Chapter 22 Nate - August 2020, Toronto, Canada #2
"That's the whole answer. Every plate out of that kitchen was made by a professional for strangers, and I've eaten like that my entire life and I didn't know it was a category until this month.
" I put my hands on my knees. "My mother used a borrowed torch with the light off.
Your mother watches you not eat and says nothing.
That's the same thing and it doesn't have a name, and it's not on any menu in this hotel. "
The dryer buzzed and neither of us moved for it.
And then Riley put his hand flat on the dryer and leaned his weight onto it, and I watched him come up out of that chair, and his shoulders came around.
I'd read that man's body since 2017. There was a sentence coming across that room at speed, and I knew the shape of it the way I knew a forecheck was arriving before the man had finished his second stride.
So I got there first.
"Riley."
He stopped.
"I want to say something and I want to say it in one go.
" It came out warm and level and reasonable, and I recognized it, because it was the voice I used in a room in the third period when we were down two and everybody was looking at me.
"Two nights ago I sat on a bathroom floor at three in the morning and I could not breathe. "
"What?"
"I'm fine. It was food." I kept going, because the whole thing depended on not stopping.
"But that's what this has come to, and if either of us is honest for a second we can both see it.
We're in a sealed building in a foreign country in the middle of the worst thing that's happened to this sport in a hundred years, we're about to play each other in a second-round series, and neither of us can sleep, and it isn't the hockey. "
"Okay."
"I don't think we can keep running it. Not because anybody got caught. Because of what it costs, and we've both been paying it, and I don't think either of us has ever said the number out loud."
He was completely still.
"So I'd like to end it, cleanly. Nobody did anything wrong, and there's nothing to unwind, because we never wrote anything down that anybody could find.
" I looked straight at him. "And I'd like to try being friends.
I think we'd be good at it. I think we're already good at it, and it's the only part of this that's never hurt anybody. "
The dryer had stopped. He looked at me over the top of a mask for a long time.
And then the grin arrived. It came up over the mask into his eyes, all the way, the full thing, the one that took a room apart in Chicago in 2017. And it arrived one beat late.
"Friends," he said. "That's a big word for a guy who wouldn't give me his toothpaste."
"I gave you the toothpaste."
"You said I could have asked."
"That was three years ago and you have never once let go of it."
"No, I'm in." He put both hands up. "I'm in, obviously I'm in, look at us, we're at a dryer in a sealed building in another country. Motion carries. All in favor."
"Aye."
"Aye. Unanimous, two nothing, great meeting everybody."
We could not shake on it, so he got the plastic cup off my detergent bottle and held it up, and I picked my water bottle off the floor, and we did it across six feet of concrete at ten past five in the morning.
"To the friends."
"To the friends."
I went up the north stairs and slept longer than I had since March, and did an inventory in the morning, and the finding was relief. I've gone back to that file since.
We went seven. A great deal has been written about that series and every word of it missed what it was, which was two teams that could not solve each other because the two of us had spent three years handing each other the answers.
Game 7 was one to one with four minutes left and he came down the off wing.
There was a hitch in his crossover. Two or three strides before the move he loved, his outside leg shortened, because he was loading for it. I drew it for him on hotel stationery in December of 2018.
"Why have you never used it?"
"I'm saving it."
"Saving it for what?"
"I'll know when I get there."
I got there with three fifty-one on the clock, stepping up at the line half a beat early into the shortened stride, and the puck was gone off his blade before he finished loading, and it was in the net a few seconds later.
They won a national championship off my tell in 2017, and we won a second-round series off his in 2020.
No crowd, two lines of men shaking hands in silence in a building the size of a hangar. He got to me and took my hand and held it about half a second past the beat.
His face gave me nothing I could read, which had never once happened in any room.
"Good series," he said.
"Good series."
Two days before the Forge flew out there was a tray outside my door. White cloth, no ticket, no signature. Crème br?lée, one ramekin, off menu, and I had eaten in that building six weeks and there was a sheet cake on Fridays and a fruit plate.
And the top was wrong. Somebody had taken a torch around the outside edge twice, so there was a ring of dark brown going almost to black at the rim, where a professional kept the flame moving. Whoever did it had never held a torch in their life.
I stood in a corridor and reconstructed it.
Cohorts did not mix, so somebody had been asked to carry it.
The kitchen closed at ten, so it was a line cook, in the dead hours.
There was exactly one player in that building who knew the whole kitchen staff by name, because he learned the name of every person who handed him anything.
I knew exactly what it was. There's a sentence about the smell of burnt sugar that I handed a man for free in February of 2018, with no wager on it and no coin, and he put the spoon down.
"You can't just give me that."
"I can. It isn't worth anything."
"Everything you say is worth something. That's the entire problem with you, Sinclair."
And I read it as a period. I decided it was a goodbye, the last course of a three year meal, delivered by a man who was better at endings than I was, two days before he got on a plane.
I proposed the pact myself, in a basement, in my captain's voice, and then used it to misread the only piece of evidence I've ever been handed.
I ate it standing up at the desk with the lamp off, which is the only way I've ever eaten one.
Then I drafted replies and sent none, because asking him how he did it would have got me an answer, and an answer is a fact, and I've never once gone looking for a fact I would then have to hold.
At six in the morning their buses were idling in the courtyard.
I went out onto the balcony in the cold with a towel and folded it in half, square, and hung it over the rail and pushed it all the way to the left end. Goodnight. There was one person alive who could read it.
I stood inside the drapes and watched the players come out in ones and twos, and he came out third from last with a duffel on his shoulder and a coffee in his hand, and walked the whole length of that courtyard to the second bus. He did not look up.
We went out in the next round in five. I did the availabilities and I was correct in all of them.
The towel was still on the rail when I packed. I left it there, folded square and pushed all the way to the left, saying the thing to nobody.