Chapter 15
CARTER
The thing nobody warns you about is how strange it is when the thing you wanted actually shows up.
For four months I had organized my entire life around a woman who lived three hundred miles away. Every phone call was scheduled. Every visit was a countdown. I knew exactly how many days until I’d see her, always, the way you know how many games are left in a road trip.
And then she moved to St. Louis, and she was fifteen minutes away, and I did not know what to do with myself.
That’s not a complaint. I want to be clear about that. It’s just that wanting something at a distance is a skill I had gotten frighteningly good at, and having it in the same zip code was a completely different sport, and I was — for the first time since I was about nineteen — bad at something.
I kept doing the math anyway. Fifteen minutes.
Twelve if the lights went my way on Kingshighway.
I’d catch myself in the parking lot after practice with my phone in my hand, working out whether it was too soon to text, whether twice in a day was too much, whether a grown man could reasonably drive across a city on a Tuesday for no reason.
I did it, by the way. Several times. She never once made me feel stupid about it.
We fell into rhythms fast. Tuesday nights became taco nights at Liam and Anne’s — a standing thing now, whoever could make it.
During the season that often meant Liam and I were on a plane to somewhere, so half the time it was really Jess and Anne and the two boys, building doomed towers of shells and holding the table down without us.
When we were home, we showed up. When we weren’t, it went on fine without us, which was somehow its own kind of comfort — the thing didn’t depend on me to keep existing.
It just did, and I got to be part of it when I could.
Mid-October we had a family skate after Saturday practice — one of those things the team does where the guys’ kids come down and the ice gets turned over to about forty children for an hour and the equipment staff quietly go somewhere and drink.
I stayed. I didn’t have anybody there. I stayed anyway, which was new, and I sat on the bench with my skates still on and watched a defenseman worth eleven million dollars get run over from behind by his own four-year-old.
Cole’s two kids came down the tunnel about ten minutes in, with Maggie behind them — Cole’s mother-in-law, Claire’s mom, the grandmother who’d been holding that family together since the funeral — carrying a thermos and two pairs of gloves like a woman who had done this a thousand times and had strong opinions about who forgets what.
Ben — the little one, seven years old — hit the ice at a dead sprint.
“BEN,” Maggie called, without much hope. “Walk on the —”
He did not walk on the anything. He was gone, straight down the middle, arms out, absolutely committed.
His big sister came out after him at a completely different speed.
Emma — eleven, and nothing like her brother about it — laced up on the bench three feet from me, methodical, double-knotting, and then stood and stepped onto the ice and skated one clean lap before she did anything else, like she was checking the building was where she left it.
I know that move. I’ve made that move in every new rink I’ve ever walked into.
“Hi,” she said, coming past.
“Hi.”
“You’re number nine.”
“I am.”
“My dad says you’re the best hands on the team but you don’t shoot enough.”
“Your dad,” I said, “is a defenseman, and defensemen have opinions about shooting that should be treated with suspicion.”
That got me about a quarter of a smile, which I understood immediately was a real currency and not to be spent casually.
Ben arrived at speed roughly forty seconds later, having apparently been told who I was, and asked me nine questions without waiting for any of the answers, and then asked whether it was true I knew a kid who had a bear named after me.
“That’s true.”
“Why.”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Can he come to the family skate?”
“He’s not —” I stopped.
Because what I’d been about to say was he’s not team family. Which was true, technically. There’s a distribution list. He was a woman’s kid who I was dating, and that is not a category the ice-time email accounts for, and I heard how it sounded before it finished forming and did not say it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, he can come. I’ll bring him next time.”
“Bring him today.”
“He’s not here today, bud.”
Ben absorbed this as a personal setback and left at speed.
Cole came off the ice around the point where the noise level suggested somebody was going to lose a tooth, and dropped onto the bench next to me, and we sat there together watching forty children commit various felonies.
“Maggie brings the good coffee,” he said. “That’s the only reason I do this.”
“How’s she doing?”
He thought about it. Cole thinks about things. It’s one of the reasons you want him next to you.
“Good days and bad ones,” he said. “She’s the reason we came here in the first place — when Claire got sick we moved so she could be near her mother. And then Claire died, and Maggie just closed up her own place and moved into our spare room and never went back.”
He turned his coffee around in his hands.
“She gave up a whole life to come be with them. Her own house, her own church, her own everything. Now she cooks in a kitchen full of her daughter’s recipe cards — Claire’s handwriting on every one.
Maggie makes the kids’ favorites at least once a month.
The chicken thing. The Sunday sauce. Says it keeps her close.
” He shrugged. “It’s her house too now, whether she ever meant it that way or not. ”
He tipped his chin toward the ice, where Ben had just wiped out spectacularly and was lying on his back laughing at the ceiling.
“He was four when she died. He doesn’t remember much of her. That’s the mercy and it’s also the thing that guts you. He asks me what her voice sounded like.”
“What do you tell him?”
“I tell him the truth. Then I put on a video.” He said it plainly. Not bleak — plainly, the way a man says a thing he’s carried long enough to know the weight of. “Emma remembers everything. That’s the harder one.”
I didn’t say I’m sorry. He’s had enough of that. I sat there.
Out on the ice Emma had circled back and was skating slow loops around her brother, not helping him up, just orbiting, keeping an eye on him from a distance she’d clearly decided on.
“She’s a hell of a kid,” I said.
“She’s eleven going on forty.” Cole rubbed his jaw. “Working on that.”
We watched a while longer.
“Can I ask you something,” I said, and then didn’t ask it, because I hadn’t actually planned to say that part out loud.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Jess moved here.” I turned my stick over in my hands. “With her boy. Three weeks ago.”
“I heard.”
“Yeah.” I laughed, and it came out wrong. “Everybody heard.”
Cole waited. That’s another thing about him.
“I keep waiting for the part where it goes bad,” I said. “That’s — that’s the honest version. I’ve got the thing I wanted and I keep standing in the middle of it waiting for the floor to go.”
I expected him to tell me it wouldn’t. That’s what people say. That’s the free reassurance everybody hands out because it costs them nothing.
Cole didn’t do that.
“It might,” he said.
I looked over at him.
“That’s the actual answer," he said. "It might. Mine did."
He was still watching his kids.
"And I’d do every single day of it again. All of it. The whole thing, knowing exactly how it ends."
He finally turned his head and looked at me straight on.
"You’re not scared it’ll go bad, Michaels. You’ve had things go bad your whole life — you’re an expert at it. Losing things is the one thing you already know how to survive."
He let that sit for a second.
"What’s got you frozen is the opposite. You’re scared of how much it’s going to cost you if it goes good.
Because if you let yourself have all of it — her, the kid, the whole life — then suddenly you’ve got something you can’t stand to lose.
And you’ve spent your whole life keeping your hands empty on purpose — because empty hands can’t have anything taken out of them. "
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah,” Cole said. “Thought so.”
He stood up and knocked his stick against my skate on the way past.
“Cost’s worth it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got. It’s the only piece of advice I’d stand behind under oath.”
I sat on that bench a long while after he’d gone out to collect his kids.
I watched him get an arm around each of them and steer them toward the tunnel, Ben talking the entire time, Emma carrying both their water bottles because somebody had to be responsible.
I watched Maggie hand out the coffee and take back the gloves.
A family that had lost the middle of itself and had gone right on being a family anyway, on a Saturday, at a rink, because that’s what you do.
You’re scared of how much it’s going to cost you if it goes good.
He’s not team family. That’s what my mouth had gone for, on its own, before I caught it. Three weeks she’d been living here and some part of me was still holding them at arm’s length, still treating this like a thing that could be taken back.
And here’s what else I’d been sitting on: tickets.
The good ones, right behind the bench, mine to hand out any time I wanted.
Justin had watched every single home game of the season from a couch in a temporary apartment, in his jersey, with a bear named after me propped up beside him — and I had not once offered.
I’d had a dozen reasons. School night. Long week. Don’t crowd her, she just moved. Every one of them was a lie with a schedule attached.
The truth was that a seat behind the bench isn’t a ticket. It’s a place. It says these are mine, they’re with me, put them where I can see them — and I had never in my life put anybody where I could see them, because you don’t do that with things you’re planning to be able to leave.
So I was going to ask her that week. Come to a game, both of you, sit in my seats where I can find you between shifts. In her kitchen, out loud, like a man.
I texted her something much smaller instead — you around tonight — and she wrote back inside a minute, always, and I looked at that one word for a while.
I sat there on the bench with my skates still on and my hands full of my own phone and let myself be happy about it for a whole ten seconds before the quiet started coming down, cool and clean at the back of my skull, whispering that this was a lot to be holding and that a man could set it down anytime he wanted.
I didn’t know what that feeling was yet. Nobody had given me the word for it.
I told it to shut up, and I laced my skates tighter, and I went back out on the ice.