2. Maren #2
He didn’t use notes. He stood at the front of the room with his hands in his pockets and said what he thought, which was that Phoenix had loved a hockey team once and lost it, and the loss still stung, and that he hadn’t bought this franchise to make money or to have something to put his name on.
He’d spent the better part of two decades as one of the best players in the world. He had both.
“I bought it because someone had to,” he said, “and because I believe this city will love it again if we give them something worth loving.” He swept the room.
“I played long enough to know the teams that meant something weren’t always the ones with the best rosters.
They were the ones where everybody in the building, players, staff, front office, and the guy who sharpens the skates, understood what they were building and gave a damn about it.
That’s what I’m asking from everyone in here. Not perfection. Just give a damn.”
He thanked us, said his door was open, and held eye contact a beat longer than the sentence required. I believed him.
I wrote give a damn in the margin of my notes and underlined it twice.
I sat between Dr. Reyes and Dom Caruso during the staff orientation which covered mostly stuff I already knew. Dr. Reyes was exactly what I’d hoped for in a team physician. Methodical, direct, a doctor who gave you information and trusted you to do something useful with it.
He’d been working with professional athletes for twelve years and spoke in assessments rather than opinions, which I respected immediately.
We talked through the injury prevention protocol for forty-five minutes over a lunch that neither of us was eating and by the end of it I could have sworn we’d been working alongside each other for a year.
Dom Caruso, the strength and conditioning director, had fifteen years of experience and the unflappable quality that came from having seen everything go wrong at least once and surviving it.
He was funny in a dry, offhand way that snuck up on me, and he knew every trap a new franchise could fall into because he’d watched other franchises fall into all of them.
I liked them both immediately and without reservation, which was not how first days always went.
Across the room at the players’ table, Ryan was talking to Griffin and Coach Calloway, all three skipping the preamble, past the point where they needed it.
I noticed, without quite deciding to, how the room arranged itself around him.
Not through any effort on his part. He had natural authority he didn’t need to announce.
I turned back to Dr. Reyes and gave the injury prevention protocol my full attention.
Mostly.
The team family skate was technically optional but mostly expected, and I had decided before I started this job I was going to show up to everything in the category of optional but good for your career, because I was building something here and that meant being present for the parts that didn’t show up on the official schedule if it was good for the team.
What I had not fully thought through, standing at the boards in rented skates that fit the way skates that weren’t your own always fit, was the part where I would have to get on the ice.
I grew up in Arizona. The opportunities to learn to ice skate had been limited.
Okay, I had not sought them out. Obviously my brother learned to skate and I supposed I could have as well, but I didn’t.
And now, I was twenty-seven years old and I worked for a professional ice hockey team and I could not skate, and I was going to have to live with that in a very public way in about thirty seconds.
Griffin appeared at my elbow wearing the expression I recognized from twenty-seven years of being his sister, the one that meant he’d thought of something I was going to find deeply unfunny and was savoring the run-up to it.
“Don’t,” I said.
“You could use one of those,” he said, nodding toward the far side of the rink where a small child was navigating the ice behind a plastic penguin skate aid, pushing it ahead of her with great concentration and zero shame, because she was four years old and had earned the right.
“I will end you.”
“It’s very helpful. No judgment.” His smirk was well on its way to fully formed. “I’m actually shocked you came.” He was skating around within three feet of me in jeans and his Sidewinders jersey, gloating. Fucker.
“Griffin.”
“The penguin is non-judgmental by nature—”
“I will tell Mom about Vancouver.”
He held up both hands immediately, caught and looking it, cornered by his own history.
I made it onto the ice by gripping the boards with both hands and moving sideways in increments, which was humiliating in a way I was going to have to deal with later, privately, with wine.
Around me, professional hockey players moved like the ice was something they’d been born on, which most of them effectively had been.
Partners and family members skated with varying degrees of confidence.
Even the kids were better than me. Every single one.
“Okay.” Cole Westbrook appeared in front of me, skating backward without thinking about it, blades as natural as walking, both hands extended. “Grab on.” His kind eyes were pleading and my resolve was waning. I did need help. But not from Griffin. And not from that fucking penguin.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re doing the thing where you shuffle sideways along the boards and call it skating.” He wiggled his fingers. “I’ve done this with my nieces. You’ll be moving in ten minutes.”
“This is not necessary.”
“I will never speak of this again, also I don’t care even a little. Grab my hands, Callahan. Come on. You look terrified, and you should be having fun.”
With a dramatic sigh, I grabbed his hands.
Cole Westbrook, underneath all the charm and the golden-boy grin, turned out to be a patient teacher in the real sense of it.
He continued to skate backward slowly, pulling me forward, talking me through it.
Weight distribution, where to keep my eyes, how you had to trust the blade even when every instinct screamed not to.
He didn’t make me feel like an idiot once, which I appreciated more than I could say out loud.
“There,” he said, when I made it ten feet without the boards. “See?”
“Please don’t make it a thing.”
“It’s a little bit of a thing.” He grinned. “You’re doing great.”
Griffin blew past us at full speed, close enough the wind off him moved my hair. “Looking good, Maren!” he called, already halfway back down the ice.
“I hate him,” I told Cole.
“Completely justified,” Cole agreed with a chuckle, pulling me forward another few feet. “Knees soft. Eyes up.”
I kept my eyes up. Ryan Lindqvist was at the far end of the rink.
I’d spotted him immediately, which was becoming a pattern.
I was always tracking where he was. I didn’t know.
He was hard to miss. He was crouched down to the level of a small boy, dark-haired, serious-faced, wearing a helmet with his hands out and his voice low.
The kid took three careful steps forward and Ryan’s whole face changed.
Not the restrained version I’d gotten in the corridor that morning, the almost-smile he kept on a tight leash.
This was different. The kid grabbed his sleeve and Ryan caught him with both hands before he could wobble or fall.
My heart rate kicked up and I started to wobble myself. Cole caught me before it became a situation.
“Eyes forward,” he said cheerfully.
I moved my eyes forward. My face was warm and it had nothing to do with the rink temperature and everything to do with a thirty-second lapse in professional judgment I was not going to repeat.
“Who’s the kid?” I asked, nodding in their direction.
“Dom’s son. Mateo. Five years old, extremely serious about hockey.” Cole glanced back over his shoulder. “Ryan’s been over there with him for twenty minutes. The kid asked to skate with him. He’s a big fan.”
So am I, kid. So am I.
Griffin texted me at six.
Griffin: Dinner? I want to debrief and I’m starving
Maren: Fine but I’m picking
Obviously, with a multi-million dollar contract, he was paying.
He took me to a place in Old Town Scottsdale I’d loved since college.
Small, good wine list, a patio with misters that worked.
A little pricey for me, but not for him.
Sister privilege. We got a table outside and ordered a bottle and Griffin leaned back in his chair and let the day leave his body in a long exhale.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me everything.”