Chapter Two
SAINT
The oatmeal was steel-cut, with cinnamon and one sliced banana, the way my grandfather made it.
Olle used to say a goalie should eat food that takes patience, because the position is nothing else.
He said it in Swedish, standing over a pot in a kitchen in Duluth, and he has been dead two summers, and I still hear it every morning at the exact moment the water starts to move.
I ate. Then I picked up the phone.
Four point one million views.
I sat with that number for a while. Four point one million people had watched me tape a wrist. I have made saves that physiotherapists use as cautionary tales, and my most viewed clip on this earth was me kneeling on home ice mumbling at a social media manager while she offered me her backup wrist.
The group chat had 214 unread messages and a new name. It used to be called CHUPAS. Mason had renamed it at 11:52 p.m.
Mason: welcome everyone to SAINT’S WEDDING PLANNING COMMITTEE Mason: first agenda item.
the tape. did we all see the tape Pickle: i’ve watched it nine times.
it’s better than church Mason: the little TAB he folded.
the TAB, bud Noa: I tape shoulders for a living and even I felt something Mason: doc if you felt something get in line, the internet is already planning the venue Pickle: what’s a hashtag concordance Mason: it means #SaintAndSunshine is trending in four countries, rook Mason: saint we know you’re reading this.
the read receipt is on. you forgot to turn it off in 2023 and we’ve never told you
I typed one word, “no,” deleted it, and put the phone face down, which in the chat’s economy was a full confession.
Here is what none of them knew, because I had never said it, because saying things is how they get taken: I did not sign in Austin for the money.
Two better teams called that summer. I signed with an expansion franchise in a desert because the Texas School for the Deaf is on South Congress Avenue, and my brother boards there, and Theo is sixteen, and he has moved schools four times in his life, and I watched what the fourth one cost him, and there will not be a fifth.
That’s the whole contract. Everything else is print.
So when my phone rang mid-morning and the screen said RICH ABERNATHY, GM, I answered already knowing the shape of it. Rich had spent two seasons saying the word “relocation” the way other men say “biopsy.”
“Lindell! Lars. Saint. Big guy.” Three names meant he wanted something. “You’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Four million views, Lars. Do you know what our previous record was? Chuy falling off the Zamboni. Nine hundred thousand, and half of those were people worried about the man in the suit. Can you come in? Eleven o’clock. Nothing bad. Nothing bad at all. Wear something.”
“I generally do.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Rich, who had not heard me, and hung up.
I finished the oatmeal standing at the counter, because Olle also said a man should sit down to eat, and some mornings I disobey him in small ways just to prove I can, and it never once works. The bowl went in the rack. The day resumed its shape.
Practice first. Optional skate, which I never treated as optional, because Olle’s rituals do not know the word.
Pipes on arrival, stick tap, twice each, left post first because the left post is older.
You laugh. Everything in a rink has an age if you pay attention.
I talked to them quietly while I stretched, in Swedish, because it’s between us, and Tuna came out to supervise.
Tuna was the rink cat. Orange, one ear folded like a page someone meant to come back to, no known origin.
Facilities said she came with the building, which was impossible, because the building was two years old.
She walked the ice during optional skates with the entitlement of a league official and she had, for reasons I did not accept, chosen me.
She sat behind my net. I told her repeatedly that this was a professional environment. She heard me the way cats hear.
“Your girlfriend’s here,” Mason called from the blue line, and I let in the next shot five-hole out of pure distraction, which he would be describing at my funeral.
“She’s a cat.”
“I meant the cat, bud. Why, who’d you think I meant?”
I gave him nothing. He skated off, delighted, a golden retriever who had learned to operate a group chat.
Eleven o’clock, Rich’s office. He had the clip up on his monitor, paused on the frame where I’m pressing the tape flat, and honestly, seeing it that size, I understood the internet a little.
The man in the picture did not look like he was performing first aid.
He looked like he was defusing something he’d decided to keep.
“Sit, sit.” Rich’s desk held three empty coffee cups and a printout of attendance figures he’d stopped hiding in December.
“Lars. I’m going to say some numbers. Ticket inquiries are up three hundred percent since last night.
Our follower count grew more in fourteen hours than in fourteen months.
There’s a woman in Ohio making friendship bracelets that say SAINT AND SUNSHINE and I want to be angry about the trademark but I ordered two. ”
“There’s nothing happening, Rich.”
“I know that.”
“Nothing is happening.”
“I hear you. Nobody’s saying anything is happening.
” He leaned in over the coffee cups. “Here’s what I’m asking.
The league reviews our viability numbers at the end of the season.
Attendance and engagement. You know what’s on the other side of those numbers.
Hartford, Lars. They have a building ready.
They have a logo. It’s a whale, which for an inland city takes confidence, but they have it. ”
I knew the stakes better than he did. He was afraid of losing a franchise.
I did the other math every time it came up: Hartford meant a trade request or a move, and a move meant Theo’s fifth school, midyear, or Theo staying behind with a brother suddenly two thousand miles away.
I did not say any of this. I never said any of this.
“How bad are the numbers, Rich. The real ones.”
He turned a printout around without a word, which from Rich was a symphony of restraint.
Twelfth in the league in attendance out of fourteen in our conference footprint.
Season-ticket renewals soft. The columns from last night sat next to them like a transplant next to a failing organ, and even I could read the chart.
He wasn’t wrong to be in this office sweating.
He was only wrong about how casual he could make the ask sound.
“So what do you want.”
“Nothing! Almost aggressively nothing.” He spread his hands. “Ms. Bloom is coming in tomorrow, we’ll talk details, all voluntary, all civilized. Today I only want to align on posture. Public posture.”
“Rich.”
“Don’t confirm anything. Don’t deny anything. Also, please God, don’t stop doing whatever this is.”
I drove south on Congress after, because it was Thursday, and Thursdays I ate lunch with Theo when his schedule allowed, and the school let me sign him out for an hour.
We got tacos from the truck he liked and sat on the tailgate, and he was sixteen, so the first thing he did was pull out his phone with a grin I distrusted on sight.
Theo eats the way he argues, fast, with total commitment, three salsas going at once. He was signing about his roommate’s disastrous crush and a history teacher who thought captions were optional before I had the bag open. Then he got to the reason his eyes had been shining since the parking lot.
He had the clip. Of course he had the clip.
He played it, watching my face instead of the screen, and signed, fast the way he only signs when he’s enjoying himself: You’re on my phone.
You’re on everyone’s phone. My roommate showed ME.
Do you understand how embarrassing that is, I had to pretend I don’t know you.
It was first aid, I signed back.
It was a wedding. He replayed the tape part, freeze-framed the tab, and pointed at it, then at me, and made a face of exaggerated, disgusted delight, the face our mother makes at golden retrievers. Who is she?
She works for the team. She runs the accounts.
She’s funny. I read her posts. The team is boring and she makes it funny. He ate half a taco in one bite, then, sneak attack, the way he does, signed with one hand: Olle would have laughed for a week.
He would have. That was the thing about the clip I hadn’t let myself go anywhere near.
The taping in it was Olle’s taping. The overlap, the thumb press, the tab folded so it doesn’t hurt coming off.
Every careful thing my hands know, a dead man taught them, and four million strangers had watched him do it without knowing who they were watching.
Before I dropped him back, Theo made me promise to send him “everything embarrassing, as it happens, in real time,” and I promised nothing, and he took that, correctly, as a yes.
He signed good luck with your girlfriend through the passenger window and ran for the doors before I could answer, which is the great tactical advantage of a sixteen-year-old: he always gets the last word by leaving.
I drove back north with the windows down.
Austin in January is a rumor about winter.
Seventy degrees, live music leaking out of a bar at two in the afternoon, and somewhere under the Congress Avenue Bridge a million bats slept through all of it, waiting for evening like they had a game-day routine of their own. I respected that about them.
The phone buzzed at a red light. The committee, in session: Mason: committee motion: mic him up every practice Pickle: seconded Noa: the wrist tape had better technique than your slapshot, captain Mason: hurtful. accurate. motion carries
The light went green. I put the phone face down, and somewhere around 38th Street it happened, embarrassing and involuntary, at the memory of a woman arguing with a ring light in front of nine professional athletes: I laughed.
Alone, in traffic, on a Thursday. Four million people had watched the wrong clip.
The taping was nothing. The wrong clip was whatever my face had been doing while she talked.