Chapter 25 Riley - 2022–2023 #2
That was my father's doing, and he did it by never once suggesting it, which is how he did everything.
Somewhere in the second round he mentioned to my mother that there was a loading dock at the north end with good shade in the morning, and my mother mentioned it to me, and that was the entire negotiation.
Two hundred and some people on a loading dock at ten in the morning.
Guys off nights who had not gone home, and guys who had known me since I was seven.
My mother had made hotdish for a hundred and then, when it became clear that a hundred was a fantasy, had gotten four women from the church involved, and there were pans of it down a folding table with the foil still on.
And the bowl of the Cup got filled with it. That was the plan the entire time, and everybody in that town had known about it for a week.
My father did not eat any of it. He conducted an inspection, and it took two hours. Walter Kowalski, in a golf shirt, took the Stanley Cup over to a bench by the loading dock door where the light was good, and he put his glasses on, and he went around every weld on that thing with his thumb.
"There's five bands."
"Yes, Dad."
"They come off. Look at the seam here." He turned it in the light. "That's brazed. That's not a bad job. That's a repair, though. Somebody's had this apart."
"They take a band off every thirteen years."
"Then why is this one brazed and that one isn't?" He turned it again. "Somebody dropped it."
"Somebody's dropped it about four hundred times."
"Yeah." He ran his thumb along the join under the bowl for a while. "The bowl's thin, Riley. You could put your thumb through that in a shop press."
"Nobody's putting it in a shop press."
"I'm telling you what it is." He sat back. "It's overrated."
The three guys who had come over to listen made a sound.
"It's serviceable," my father said. "I'd have made the base heavier. It'll last another hundred years."
That was the review. Two hours of it and a sentence at the end, and my mother heard the whole thing and did not turn around, and I watched the back of her neck while he said it.
We took it to the pond after that, the one she shoveled, which in June was just a pond with weeds and a dock.
We took it to the school and a gym full of kids screamed until the windows went.
My junior high coach, Mr. Hakala, seventy years old now, came around a corner in the hardware store while I was buying a hose fitting and started crying into a display of paint rollers, the same display, in the same aisle, six years later.
I stood there and let him hang on to me for a long time and told him it was his neutral zone drill.
The party at the house went until two.
And at about eleven, at the loudest part of it, with sixty people in my parents' yard and the good speaker out and a man from the Pit Stop doing a toast on a cooler, I went inside and up the stairs and stood in my childhood bedroom in the dark with the door shut.
I got my phone out and opened a thread that had been dead since the eleventh of November, 2021.
The last thing in it was a sentence from him with a period on the end, and above that a whole life, fifteen hundred messages, box scores and insults and photographs of ties, and I scrolled up for a while.
And then I sat there with my thumb over the box, and nothing came.
It was not that I could not find the right joke. I have never once in my life failed to find a joke. It was that there was no format.
Everything I've ever said to that man went inside a structure.
A trade proposal. A wager. A tie rating out of ten with the ten withheld.
Bylaws, an arbitration, an expansion communiqué.
We built a whole machine for the specific purpose of never once having to hand each other a plain sentence, and it worked for three years, and on the night I won the only thing my entire biography said I was too small to win, I stood in a dark bedroom and found out there is no clause in that constitution for I would like you to know about this.
Moose filled the doorway. He did not knock. He was six foot six and he could be extremely quiet, and he stood there with a beer in his hand and looked at the room, and at the poster, and at the dust shadow on the windowsill, and at me holding a phone in the dark.
"Ludvig."
"Hm," said Moose, and came in.
He stood next to me at the window and looked out at the yard, where the man from the Pit Stop had gotten down off the cooler and somebody was putting music on.
"I will say one thing this season," he said. "I have been saving it. I had intended to spend it in March."
"Don't."
"It is inefficient," Moose said, "to win everything and have no one to hand it to."
I did not say anything.
He drank his beer. And then he stood there at that window beside me for a long time without saying one more word, and it was the single kindest thing anybody did for me that entire year.
Then he said, "There is more of the hotdish," and went downstairs.
I did not send anything. What I did instead, at two in the morning with the yard finally empty, was unpack, because I had come straight from a flight and my bag had been sitting inside the bedroom door since Tuesday.
Suit bag first. And in the inside pocket, at the bottom, under a folded shirt I did not remember packing either, was a champagne cork with a bit of wire cage still on it.
Las Vegas, June of 2018. A $400 bottle off a table in a sponsor's room, opened at one in the morning in a suite bigger than this house, and the cork went off across the carpet and under a desk and a man laughed at the ceiling about it.
It had moved twice since then, into and out of two different apartments and two different bags. It had been to a World Championship in Slovakia and a sealed hotel in Toronto, and now it had gone to a Stanley Cup Final in the inside pocket of a suit carrier.
I sat down on the end of the bed and held it in my palm for a while.
Then I got up and put it on the windowsill, in the clean square in the dust where a $2 UMD keychain sat every summer from the time I was eighteen until the fall I turned twenty-two, when it went into a bag and out of a bag and into a suit pocket in a hotel in Philadelphia and never came back.
It fit the space exactly.
And I stood there with the Stanley Cup on my mother's kitchen table one floor down, and I finally said the thing to myself with the lights off.
The thesis is dead.
The thesis was that the sport is rigged for the guys born in the right living room, and that a man like me exists to be the correction, and that if I worked hard enough for long enough I would take every single thing they said was mine to lose.
I did take all of it. There is nothing left in this sport for me to take.
And the ache outlived the thesis by three years and did not slow down, because I have spent everything I have on it since I was twenty-one and it has never once been for sale.
The schedule dropped on a Wednesday in July.
February 16th through the 18th, All-Star weekend, Toronto.
My agent called about the ancillary stuff, because there is always ancillary stuff, and he got about two thirds of a sentence into it.
"So the league's putting together a promotional thing around the weekend. It's a retrospective, they're doing an era piece, and they've asked about your participation in a feature about the rivalry with…"
"Yes."
"Riley, I haven't told you what it…"
"Yes. Tell them yes."
There was a pause on his end. "Okay. That's easy."
"It's good for the brand," I said.
That's the oldest lie I own. I've been saying it since I was twenty-two. I said it about a nickname a tabloid in Philadelphia made up, and about a piece of paper taped inside a stall door, and about a bar in St. Louis with sixty witnesses in it.
I hung up and put the phone on the counter and stood in my kitchen for a while, and my heart was going like the last two minutes of a one goal game.