30 #2
I’m waiting for something else, and I don’t know what.
Some acknowledgment. Some version of hey, about last night.
It doesn’t have to be an apology. I don’t want an apology.
There’s nothing to apologize for. I don’t know what I want.
She doesn’t bring it up once. She isn’t avoiding it, either; it isn’t sitting in the room being avoided.
It just isn’t there at all, because for her, nothing happened last night.
She said a nice thing to a guy she likes sleeping with, and then she slept great. She meant it.
She comes over and leans down and kisses me at the desk with one hand on my jaw, and her mouth tastes like my toothpaste. “Seven o’clock tomorrow.”
“Doors at six. Sit behind our bench. Three or four rows up.”
“Okay.” She’s grinning at me. She taps my cheek twice with two fingers, light, the way you’d tap a dog’s nose, and heads for the door with her boots in her hand. “Have fun at your six a.m.”
“It’s at four.”
“It’s at—” She stops in the doorway. “Four? In the afternoon?”
“Yeah.”
“So you got up at six for no reason.”
She’s standing in my doorway in my hoodie with her boots in her hand, waiting for an answer, and I don’t have one.
“Go to class,” I say, and she goes.
Practice at four is short. The day before a game, Berwyn doesn’t run us into the ground.
I’m half a second off the whole time. On a breakout, I put a pass on Rafe’s backhand instead of his tape, and he has to reach for it.
Ten minutes later, I come across the middle and don’t see Koda cut behind me, and the puck goes into the corner and dies.
In the neutral zone drill, I get to the spot a beat early and have to wait, which lets the guy behind me catch me, and we start over.
At this level, half a second is the whole job.
Rafe fans on a one-timer off my feed, and I say something about it. I don’t even know what. It isn’t what I’d normally say. He skates past me and says, “Great pass,” and he’s right; it wasn’t.
At the water break, Koda glides over to the boards next to me and takes his mouthguard out. He has circles under his eyes down to his cheekbones. He got maybe three hours of sleep.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “How was Theo’s?” he says, grinning with his whole face, and puts his mouthguard back in. Fucker.
At the end, Berwyn runs the exhibition lines.
Second stays second. Greeley takes the third-line draws, which he’d take against anybody, and on the second-to-last rep, he wins one clean against me off the wall and doesn’t say anything about it, doesn’t chirp, doesn’t look at me.
He’s the last one off the ice. I’m at the gate with my helmet in my hand, waiting for the guy ahead of me to move, when he comes up behind me.
“Big night tomorrow,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“Who’s coming?” he says. “Family?”
I look at him. That’s all I do, for about a second and a half. Then I step through the gate, and I’m four steps down the rubber when I hear him say, real friendly, to nobody in particular, “Should be a good crowd.”
I keep walking down the tunnel without turning around, and he doesn’t follow. Whatever he came to get, he got it off my face in a second and a half, and he’ll keep it. In the room, I sit in my stall with my elbow pads still on longer than I need to.
My dad calls at eight. I’m at my desk with the reading open, and Rafe’s in the shower, and the phone lights up on the wood. Dad.
“Nash. You good? You eating?”
“I’m eating.”
“Good. So listen, I’m coming.” He’s in the truck. I can hear the blinker.
Something in my chest moves. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. I got out of the Saturday shift, Denny’s covering, so I’ll be on the road by noon and there way before puck drop. Got a room at that place off the highway with the waffle thing in the lobby.”
“The waffle thing.”
“You love the waffle thing.”
“I’m not nine anymore.”
“You loved it, bud.” He laughs. “First exhibition. Second line. Center. At a program like that. You know what that is?”
“It’s an exhibition. It doesn’t count.”
“Everything counts, Nash. They’re all watching what you do when it doesn’t count.” The truck noise changes. “Hey. Listen to me. First ten minutes tomorrow, don’t chase it.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it anyway. Everybody’s going to come out of their skin for the first ten, because it’s the first one with a crowd. Let them run around like idiots. You find the game first. Find your feet, find your wingers, take what they give you. Then go get it.”
He’s right. That’s exactly what happens in a first one, and exactly what to do about it, and nobody on the staff will say it better.
“Yeah,” I say.
“How are the draws?”
“Better on my strong side. Still losing the ones off the wall.”
“Hands lower. You get tall when you’re mad.” He says it easily, and he isn’t wrong about that either. “Who’s your third line?”
“Greeley.”
“Any good?”
“He’s good on draws.”
“Huh,” Dad says. “Learn something off him, then.”
I don’t say anything.
“Anyway.” I hear him take the exit. “I’m looking forward to seeing you. Been too long.”
My hand is on my side, over my shirt, and my skin feels too tight there, so I take it off and put it flat on the desk.
“Anybody else coming?” he says. “You got people?”
Kylie in that seat behind our bench, three or four rows up, where I can see her.
“Koda’s parents are coming,” I say.
“Koda’s the winger. Good. It’s nice when there’s people.” A pause. “You need anything? Tape? Money?”
“I’m good, Dad.”
“All right. Seven o’clock. I’ll find you after.” He says it like a promise. “Love you, bud.”
“Yeah. You, too.”
Rafe comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his neck and looks at me, at the phone still in my hand, and doesn’t ask.
“Who’s coming tomorrow?” I say. “For you.”
“Nobody,” Rafe says, and gets into bed.
Saturday, I’m up at eight. Eggs and oatmeal at nine.
A nap at noon, a real one, phone face down.
Chicken and rice and a banana at three-thirty.
I take a picture of the banana out of habit and then don’t send it.
At the rink by four-forty-five. Tape at five.
Two rolls, same order, blade first, heel to toe, then the knob.
I do my socks the way I’ve done them since I was twelve, left shin pad, then right.
Everything in the same order. When the order’s right, there’s nothing in my head but the next thing in it.
Warmups at six-twenty. The building is about a third full and getting louder, the ice is fresh and fast and feels unbelievable under me, and for about ten minutes, there’s nothing wrong in my life at all.
Then I come out of a turn at the far blue line and find them both without meaning to.
Dad is on the near side, in the section by the corner, eight rows up, in the brown work jacket he’s had since I was in middle school, big hands on his knees.
He isn’t waving. He’s watching everybody the way he watches, taking the whole thing apart.
Kylie is on the other side, behind our bench, four rows up, exactly where I told her, in a Woodbury shirt she didn’t own on Thursday, with Paige next to her and Kenzie next to Paige and a bag of popcorn already open in her lap at six-thirty.
Two coordinates. I take another lap and don’t look at either of them, but I know exactly where both of them are the whole time.
They open the doors by the gate for twenty minutes after warmups so families can come down to the rail.
Dad is at the rail when I come off with his hand up.
I go over with my helmet off and my gloves under my arm.
He grabs the back of my neck over the rail and pulls my head in and knocks his knuckles on my skull.
I feel his palm against the back of my neck.
“Look at you,” he says. “Hell, Nash.” He’s grinning big. His eyes are doing the thing they do when he’s about to get emotional and doesn’t want to, so he goes straight to hockey. “Ice is quick. Boards are dead in that far corner, did you feel it? Dumps are going to sit.”
“Yeah, I felt it.”
“So don’t chase it in there. Their six is slow turning left.”
“I saw it.”
“Course you did.” He knocks the rail twice with his knuckle, happy.
And then I hear Kylie. “Nash!”
She’s coming along the rail from the other end with her popcorn, in that shirt, with her hair down, holding up Paige’s phone to record me for some reason, and she’s laughing before she even gets there.
I could have told her never mind about the game.
Yesterday, this morning, any time. I could’ve just sent a text.
Don’t come. I didn’t. I invited her, and I told her where to sit.
She gets to the rail and looks at my dad, then at me, and lowers the phone. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hi,” Dad says, and looks at me. “And who’s this?”
“Kylie,” I say.
He sticks his hand out over the rail. “Wade.”
“Hi. Oh my God, hi.” She shakes it with both of hers because one is full of popcorn. “Sorry, I have butter on me.”
“That’s the good stuff.” He’s already charmed. “Girlfriend?”
“Oh, no,” Kylie says, just like that, without a pause, without stopping her smile. “We’re friends. I live down the hall from him. Three doors. It’s very convenient for borrowing hoodies.”
“Ah,” Dad says.
She laughs, and he laughs, and the horn goes for the second warm-up group. Somebody on the ice yells my name. I’d like to put my fist through the glass.
Dad looks at me once, quick, not even a full second. He doesn’t say anything or smile. Then he turns back to her, asking where she’s sitting and telling her behind the bench are the best seats in the building.
“Go,” he says to me. “Go, go.”
I go.