was a debt they were collecting in shifts.
I didn't listen to either one.
I'd figured out a long time ago that the voicemails couldn't hurt me if I didn't play them.
As long as they sat there gray and unopened, they were just data.
Little gray rectangles. The second you press play you let the voice into the car with you, and the voice knows exactly where all your old wiring runs.
It can reach right in and find the kid who used to stand in a church pew in an Easter suit he hated, getting yelled at on the drive over and smiled at the second they hit the parking lot.
Learning before he could read that the face you show the world and the thing happening at home are two different items, and you'd best keep them filed apart.
I'd built my whole personality on keeping them filed apart. Loud out here. Locked up in there. It had won me a championship and a locker room full of brothers and a life my parents would've called sinful if they'd ever bothered to look at it.
I deleted both voicemails without playing them. Thumb, swipe, gone, gone.
Then I sat in the dark a minute longer than I needed to, because the thing about deleting them was that it never felt as good as it should have. And it got quieter the more times I did it.
Here's the part I never told the guys. The part I hadn't told anybody in eight years, because telling it was the whole problem.
Locked up in there had a start date.
Her name was Hannah, and her daddy ran the church the whole town answered to, which made her the closest thing we had to royalty.
It made me, a kid who played a sport nobody within five hundred miles understood, a curiosity they kept around as long as I kept winning.
I loved her the way you love the first one.
Total and stupid and dead certain it was the only time it would ever happen to me.
And one night at the edge of a field, the whole black sky sitting on top of us, I told her the things I'd never said out loud to a living soul.
That I'd quit believing somewhere around twelve and just kept moving my mouth on Sundays.
That the town fit me like a coat two sizes too small.
That the only thing I wanted on God's green earth was to go somewhere nobody had heard my name and be nobody at all.
I told her I was getting out. I asked her to come with me.
She told her daddy.
I've had eight years to work out why, and the honest answer is the plain one.
Staying with me had started to cost her something, and she came from a house that knew the price of everything.
Turning me in made her clean again. It made me a sermon for about a month, the boy who'd lost his faith and tried to take the pastor's daughter down with him.
By the time I climbed on the bus at eighteen there wasn't a soul at that station.
Her included. And every true thing I'd ever handed her came back to me in my own mother's voice, read out like a list of what was wrong with me.
So I learned it early, and I learned it clean. The second you let somebody see the real one, you've handed them the knife and pointed at the soft parts. They don't even have to hate you to use it. They just have to want something more than they want you.
Everybody does, eventually.
I bought distance after that, the way other men buy trucks. Distance never once turned me in.
Whatever, I thought. Their loss. My whole life, their loss.
I drove up into the hills, to the big glass house nobody knew was mine, let myself into all that silence, and went to bed thinking about Phoenix's power play and a two-goal night and Brynn's best friend. The fast-talking, mean-smart nightmare coming to town to ask me about my feelings on Monday.
You decide somebody's a threat and you chirp them till they hate you.
Brynn didn't miss much. Never had.
But she'd been wrong about one thing, I figured, drifting off. Some magazine writer wasn't a threat. A threat was a thing that could get inside, and I'd spent eight years making real sure nothing got inside.
Monday was going to be fine.
I really believed that, right up until it wasn't.