Chapter 24 Riley - August 2021, Hibbing
The thread sat on my phone like a lake in January. I could walk on it. There was nothing under there I could get to.
Dex and Kayla got married on the third Saturday in August, fifteen months late, at the VFW hall on the highway, with two hundred people in it and a chocolate fountain in the corner.
My father spent a long time on that fountain.
"There's a pump in the base, and it's running warm chocolate up through a column, and then it comes down over three tiers, and every single person in this room is putting their hands in it."
"That's the concept."
"It's a slurry system, Riley, and it's in a room with a dance floor." He looked at it a while longer with his hands behind his back. "It's very well made. Whoever built that knew what they were doing and they should be ashamed of themselves."
I wore the suit. Second time out, and it fit.
My mother had taken it to a man in Duluth in June and had the sleeves let down, the shoulders opened, and about an inch off the trouser break.
She did it without asking me, which is the only way that was ever going to happen.
It came back on a hanger under plastic and she hung it on the back of my bedroom door and never said one word about it.
I put it on in front of a mirror I'd been looking into since I was nine and stood there with my hands hanging out the ends of the sleeves at the correct length, in my father's wedding suit, at twenty-six.
The best man speech I wrote at two in the morning at my parents' kitchen table on the Thursday, in one sitting, on a legal pad, and I did not revise it, which is not like me.
I'd written for that room my whole life. I knew exactly how a VFW hall worked. Open with the fishing story, do the callback about the truck, land the thing about his mother, get out.
I did not do that. I stood up with a microphone.
"So everybody's going to tell you tonight that when you know, you know. That's the whole genre. Lightning. It hits you and you're done, and then you tell the story at every wedding for the rest of your life.
"And I want to say, respectfully, with a full room and a chocolate fountain going behind me, that I think that's a lie.
"Because I've known Dexter Ahonen since I was eight years old, and I have never once seen lightning strike that man.
What I've seen is that in the winter of our senior year my truck wouldn't start for eleven days straight, and for eleven mornings a guy who is not a morning person got up in the dark and drove out to my house and sat in my driveway with the heater on, and I never asked him to do it and he never once mentioned it.
"That's the actual thing. Love is not the lightning. Love is the showing up. It's the guy who knows your order without asking, who knows your tells, who knows exactly which mood you're in from four words on a phone, and who stays anyway.
"Anybody can be struck. It happens to people at banquets, in rooms they had no business being in, when they're twenty-one, and it doesn't mean a thing on its own.
"Staying is the whole sport.
"Kayla, you knew his order inside a month.
I've watched you order for him at a table where he was sitting.
And Dex, you have not stopped showing up since the day you met her, and I want everybody in this room to understand that I have known this man for eighteen years and he has never in his life gotten out of a warm car for anybody who wasn't worth it.
"To the two of you. And to everybody in this room who's got somebody who knows their order. Hold onto that. There is no trophy for it and nobody's going to put it on television, and it's the only thing any of us are actually keeping."
I sat down.
The room came apart. Kayla's grandmother, who was ninety-one and had never liked me, came over during the meat and took my face in both hands. "This one's a poet," she told the table. "I've always said it."
She had never said it. Dex could not speak, and a guy who sells snowmobiles told me I should do this professionally.
And I gave that entire speech looking at the back wall, at a laminated poster about a fish fry, because my mother was at the family table to my left.
Denise Kowalski sat through all of that with her hands in her lap and her head slightly tilted, and she watched me the way she watched a bill she didn't agree with, and I did not put my eyes anywhere near her one time.
I danced with the bride and with two grandmothers in rotation. I caught the garter, which was not my fault, because it came off a chandelier fitting at speed and hit me in the chest and my hands were professionally trained.
Then after midnight I got in the truck and drove home with the radio off.
The games came back in October with buildings full of people again, and the sport got the mystery it deserved.
The first one was in Philadelphia and I've watched it since. It's a beautiful hockey game. One goal, forty-eight shots, both goalies excellent, four minutes of penalties in the whole thing.
And it was completely silent. Not the building, the building was screaming.
The two of us. Every faceoff where we were both on the ice, every scrum after a whistle, and a moment in the second where he had me on the boards with a forearm across my back and the whole place howling, and neither of us said one word.
I did not chirp him at a single dot, and this was a man I'd talked to during a television timeout.
We read each other perfectly the whole night. It might be the best either of us ever played against the other one. He knew where I was going and I knew where he was going, and every exchange was clean and fast and finished, like two guys doing a drill.
And the league had us mic'd, the way they did whenever we played, because of a segment we made in 2019 that a man on a panel called the best nine minutes of hockey television all year.
They aired forty seconds of it on a Thursday. Two men, side by side, on the dot, and the audio had nothing on it but skates and a stick tapping the ice, and one linesman saying something about a change, and a building making noise a long way away.
The panel loved it. A guy in a checked jacket said, "That's maturity. That's two men who've realized they're competing for something bigger than a rivalry."
Both group chats knew exactly what it was.
Angelo went first. He was never subtle in his life and it was the single most likable thing about him. He got my number off somebody in October and started texting me directly.
Angelo: riley its angelo from philly. we should all get dinner. me you nate and whoever. theres a place in south philly my cousins wife runs it. i think you guys had a thing and its stupid
Riley: we didn't have a thing
Angelo: ok so friday
He tried four times. He got my agent's office once, and got the assistant to put a hold on a Wednesday in December, and then it fell through. I've been in this business long enough to know what it looks like when two sets of schedulers are told the same word from two different directions.
Moose was worse, because Moose did it formally.
He came and stood at my stall in November with his hands at his sides. "I have been approached."
"By who?"
"By a man in Philadelphia who wants to have a dinner.
" He looked at the wall over my head. "I have declined, on the grounds that I do not mediate a war which neither government will confirm is happening.
I said this to him on the telephone in those words.
He did not understand them, and I did not explain. "
"Ludvig, you're a good man."
"Also I do not like South Philadelphia. It is very close together." He put his gloves on and went out.
There was a tab on my laptop for a Philadelphia sports network's postgame availabilities. It was muted, and it had been muted since October, and I opened it four nights a week, and I had told myself, out loud in an empty apartment, that this was pre-scout.
It's a defensible position. I played them four times a year, and watching a captain's postgame is a legitimate thing for a professional to do.
Muted, though, because I did not need the words.
I unmuted it a few seconds at a time, only for the hard questions, and only because of a thing he did where he took a quarter breath in and let about a quarter of it back out before he answered, and if there were four of those in a press conference it was a bad week and if there was one it was fine.
That is what I was doing with my evenings at twenty-six years old.
The box scores I read like letters. A man went minus two in Calgary and got moved off the top pair for one game in December, and I sat in my kitchen and read a table of numbers on a phone the way I'd read something a person sent me.
The pot roast happened on the second Sunday in November.
Michael had done the whole thing, the roast and the potatoes and the horseradish that took the top of my head off. Bo had been arguing about the gravy since I walked in, and it was going the way it always went.
"It's thin."
"It's a jus."
"It's thin gravy, Michael. You've put wine in it."
"Thirty-four years of a man who thinks gravy should stand up on its own like a wall."
And I put my fork down and said, "How did you two meet?"
The table did not stop. Michael reached over and moved the horseradish, and Bo kept eating.
Then Bo said, "Nineteen eighty-seven. I got traded in November and they put me in a room with him."
"You were roommates."
"Road roommate. Four years." He put a piece of bread in the gravy. "Nobody picks a road roommate. You get given one. Alphabetical, half the time."
"He was a terrible roommate," Michael said. "He watched television with the sound at four and then complained he couldn't hear it."
"There was a diner in Saskatoon," Bo said, "open all night, and after games we'd go there because you can't sleep after a game and there's nothing else open in Saskatoon in February."
"Saskatoon." Michael said it to nobody in particular. "Thirty-four years and he still says it like it's somewhere people go on purpose."