30 #4
We go up two-one with four to go on a play I don’t touch.
With forty-six seconds left, in our own zone, their net empty and six of them on the ice, Berwyn leans out and says, “Kennebeck.” Not Greeley.
I glance at him, and he’s pretending he wasn’t just looking at me.
I take the draw. I win it. We get it out.
The horn goes. And I stand in the handshake line with my glove going out and coming back and going out again, saying nothing to anybody, still feeling like I could bite through my own stick.
Afterward, there’s a thing in the lobby with folding tables and cookies on them, a banner nobody hung straight, families standing around in their coats, because it’s an exhibition and the athletic department wants everybody to leave happy.
I come out with wet hair and my bag on my shoulder, already looking for the side doors.
Kylie comes straight across the lobby with the popcorn bag rolled up under her arm and her cheeks still pink from the cold in there, and she doesn’t slow down. She grabs my arm with both hands and shakes it. “That hit. Nash. I screamed. Paige screamed. That guy flew.”
I glance down at her.
“His helmet came off.” She’s still holding my arm, her hand around my bicep, squeezing it while she talks, up on her toes. “Okay, and then the other thing. When you got in trouble. What even happened there?”
“I took a penalty.”
“I know, but what—”
“They scored on it.”
I look over her head at the doors. There’s a kid running circles around one of the tables. A woman in a Woodbury jacket is taking a picture of three guys with her phone held out too far. An old lady sits in a folding chair by the trophy case with her purse in her lap.
“Okay,” Kylie says. She’s watching me now instead of talking at me. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Because you’re being kind of—”
“I’m fine, Kylie.”
She blinks, lets go of my arm, and steps back half a step. “Okay,” she says easily. “Hockey face. Got it.”
I look down at her. She’s decided I’m keyed up from the game.
She’s decided it’s adrenaline, or the penalty, or the coach, because those are all reasonable things for it to be, and she’s a good person, so she gives it to me.
She bumps my arm with her shoulder, playful.
I don’t say anything, and I don’t look at her.
I can smell the popcorn. I want her to go away, and I want her to stay exactly where she is.
Then a hand lands flat on my back. “Good recovery,” Dad says, smiling and proud. “That draw at the end, that’s a coach telling you something.” He taps my chest with the back of his hand. “He didn’t send the other guy, your third-line guy. He sent you.”
“Yeah.”
“And the hit was perfect. Feet, shoulder, puck-side. That’s the one.” He nods a couple of times, then stops nodding. “But he got you once.”
“Yeah.”
“You gave him a power play. That’s what he was out there for, bud.” His voice is warm. “He goes back to the bench a hero, you go sit in a box, your team’s down one, and your coach is looking at you instead of at him.”
“Yeah.”
“Tonight it’s an exhibition, so it’s a lesson.” He shrugs, easy. “Can’t do that when it counts.”
Kylie is still right here with the popcorn under her arm, listening, being polite, smiling at him, because this looks like a nice father-son moment.
“Yeah,” I say again.
“Hey.” He grabs the back of my neck the way he did at the rail. “I’m not on you. You hear me? I drove five hours, and I’d have driven ten.”
Then he pulls me in. It’s a real hug with both arms, one up over my shoulders and the other around my back.
His hand lands low and flat on my left side.
Right on it. Through my shirt, I can feel his palm, the smooth, tight middle of it, pressed against the smooth, tight stretch of me.
Two scars from the same November Saturday, touching.
Everything in me goes still at once. My lungs quit.
My hands stop halfway to coming around him and just hang there, and my whole body does the thing it learned a long time ago, which is nothing.
Don’t move. Don’t pull away. Don’t make a face.
Stand exactly where you are, let it happen, and it’ll be over faster.
Eighteen years old, six foot three, and my body still knows the drill before I do.
He doesn’t know. He isn’t thinking about it. It isn’t in the room for him at all. He’s a father who drove five hours and got a room at the place with the waffle thing, hugging his kid in a lobby. He pats me twice, right there.
“Proud of you, bud,” he says into my ear, and he means it, but it’s empty to me.
My side burns. I focus on letting out a breath before I turn blue.
That stretch of skin doesn’t feel like the rest of me.
It mostly stopped hurting a couple of years ago, but I still remember what it felt like.
I make myself lift my arm and put my hand on his back and pat him twice, because that’s what you do.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He lets go. And over his shoulder, three feet away, there’s Kylie with her popcorn under her arm, watching the two of us, smiling at me like it’s the nicest thing she’s ever seen.