Chapter 10
TEN
Brandon
I know Ryan says he needs his pregame nap but despite not getting one today, he’s playing like a god out here.
I swear, every time his stick touches the puck magic happens.
He is an assist machine. Evident in how the pass he just sauced to me lands perfectly on the tape of my stick.
All I need to do is flick it into the top corner of the net where Chicago’s goalie isn’t looking.
With that, the score is now three–nothing.
“Damn, Baby!” O’Shea yells as he rushes me into the glass and wraps me in a hug. “That’s two for you tonight!”
“Nah,” I say, laughing as I throw my arm around Ryan’s shoulders when he joins our celebration. If it wasn’t for Ryan’s impeccable ability to read the ice, I’d be useless out here. Just doing cardio instead of producing points. “It’s all thanks to this guy. He keeps setting me up.”
“Fuck that,” Ryan says and rubs my helmet. “You’re officially on hatty watch.”
I shake my head and my gaze drops to the ice. “It’s only beginner’s luck.”
The three of us start to skate back to the bench.
O’Shea points at me with his thumb over his shoulder. “This fucking guy!” he says to the team. “He thinks he’s got beginner’s luck.”
“Baby, no,” Danton says.
“That stopped being an explanation two weeks ago,” Roysy says.
“Yeah,” Ryan agrees. He leans in close to my ear. Closer than he needs to. “Just admit it. You deserve to be here. You have great hands.”
I swallow. Oh, Ryan. You have no idea.
Ryan
When the lamp lights again, I turn to look at Brandon. He looks stunned. His mouth is hanging open and he drops his stick onto the ice.
With his hands now free, he brings them to his head and just continues to stare right at me. At this moment, he looks so much like the kid I knew eight years ago celebrating goals made against his brother in the driveway. The nostalgia of it all almost swallows me whole.
Except he’s not a kid. He’s grown into a man. One I want to pick up and squeeze and throw over my shoulder.
Which is exactly what I do when I rush towards him. I lean down and scoop him up by his hips. He yelps when he finds himself hanging over me and one of his fists thumps me on my back.
“You fucking beauty!” I scream out as I put him back down onto his feet.
He’s laughing and grinning from ear to ear. It’s a shame this didn’t happen during a home game, and he could experience having hats rain down on him instead of a chorus of groans from the crowd.
“Baby’s first hat trick!” Danton yells as he rushes us and wraps us both in a hug.
We’re quickly joined by O’Shea and Clemmers and even Ivanov is escaping his home in the crease to come celebrate.
Together the five of us watch him make his way down the ice taking the long strides his goalie gear relegates him to.
“Holy shit!” he yells out when he arrives and immediately hugs Brandon. This is a new move for him. I guess Momma B was a good influence.
Unfortunately, our celebration doesn’t get to last long. The refs are circling, looking to put an end to our fun.
“Ivanov! Get back in your crease,” one of them demands.
Ivanov pats Brandon’s helmet with his gloved hand one more time, then heads back down the ice as he was told.
“Let’s go,” another ref says to the rest of us. “Don’t make me slap your team with a delay of game penalty.”
“Aww, come on, man,” Danton says. He pulls Brandon into his side. “Baby popped his hat trick cherry tonight.”
At Danton’s words, Brandon turns as red as, well, a cherry. And I’m loving every shade of it.
“Nice job, kid,” the ref says to Brandon, then takes his attention back to Danton. “But if we don’t get this game going again, we’re gonna have a riot. This crowd is getting hostile.”
I look around the arena. He’s right. Fans are booing, but not at us.
They’re booing their own team. A few Chicago jerseys have been thrown onto the ice, landing amongst the Chicago players, who are all hanging their heads.
It’s getting ugly. It should make me smile.
Kennedy Sr is getting his just deserts. But the fans are taking their frustrations out on the players when all that energy should be aimed at the man looking down at all of this from his office in the mezzanine.
I feel bad for the Chicago Broad Wings players, which is keeping me from taking too much joy in all of this.
It’s not their fault that as a team they’ve been horribly mismanaged.
It’s not their fault that they got unwillingly dragged into a father-son dispute for the ages. All they want to do is play hockey.
Heading back to the bench, I focus my attention on Coach Chris. He’s picked up on the same thing I have. While the rest of our team congratulates Brandon, like he deserves, Coach Chris keeps his eyes focused forward towards center ice.
It’s at this moment, the jumbotron hanging above the fray begins to play a video highlighting Coach Chris.
Highlighting isn’t the right word. This video is a scathing reminder to the fans in the building that their beloved coach is now standing behind the visitors’ bench instead of theirs.
It’s a poor attempt at trying to paint Coach Chris as a traitor.
Unfortunately, it works, as the ire of the crowd turns back towards us and our leader. But true to his form, Coach Chris stands stoic.
That doesn’t keep me from feeling anger about this on his behalf. A few weeks ago, this was his barn filled with his players, cheered by these fans. Now, they hate everyone in here, including their own. It didn’t need to be this way.
“Hey!” I say to my team as the third line climbs over the boards to take the next face off.
“We’ve already got this. We’ve won this game.
The score is four–zero.” I point up to the area in the arena reserved for Kennedy Sr and the rest of his flunkies.
“Don’t let him take this night away from us.
Don’t let him ruin this moment with his games.
The Mules have arrived, and we’re taking the Broad Wings’ place in the Western Conference. ”
“Yes!” Danton yells out his agreement with a clap to my shoulder.
My eyes catch Brandon’s. He’s glowing as he yells, “Playoffs, here we come!”
Getting back to the hotel after the game, moods are still high, and adrenaline is still pumping through our veins. Even Coach Chris seems to be breathing a little easier now that we’ve gotten away from the Broad Wings’ stadium and his wife, Michelle, has joined us.
I don’t know what she just said to Brandon, but whatever it is, it has him glowing bright pink. And like a moth to a flame, I feel myself drawn to him. Before I know it, I’m standing in between him and Michelle.
“Ryan,” Coach Chris says. “Perfect timing. Your linemate is worried about getting too cocky.”
“He could never.” I laugh. “He’s not Ander.”
Brandon lights up at this and the whole group laughs.
“I gotta tell you,” Coach Chris says with another clap to Brandon’s shoulder. “If he hadn’t spent every free moment he had with me at the Olympics talking about you, I never would have guessed you two were brothers. You’re very different young men.”
“You have no idea,” Ryan says. “I lived with him and Ander for a season. They couldn’t be more different if they tried.”
Michelle looks at me, curious. “So you two already knew each other?”
I nod my head yes. “Yeah, I billeted with the Bouchards when I played juniors.”
She hums then takes a sip of her drink. “That explains the chemistry between you two. It’s not as instant as it seems.”
“We never played together, though,” Brandon says. “I mean, unless you count street hockey in our driveway—”
“Or all the days we’d lace up and hit one of the nearby ponds during the winter,” I say. “Honestly, we played together quite a bit. We’ve just never been teammates.”
“I miss those pond hockey days,” Coach Chris says. “Nothing better than a pickup game with the bare minimum of resources.”
“That’s what growing up in Green Bay was like every day,” Brandon says.
I take a sip of my beer and reminisce about my time with Brandon and his family.
Looking back, everything about that time felt like discovering a magic I never knew existed.
A warm, friendly, occasionally too loud house.
Spontaneous neighborhood hockey games. Ander organizing team parties.
Brandon tagging along everywhere we went.
At times, living with them felt like a Christmas movie, too good to be true.
They were always doing things as a family and encouraging everyone around to join in.
Whether it was organizing outdoor games, or teaching local kids how to skate, or having bake sales to help fund a team that needed a leg-up.
Everything they did was for the community.
And not just the hockey community. It felt like all of Green Bay.
It was overwhelming at times and unfortunately, I wasn’t in the head space to appreciate it properly.
It felt like too much. I’d always thought people like the Bouchards were fictional.
My entire experience up until I met them was made up of people who didn’t care about anyone other than themselves, including their own child.
My father always hated me. My mother, after years of fighting with him over me, resented me.
My sisters, who I fall between, were used against me.
And for why? All because my dad couldn’t stand the truth about me.
A truth my mother kept hidden from me until I was shipped away.
Swallowing my drink, I rid myself of thoughts of them and try to stave away the guilt I’m feeling for not appreciating the Bouchards the way I should have.
I wish I could go back to that year and experience it all over again under a new lens.
I wish that at the time I was in a place to understand what the Bouchards were offering me that season.
Belonging. A loving home. An existence completely different than the one I left when I went up there to play.
I look at Brandon and a rush of fondness for him and his family washes over me. Maybe I can have all that again. Maybe having Brandon around is exactly what I have needed not just on the ice, but off it as well.
“I bet Green Bay was a lot different from Dallas,” Michelle says to me, pulling me out of my spiral.
I turn on the charm as I face her. “Yeah,” I say. “To start, they had a winning football team.” The joke makes everyone laugh. “But for real, moving to Green Bay was an extreme culture shock to a Texas boy like me. Frozen lakes and ponds weren’t easy to come across in Texas.”
Brandon
Everyone else might have missed it but I saw the look of melancholy that flashed across Ryan’s beautifully handsome face before he settled back into his usual teasing, happy-go-lucky self.
“No,” Coach Chris says. “I wouldn’t expect Dallas to be a pond hockey mecca.”
“It’s still a popular sport down there,” Michelle says. “They have a flourishing youth hockey program.”
“They do,” Ryan agrees. “I was a part of it.”
“How did you end up playing juniors in Green Bay, then?” Michelle asks.
“Well…” Ryan says slowly. “That’s kind of a long story.”
Interesting. Now that I think about it, I never knew how or why Ryan ended up playing for the Hodags.
In theory, it isn’t an unlikely scenario.
It’s not as if the players my family have billeted over the years were locals.
That would defeat the purpose. But most of them were at least from the surrounding states.
Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois. Never some place as far away as Texas.
He was the first, and now that I think about it, the only billet who wasn’t dropped off at our house by his parents.
He arrived by plane. We picked him up as a family at the airport.
My mother made us hold signs in the terminal with his name and number on them to welcome him to Green Bay.
“I don’t think any of us make it to the league without one of those,” Coach Chris says to him. It’s a very graceful way to end the conversation, but I still want to know more. So much more.