Chapter Four
SAINT
Then I texted Rich, not her, one word: “No.”
He called within ninety seconds. I let it go to voicemail and went to the rink, because it was a game day minus one, and my day had a shape, and the shape did not include being a storyline.
Pipes, twice, left then right. Stretch. Tuna attended.
I told the posts, in Swedish, that the organization had lost its mind, and the posts kept their opinion to themselves, which is the quality I prize most in a post.
The no lasted until Saturday. I want that on the record.
It was a good no. It was structurally sound.
It survived Rich’s four voicemails, Mason’s committee (“Mason: sources say saint said no. Pickle: what sources. Mason: i stood near a different door”), and one long look from Coach Barb that contained an entire exit interview.
It did not survive breakfast with my brother.
Saturday mornings when we didn’t travel, I signed Theo out of the dorms and we went to Marge’s, a diner on South First with vinyl booths the color of old mustard and a waitress named Dot who had learned the sign for “pancakes” the second week and used it with pride and slightly wrong, so it came out closer to “ceiling,” and Theo never corrected her because he said ordering the ceiling was the best part of his week.
He was on the clip’s aftermath before the coffee landed.
So, he signed. The internet says you have a girlfriend. Mom says you have a girlfriend. Mom CALLED me. On video. Wearing her good cardigan. She thinks there’s going to be a wedding at a rink.
There’s no girlfriend. There might be an arrangement. I laid it out, because I do not lie to Theo, ever, that’s the oldest rule I have, older than the pipes. The graphs. The viability review. The word Hartford.
He stopped eating when I got to Hartford.
Sixteen years old, syrup on his wrist, and his hands went still the way they only did around that subject.
Four schools. He was seven the first move, ten the second, and the third one I wasn’t there for, and the fourth one I drove him to myself and sat in the parking lot after for one hour and made a decision about my career that no agent has ever been allowed to see the inside of.
Hartford is if the team fails, he signed, slow now. The team fails if nobody comes. The girl makes people come. He said it like arithmetic, because it was. Then, being sixteen: Also she’s funnier than you. I’d be trading up in a sister-in-law.
It would be fake.
Fine. A fake trade up. He stole a pancake off my plate. You want to know what I actually think?
I did not say yes. With Theo I have never had to.
I think you liked her before the internet told you to, he signed.
I watched the clip with the sound off, which is the only honest way to watch anything.
You tape your pads that way. You’ve never taped a person that way.
He shrugged and went back to the ceiling pancakes, having dismantled me in eleven seconds, which was off his usual pace. He was tired that week. Exams.
I texted her from the parking lot. “Meet me at Marge’s on South First tomorrow, ten. Bring the document. I have conditions.”
She replied in four seconds. I had started timing it, which I filed under things I was not examining.
Junie: CONDITIONS. he has CONDITIONS. bringing the document, a red pen, and a witness. Saint: no witness. Junie: fine, the pen negotiates alone.
She arrived Sunday at ten sharp in sunglasses the size of hubcaps, slid into the booth across from me, set down a laptop, a legal pad, and a printed copy of the Rulebook in a folder labeled TOP SECRET in glitter pen, and said, “I want it noted I’ve never done crimes in a diner before. Walk me through your demands, Lindell.”
“Not crimes. Terms.” I turned the folder around. “Rule 2. Two appearances a week is fine. Not on game days. Game days are mine, nothing moves on game days, and I don’t explain the schedule.”
“The oatmeal is safe. Noted.” She wrote it down. “I’ve seen the 4:40 oatmeal. Gus told me. The Zamboni drivers talk to me, Saint, I know everything in that building.”
“Rule 3.”
“Stands. Your face has made two children cry that I know of. I have footage.”
“The face is neutral.”
“The face is a border dispute.” She clicked her pen. “Counterproposal, I’ll teach you a camera smile. Small. Two degrees. We’ll call it the January thaw.”
“Rule 5. You banned a word I’ve never said.”
“Preventive medicine. You’d be amazed what fame does to a man’s vocabulary. I once watched a client go from ‘hello’ to ‘hey mama’ in six weeks of brand growth. I buried him professionally and I’d do it again.”
Dot came by. Junie ordered migas with corn tortillas, double avocado, no onions, hot sauce on the side, delivered at auctioneer speed, and then she ordered me the short stack without asking, “because you had a pancake situation going when I walked in, there’s syrup on the menu, this isn’t detective work.
” I let it stand. I don’t know why I let it stand. I let it stand.
“Rule 1 stays exactly as written,” she said before I could get there, pen aimed at my sternum. “Non-negotiable. The team knows the truth, start to finish. I’ve worked one job where everybody managed everybody, and I’d rather sell the Corolla and live in it.”
“Rule 1 was never in danger. Rule 1 is the only one I’d have written myself.”
She blinked, recalibrated, and made a small ceremonial checkmark. “Look at us. Aligned on ethics by 10:15. The fraud is going great.”
We went through the document line by line like two lawyers who hated the same merger.
She fought like she posted, fast and warm, three jokes deep with a real point buried in the second one.
I discovered that if I waited a full sentence before answering, she leaned in, and if I waited two, she narrowed her eyes, and by the third time I did it on purpose.
“Rule 6,” I said. “Termination. Add a line. Either of us can end it early. One word, no reasons given, no penalty.”
She looked at me over the sunglasses, which she’d pushed up into her hair, where they were losing a fight. “An ejector seat.”
“A door. Fake things need real doors. Otherwise they’re a different kind of thing.”
She wrote it down, and something passed across her face, one frame of it, gone before I could read the whole sentence. “That’s weirdly the most reassuring thing anyone’s said to me in this entire fiasco. Fine. Rule 6, subsection a, the door.” She typed. “Anything else, or do we sign in queso?”
“Logistics,” she said, flipping the legal pad.
“The team gets told Monday, per rule 1, before anything else goes out. I tell Barb myself, because if she hears it secondhand she’ll make me skate bag drills, and she’d be right to.
And Rich gets a version with fewer jokes, because he cries at ceremonies. ”
“He cried at Pickle’s first goal.”
“He cried at Chuy’s birthday, Saint. The mascot. He wept at a man in a suit’s birthday.” She wrote TELL EVERYONE, MONDAY, and underlined it twice. “See, this is why the fraud needed documentation.”
There was something else.
I’d known it since 7:03 the previous morning, reading Rule 7 with its load-bearing parenthetical, because you don’t post a guard on an empty room.
Somebody had taught her to write a rule like that.
I had a guess about who. Everyone in that building had a guess.
There was a podcast clip that lived in corners of the internet where our fans overlapped with people who enjoy watching a woman get described by a man who used to sign her paychecks, and I had listened to it once, eleven seconds of it, at home, and then I had gone to the rink on my day off and taken shooters for two hours until my hips complained, and I had not examined that either.
“Give me the laptop,” I said.
“Excuse me. This is my legal instrument.”
“One rule. Mine. Then we’re done.”
She spun it toward me, wary, chin on her fist. “If you type ‘no glitter pen’ I’m walking into traffic.”
I typed it under the rest, in her document, in her fraud, where she would see it every time she opened the file for the next three months.
Rule 9: Nobody makes Junie feel like a lot.
I did not explain it. I turned the laptop back around and signaled Dot for the check.
Junie read it. I watched her read it, because watching is the job.
She went still, the way the puck goes still in a glove, that half second where the whole building knows something got caught and safely held.
Her mouth opened, and I could see the volley loading, some joke that would put a coat of paint on the moment and roll it away, and then she closed her mouth and didn’t send it.
“There’s no rule 8,” is what she finally said, very quietly, not looking at me.
“Leave a gap. Fake things need real doors and room to grow.”
She let it stand. She didn’t ask what it meant, and I didn’t explain. Some clauses do their work in the dark.
Late in the negotiation she had knocked her own rulebook with a knuckle and said, “I know. I know. It’s a lot,” and laughed at herself in a way that was doing more jobs than one laugh should have to do, and flinched, small and fast, at her own word.
Nobody else would have caught it. I catch things for a living.
I see everything that is trying to get past me.
That night, at home, at 11:07 p.m., with the oatmeal pot drying on the rack, I opened the document one more time and added a rule of my own, under hers, no announcement, no explanation, tracked changes on because I have never once learned to turn them off.
Rule 9. Seven words. I meant every one of them, and I already knew rule 7 was going to be a problem, and I was not going to say so, possibly ever, because saying things is how they get taken.