32
Apparently, “Already Ate” Was Wrong
Nash
Kylie: Rude.
Me: ?
I’m on the end of my bed at noon on a Sunday with my skates still hanging off my bag, and that question mark sits on my screen for four minutes, then eight, and then it’s one-fifteen and she still hasn’t answered it.
She asked if I wanted breakfast. I already had breakfast. We were on the ice at six-thirty, and I ate at nine with half the team, like every Sunday.
“What,” Rafe says.
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been looking at that phone like something’s fucking wrong.”
Koda is on the floor against Rafe’s bed with his shoes off. I put the phone face down on my knee. “If somebody asks if you ate, and you already ate, how is that rude?”
There’s a pause.
“Blondie?” Rafe says, shaking his head.
Koda lifts his head off the mattress. “Honestly, this shit is exhausting. Don’t text her back.”
“She beat me to it.”
He grabs my phone, finds it locked, groans, and hands it back. I get my bag, because we have film at two.
Film is in the room with the bad chairs and the projector that takes four minutes to warm up. There are twenty-six guys, a whiteboard, somebody’s bag of chips crinkling the whole time, and Mathers licking his fingers.
Berwyn does the good stuff first, which is how you know the bad stuff is coming.
Entries. The forecheck in the second. Mathers’s first pass, three clips in a row.
Rafe’s goal, which he makes us watch twice, and the second time, he pauses on Koda’s touch pass and says, “That’s a hockey play,” and Koda nods.
Then he says, “Kennebeck,” without looking away from the screen, and clicks, and there I am.
The whistle’s already gone. You can see everybody in the frame standing up out of their stance, their nineteen turning away with his mouth going, and then me, from the corner camera up high, putting two hands of stick into his back.
It looks worse than it felt. It looks like a guy losing his mind in front of a referee.
Berwyn lets it run. The arm going up, the nineteen’s little arms-out bow to the crowd, and me skating to the box past our bench while twenty-two guys don’t look at me.
Nobody in the room says a word.
“Fourteen seconds later, they score,” Berwyn says. He clicks back ten seconds and runs it again. The stick. The arm. “This guy right here is useless to me. I can’t use this guy.”
I sit with my elbows on my knees and watch it a third time. Then he clicks forward to the third period, the wall, their nineteen with his head down for a pass, and me putting him into the boards. Even on the bad projector, you can see the puck stay and me pick it up.
“Same guy,” Berwyn says. “Same amount of mad. Look at it.” He lets it run all the way through.
My head comes up, the flat pass to Koda, Koda’s touch, Rafe in the middle, the net.
“This one I can put on the ice with forty-six seconds left in a one-goal game. Same guy, twelve minutes apart. That’s the whole thing, boys.
Nobody’s asking anybody to be nice.” Then he moves on to the neutral zone.
I’m three rows back on the end, and I don’t turn around, because there’s no reason to. But Greeley is somewhere behind me in this room, hearing every word of it.
Dad picks me up at three to eat before he drives back.
He wants the diner on Route 9 with the laminated menus, because there’s one like it near every town we’ve ever lived in, and he’s never once walked past one.
Booth by the window. He orders a patty melt and coffee.
I get the double burger and a chocolate shake, and he says, “Get the onion rings,” so I get the onion rings.
He’s in a great mood. “That draw at the end,” he says, for the fourth time since last night. “Forty-six seconds, up one. He could’ve sent anybody.”
“He could’ve sent Greeley.”
“He didn’t send Greeley.” He points a fry at me. “You know what that is? That’s a coach telling the room something.”
The waitress refills his coffee. Somebody’s kid is losing it two booths down, and the mom is doing the bouncing thing.
He wants to know how much video they do, and whether the staff gives me clips of my own draws or I have to find them.
He tells me about a guy he played juniors with who ended up coaching in the OHL and never ran a proper faceoff drill in his life.
He asks whether Ridgemont’s D held or we just wore them out, and it’s a good question, and I answer it, and he nods and eats and says, “That’s what I thought from up there. ”
He asks about the girl from the rail.
“Kylie,” I say.
“She’s a pistol,” he says, happy about it. That’s all he says about her. He mops up ketchup with an onion ring, looks out the window at the lot, and says the drive back is going to be brutal with the construction on the interstate. Then he says, “Hey. The thing in the second period.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m just saying it once, and then I’m done.” He puts the onion ring down. “You’ve got to get that shit under control, bud. You can’t give a guy like that a free two minutes because he said something about your mother.”
I sit there and play with an onion ring.
An hour ago, my coach put me on a projector in front of everybody.
And now this man is sitting across from me in a booth with ketchup on his thumb, warmly telling me to control my temper, and the ketchup is on the thumb of a hand I’ve watched him flex in the cold every winter for three years because it won’t close right.
“Do you ever think about it?” I say.
He looks up. “Think about what?”
I almost laugh. “Seriously?”
“Nash.” He puts the cup down. “Think about what?”
“You’re telling me to control my temper.”
He goes very still. He knows exactly what I’m talking about now. It takes him about a second and a half, and then his face closes up in a way I’ve watched my whole life. “That’s not—”
“The brush pile,” I say.
“We’ve talked about this,” he says, in the low, calm, reasonable voice.
“No. You talked.”
“It was an accident, Nash. I told you to step back.”
“You told me to hold the can.”
“I told you to step back, and you didn’t, because you were fifteen and pissed off about the showcase, and you never listened to a goddamn thing I—”
“You told me to hold the can while you were yelling at me about the showcase, and then you took it out of my hands and poured it on a pile that was still going.”
His jaw sets. The waitress is coming down the aisle with the pot, and she looks at our table and turns around and goes back.
“Keep your voice down,” he says.
“I’m not loud.”
“You are.”
I look at my hands flat on the table on either side of a plate of onion rings. My ears are roaring. “Every time,” I say. “You say sorry, and every single time the story’s the same. You didn’t listen. You were difficult. You moved before I told you.”
“You were difficult.”
“I was a kid.”
“I put it out with my hands, Nash.” He holds them up off the table between us, palms out, the shiny middle of each one catching the light from the window. “With my hands. What else was I supposed to—”
“I know you did.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop telling it like I did it to myself.”
He puts his hands down. “I love you,” he says. “You know that. You’ve always known that.”
“You say that all the time.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Then what does it mean?” I lean in. “You say it every week. What does it actually mean? Because you say it, and then you tell the story however you want, and then you say it again.”
“Jesus Christ, Nash.”
“You don’t get to say that to me and then decide what happened to me.”
He’s up out of the booth with his wallet already out. “We’re not doing this in here.”
The parking lot is half full. A family gets out of a minivan two spots over, the dad carrying a car seat, the mom telling somebody to stop it. Dad goes to the truck, puts both hands flat on the hood, and stands there.
“I fucked up,” he says. “Okay? Is that what you need? I fucked up.”
“Yeah. You did.”
“And I’ve apologized. I’ve apologized to you more times than—” He turns around. “What else do you want from me, Nash?”
“I don’t fucking know,” I snap.
The minivan family looks over. The mom moves the kid to her other hip, and they go inside.
“You can’t carry this around forever,” Dad says. “You can’t. It’ll eat you alive. You’re eighteen, you’re playing college hockey, you’ve got everything in front of you, and at some point, you have to decide—”
I yank my shirt up. Not slow. Both hands, hem to armpit, hoodie and shirt twisted together in my fist, and I turn my left side into the light coming off the diner window and hold it there in a parking lot in the cold.
“Easy for you to fucking say.”
He stops talking.
It starts above my hip and climbs into my ribs, wider at the bottom where it went deepest. In daylight, it’s worse than under any kitchen light.
The skin is pale and shiny and pulled tight, with the diamond pattern from the graft pressed into it like somebody laid chicken wire on me and pushed.
In one place, it sinks, and there’s just less of me there than there should be.
It doesn’t tan. It doesn’t sweat. It doesn’t feel like the rest of my body.
In the summer, it sits whiter than everything around it, and when I’m cold, like right now, the edges go purple.
My dad looks at it. He’s seen the hospital.
He was there for the two weeks and the two grafts.
He’s the one who helped me into the compression garment every morning for months when I couldn’t get my arm up to do it myself.
What he has never done, not once in three years, is stand in front of his kid in daylight and look at what’s left.
His mouth opens. His eyes go down to his own hands, the palms, and then back up to my side, like he’s lining two things up.
“I have to look at this every day,” I say. “Every time I take a shower. I hide every time I change in the locker room. I keep a shirt on every time I’m with a girl, because I don’t want to have to explain what this is.” I let the shirt drop.