Chapter 4 Riley - Summer 2017, Hibbing, Minnesota
The signing bonus bought two things.
The first was a truck. Used, from a guy in Chisholm who wanted cash and got it. My dad walked around it twice before he'd let me buy it and then he got underneath it, in a driveway, in a golf shirt, and came out and said "frame's clean," which was the whole review.
The second was a furnace.
When they got back my dad stood in the doorway of the basement for a while and then said, "That's a lot of money for something that was working."
"It wasn't working."
"It was working intermittently."
He went down there for two hours. He came up with a flashlight in his hand and told me the combustion efficiency rating, which he'd found on a sticker, his opinion of the duct routing, which was that the installer had taken a shortcut on the second run and would have to be spoken to.
Then, at the end, looking at the wall and not at me, "It's a good unit."
Hibbing was a nice place to be that summer.
The bar wouldn't let me pay for anything, which got expensive for the bar.
Some guy put my Duluth jersey up over the register at the Pit Stop with a photo of the goal taped next to it.
My junior high coach, Mr. Hakala, sixty-four years old, saw me in the aisle at the hardware store and started crying into a display of paint rollers.
I stood there and let him hug me for a long time and told him it was his neutral-zone drill that did it, which was mostly a lie and made his entire year.
It was also at the hardware store, three aisles over, that I ran into Maddie.
"Riley Kowalski."
"Oh, hey."
She looked good, she looked happy, and there was a ring on her hand.
"Congratulations," we both said, at the same time, and both laughed.
"You first," I said.
"June. Ben. He's got a boat, which I've been told is the whole personality."
"Is it a good boat?"
"It's a nineteen-foot boat and he talks about it like it's a yacht."
"That's the best kind."
We stood there ten minutes and it was easy. It was so easy. We did the cabin summers, she asked about my knee, I asked about her mom.
When I was nineteen I loved that girl all the way down. That was real. I wasn't faking anything and neither was she. It ended slowly and then in a parking lot, and we were nice to each other the whole way through.
"You look good, Riley," she said. "You look like it's going okay. Somebody in your life?"
"No."
She hugged me, and went to pay for her drawer pulls.
Then I sat in the truck in the parking lot of the hardware store and did not start it. Because of the thing I had been outskating since April, since a loading dock with a diesel smell.
That banquet felt like the cabin summers.
Not similar. The same. The exact same thing in my chest, the one where you can't sit still and you keep wanting to look at somebody and you're saying anything, anything at all, just so they keep answering.
The good kind of terrifying. And I had felt it about a girl at nineteen and it had a word attached that everybody understood, and now I had felt it in a rented ballroom in Chicago about a guy with a lighthouse tie, and there is a word for that too.
I have never said that word out loud about myself. Not once. Not in my head with the door closed.
So I turned the key and I drove.
That's what we do with things we can't price. My grandfather did it, my dad does it, I do it. You turn the key, you go home, and you cut the grass.
In the gear bag on the passenger seat, on the zipper pull where it's lived since freshman year, was the little UMD keychain my dad gave me at the airport when I left for college.
Two bucks at the campus store, plastic, the enamel worn off the bulldog's face from four years of my thumb.
It's the only thing I own that's older than my current skates.
The other thing about that summer was the napkin.
I gave Nate Sinclair my phone number on a cocktail napkin in a fit of championship-week insanity, and in the entire month of June he did not use it.
I did not notice this. I was not tracking it.
Then he did not use it in July either.
The maintenance on not thinking about it got pretty heavy in there. It was taking real work.
The phone was loud all summer. It was loud with my agent and loud with Dex and loud with guys from the team and loud with my mom asking if I'd called my aunt.
It was silent from exactly one place in Pennsylvania.
I chose not to look directly at why that one silence was heavier than everything else combined.
Late July, the national network ran its rookie class preview.
We watched it in the living room. Mom, Dad, me, the game on mute at first and then Dad turned it up because they said my name.
They put four guys up on a board and a panel talked about them. One of the guys on the panel was Grant Sinclair, who is Nate's father, who played eleven years and now sits behind a desk in a good suit and tells America what things mean.
"Riley Kowalski is a wonderful story and you love the kid.
But let's be honest about what we're looking at.
Kowalski's a product of effort, not talent.
That's the forecheck of a guy who came up out of a furnace room, and I mean that as a compliment.
He works. He's honest. He's also replaceable, and the league's going to find that out in about eighteen months. "
The furnace room. Sitting eleven feet from a furnace my signing bonus paid for.
Nobody in that living room said anything for a while. The panel moved on to a defenseman from Boston.
Then my dad stood up, and he went out the sliding door, and he started the mower. It was seven thirty at night. He had cut that lawn on Sunday. It did not need to be cut.
My mother went into the kitchen and ran water for a minute and came back out and stood behind my chair.
"I don't have a lot of use," she said, "for men who narrate other people's sons."
That's all she said.
The next morning I drove to the Hibbing public library. I found the transcript on the network's site and hit print. Then I folded it into my wallet.
Two weeks later a tabloid in Philadelphia did a piece on the coming season and called us the Prince and the Rink Rat.
Our rivalry had a new nickname. It stuck to both of us like tar and it never came off.
I told everybody the nickname was free money. Some nights, sitting in the basement under the hum of a brand new furnace, reading effort, not talent off a piece of copy paper, I believed every single word Grant Sinclair said.
September put me in Pittsburgh.
The Forge were three years into a rebuild and starving for somebody to sell tickets with, and they had a room full of twenty-three-year-olds. They gave me a stall in the corner next to a Finnish defenseman who was six foot six and unpacked his gear like he was defusing it.
"Ludvig," he said, and shook my hand once.
"Everybody calls him Moose," said a guy across the room.
"They do," Ludvig agreed, and went back to his tape.
I taped the transcript inside my stall door, right at eye level, and stood back and looked at it.
"Fuel," I announced, to the room in general. "That's fuel right there, boys."
A couple guys laughed. Moose stopped. He turned and read the entire thing. The whole page, top to bottom, from four feet away, without being invited, taking his time about it.
Then he considered it, and said:
"It is efficient to let another man do your doubting for you."
And went back to his tape.
"Okay," I said. "Great. Thanks, big guy."
Camp went the way it goes when you've got talent and you're angry.
I made the opening night roster in a walk.
And then the league dropped the schedule, and the whole thing turned up to eleven, because opening night was Pittsburgh at Philadelphia.
Both debuts. National broadcast. Grant Sinclair in the booth above his son's building.
The league was not subtle. It has never once been subtle.
I told Dex I was going to ruin the coronation. I told Moose the transcript was a to-do list. I told my mother on the phone that it was just another game and she said "hm" in a way that fooled neither of us.
Game day, my parents arrived. They parked in the players' lot between two Escalades.
We got a booth at a diner near the arena at noon.
"They keep the boiler in the back," my dad told the waitress. "Am I right? Behind that wall there."
"I have literally no idea, hon."
"It's behind that wall. You've got a hot spot in this corner."
"Dad!"
"He's not wrong," the waitress said. "It's terrible in here in February."
My mom watched me not eat my eggs. She has watched me not eat before games since I was ten years old and she has never once told me to eat.
"You're going to be great tonight," she said.
"I'm gonna be fine."
"That's not what I said."
Then in the hotel, in the hours before, I lay on the bed with my phone face up on the nightstand.
A hundred and eighty days. That's what it was. I'd sat down and worked it out once. A hundred and eighty days that a napkin with my handwriting on it had been sitting in some guy's wallet in this city, unused.
I had, obviously, no way to text him, because he had my number and I did not have his, which is the whole geometry of the problem and which I had also worked out and which had also not improved my mood.
I play the game by moving before the read is finished. That's the entire thing about me. Everybody says it, it's on my scouting page: commits early, plays on instinct.
I put the phone face down.
Then I walked to the rink in the October dark with my bag on my shoulder and my headphones in and I thought, fine.
Tonight he has to stand on ice with me. No green rooms, no loading docks, no elevators at two in the morning. Sixty minutes, national TV, his building, his father upstairs.
Tonight he finds out what the correction looks like at full speed.