24. Finn
Chapter twenty-four
Finn
We win game three in overtime and I don’t get back to the ranch until almost two, and she’s awake.
She’s not supposed to be. She’s got a program to run at dawn and every reason to be asleep, and instead she’s on her porch steps in the dark with a blanket around her shoulders and something turning behind her eyes she won’t hand me.
She didn’t know I was coming. I could’ve been another hour, could’ve stayed in the city.
That’s the tell. She’s not up for me. She’s up because whatever she’s carrying wouldn’t let her lie down, and I happened to drive into it.
She’s got two mugs going, anyway. I come up the walk still wired from the game, that overtime hum that doesn’t leave the body for hours, and somewhere between the truck and the bottom step it starts to drain out of me.
Just from the sight of her. My shoulders come down off my ears.
The knot in my chest that’s been clenched since the third period lets go a notch, then another, and by the time I lower myself onto the step below hers and lean back against her knees I’m breathing like a person again.
She hands me a mug without a word, and for a second the rest of it goes quiet.
“You scored,” she says. Not a question. She watches the games now. She won’t admit how much.
“In overtime.”
“I know when you scored. I was awake.” She says it into her mug like it costs her something to admit, which it does, everything costs her something to admit. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.”
I feel her almost laugh behind me, the little exhale of it in my hair, and I would trade the overtime goal and the whole series for more nights that end exactly like this, her knee against my shoulder blade and the second mug she poured for a man she didn’t know was coming.
It’s not the wanting; I had the wanting figured. It’s that you can get somewhere so good that the having of it starts to scare you, because now there’s a version of your life where you lose it, and you can see that version from here.
I’ve never had anything before that losing would cost me. That was the whole design. Now I’ve got this, and I catch myself, sitting on her steps at two in the morning, doing something I have never done in my life.
Planning.
Not out loud. Just in my own head, quiet, dangerous.
Next season. The place down the road from Vicente’s that’s been empty since spring.
Whether a guy could play in San Antonio and still be home most nights if he wanted it bad enough.
I run it like it’s allowed, like it’s a future I get to have, and I don’t notice until later that I’m doing exactly what she does, what I give her grief for, running numbers on a future like I can lock it down if I plan it careful enough.
She taught me to count the cost before I’m in it. She never taught me the other kind: the tallying of everything I’ve got now that I can’t stand to lose.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“Tired.”
“Liar.” But she doesn’t push. She’s got her own thing she’s not saying tonight, I can feel it sitting on her the way it’s sat on her for weeks now, and we’ve built this careful little country between us where I don’t ask about hers and she doesn’t ask about mine, and it works right up until the second you notice you’re both doing it.
I notice it tonight. I let it go tonight. That’s the arrangement.
The series is 2–1 and the walls are coming in from every side, and the strange thing is they’re coming in because it’s good, not despite it.
We win, and the wins mean deeper playoffs, and deeper playoffs mean bigger crowds and national windows and a camera on me every shift, which means the one bad night I can’t afford has a bigger and bigger stage to happen on.
Success is its own kind of trap for a guy like me.
The better it goes the more there is to lose in a single ejection, and everybody in that building would love to be the guy who finally makes O’Sullivan drop them, because dropping the reformed enforcer in a playoff game is a highlight that follows you for a career.
And Roman’s still not sold.
He’s civil now. We’re fine on the ice, we’re a machine on the ice.
But I catch him watching me the way you watch a space heater you left on, and after game three, in the tunnel, all he says is, “Three more rounds of you not swinging,” flat, like a countdown, and keeps walking.
Not cruel. Just true. He’s not wrong that it’s a long way to go and I’m one bad shift from proving him right.
I don’t get to argue it. I get to keep giving him the number, game after game, and hope the number talks him into it eventually, because words won’t.
I earned the room in the fall. I’m learning you don’t earn it once. You re-earn it every single night, with every guy who’s got a reason to doubt, and Roman’s got a good one.
I go to the barn before I sleep, because it’s become my routine, and Bonita comes to the rail for me now the way she didn’t use to, which Catalina noticed before I did and mentioned once, dry, like it meant something to her that the mare decided about me.
She’s heavier than she was. The vet came today and I was there for it, watched him run a hand down her side with a face I didn’t like, heard him say the word breech and the word watch her and tell Catalina to call the second anything changed.
Catalina went still the way she goes still when something matters and she doesn’t want you to see it matter.
“She’ll be alright,” I said after, because I wanted it to be true.
“Maybe.” Catalina looked at the mare a long time and didn’t say the rest of it, whatever the rest of it was. Just maybe, and let it sit.
I didn’t have an answer for the way she said it.
I stand at the rail now and Bonita brings her head level with mine and looks at me, both eyes, close, and I see myself in them, small and bent in the dark of them, the whole wild animal of me looking back out.
Then she sets that heavy head against my chest, a thousand pounds that could put me through the boards without a reason, choosing not to.
That’s the only kind of safe there is with her.
The chosen kind. She could change her mind in a breath and we both know it, and standing here counting on her not to is the closest thing to trust I’ve got.
There’s a lot I could lose right now. I keep finding new items on the list. That’s what having things does. It writes you a list.
She walks me back toward the bunkhouse near three, which she shouldn’t.
I’m a placement. I sleep in the bunk with the other men the county sent her, and every minute she spends out here in the dark walking me halfway home is a minute that could sink us both if the wrong headlights came up the drive and wondered why.
We both know it. We do it anyway, stopping in the black yard halfway between her porch and my bunk, standing too long, because neither of us wants to be the one who says goodnight first.
I want to tell her about the empty place down the road and next season and the plan I’m not allowed to have. I want to hand her the whole reckless future I’ve been building in my head all night.
I don’t. Handing her a future is a bet, and I don’t know yet if she’s holding the same cards, and there’s a splinter of a night a few weeks back, a phone on a counter, a wall that came up, that I’ve never quite pulled out.
We papered it. We’re good. I leave it there, where it’s safe, and I don’t go looking under it.
I lie down in a bunk with the best season of my life going and a hundred yards of dark between me and the best thing that ever happened to me, and I count everything I’ve got now instead of everything it costs.
The list keeps getting longer. Her coffee on a cold step. The place down the road. A mare who leans on me. A room I have to win back one skeptic at a time. A future I’m not allowed to plan and can’t stop planning.
I used to keep everything movable. Nothing nailed down, nothing I couldn’t walk away from inside an hour, because a thing you can’t lose is a thing nobody can use against you. That’s how I survived, the whole way up. Own nothing. Need no one. Stay light enough to leave.
And I tore it all down without noticing, one nailed-down good thing at a time, a mare and a woman and a place and a season, until I’m lying here in a bunk I can’t walk away from, counting everything I’ve got like a man who forgot the whole reason he used to travel light.
I fall asleep before I finish the total. It’s the last easy night I get for a while, and the only mercy in it is that I don’t know that yet.