Chapter Six
SAINT
I had assumed, in the way you assume the ice is fine until you’re through it, that honesty would be a stabilizing force.
The room would know the arrangement was fake, the room would nod, the room would move on to arguing about whose music played in the weight room, which was the room’s natural state.
Instead the room received the words “it’s a content arrangement, nothing is real, there are documented terms” the way a litter of golden retrievers receives a tennis ball launcher.
“Documented,” Mason said, hanging off his stall by one arm like laundry. “There’s a document. Pickle. There’s a DOCUMENT.”
“Can we see the document?”
“No,” I said.
“Is there a clause about us?”
“There’s a clause that says nobody lies to you. You’re living in the clause right now. This is the clause.”
“Incredible,” Mason said, wet-eyed. “He’s been here two years and I’ve heard him say maybe forty total words and eleven of them just now were about a fake dating contract. Junie Bloom is a miracle worker and I’m nominating her for the Masterton.”
Here is what I had failed to model: a locker room told a relationship is real will tease you about it for a week and then get bored.
A locker room told a relationship is fake, with terms, and a shared document, and a rule concerning pet names, has been handed a season-long craft project.
By Tuesday there was a betting board in the equipment room, hidden badly behind the skate sharpener, with a column of dates and dollar amounts and a heading someone had tried to disguise by writing FANTASY FOOTBALL over it in a different marker.
I did not look at what the dates meant. I looked at one date. I declined to log why.
By Wednesday, Pickle had stopped calling her Junie entirely and started calling her “ma’am, allegedly,” which he appeared to believe was legally protective.
Practice itself I could control, because practice has a shape, and I keep the shape.
Pipes, twice, left then right, because the left post is older and seniority matters.
Stretch in the same order Olle taught me, hips before groin, because “a goalie is a door and a door is only as good as its hinges.” Crease scraped my way, edges first. The shape held.
My save percentage, which is the only opinion I fully trust, had been climbing for two weeks, and I had a private theory about why that I was keeping in the same drawer as everything else from that drawer.
Tuna attended morning skate, as was her custom.
She was an orange cat with one folded ear and the entitlement of an original season ticket holder, and she had lived in the facilities office since before I signed, officially belonging to Gus, the Zamboni driver, in the sense that the moon officially belongs to whoever plants a flag on it.
For two years she had toured the room democratically.
Lately the tours had been ending in the same place.
That morning I came off the ice and she was in my stall.
Not visiting. In it. She had relocated the towel to her specifications, flattened a nest into my spare chest protector, and was sitting on the strap of my mask bag with her tail wrapped over her feet, looking at me the way Barb looks at a defenseman who has learned nothing from video.
“No,” I told her.
Tuna did not move. Cats and goalposts share a philosophy.
“That’s my stall. You have an office. You have a heated bed shaped like a taco, which the social media manager bought you, for content, which worked, so you’re already employed by this circus. There’s no room in the stall.”
She put one paw on my glove, deliberately, the way you put a coat on a chair at a crowded restaurant.
“He’s negotiating,” Pickle whispered, from three stalls down, holding his phone sideways.
“You film this and the mustache goes on the injury report.”
He lowered the phone. He did not delete anything, I knew that, and eleven minutes later the committee had a new chat wallpaper, and the wallpaper was my cat. Not my cat. The cat.
Mason: brEAKING: tuna has moved in with saint.
no prenup. bold Pickle: she chose him. the fraud has a cat now Noa: the cat is the most honest one in this whole arrangement Junie: the cat and i have that in common actually, we both got assigned to him by management Mason: ma’am (allegedly) that is the saddest cutest thing ever typed. HR is crying
I read that in the hallway outside the training room and stood there longer than the message required.
She did that. Volleyed something true straight through the middle of a joke, at speed, so that if you tried to catch the true part everyone could pretend you’d fumbled the joke.
It was excellent goaltending, from a person who claimed not to follow hockey until this job.
You could watch her do it all day and never once get a clean look at what she was protecting.
I had gotten one clean look, on a bench in January, for four minutes, and I thought about that more than a fake boyfriend strictly needed to.
The training room door was open, which is how I know what I know about the shoulder.
Mason was on the table with his shirt off and his arm out to the side, and Dr. Noa Reyes was taping his right shoulder with the specific efficiency of a woman who has done a thing five hundred times and resented it for four hundred of them.
Noa is the only person in the organization whose face has less range than mine, with the exception of one eyebrow, which does the work of an entire theater company.
“You said it was fine in October,” she was saying.
“It WAS fine in October.”
“It was fine in October the way the Alamo was fine in February.” She anchored a strip and ran it flat with two fingers, no wasted motion. “You’re compensating on the follow-through. I have video. I have so much video, Mason. I could screen a festival.”
“You watch film of my shoulder?”
“I watch film of my problems. You’re in most of it.” The eyebrow went up a millimeter. “Raise the arm. Stop. That, the face you just made, that’s the face we’re going to have a conversation about in April.”
“There’s no face. This is my face.”
“Your face is a liability report,” Noa said, and tore the tape with her teeth, and Mason grinned at the ceiling like a man who had won something, which as far as I could tell he had not.
I filed it. Goalies track loose details, and the captain’s shoulder was a loose detail with a bad sound in it, and he was playing thirty shifts a night for a franchise that could not afford to lose him or admit anything was wrong.
That was the whole team, that season. Everybody performing fine.
We were led by a coach who saw through all of it and a GM who cried at mascot birthdays, and now our marketing strategy was two people with matching wounds pretending to date, and somehow, and I say this with a Minnesotan’s suspicion of good news, it was working.
Junie came by at the end of practice to shoot what she called “b-roll” and what I called standing there while she pointed a phone at drills.
She was in the hubcap sunglasses even indoors, on her feet at the glass, laughing at something Gus said from the Zamboni, and every player on the ice skated eight percent harder in front of her camera, which she knew, and used, and would have denied under oath.
She caught me watching and mouthed “January thaw” and tapped the corner of her own mouth, two degrees.
I gave the camera nothing at all, zero degrees, an ice storm, and her laugh came through the glass anyway, and I heard it in a building full of pucks hitting boards, which acoustically should not have been possible, and there is no drawer deep enough for how easily I found it.
Per the terms, we had an appearance that Thursday, non-game day, a children’s hospital visit she’d arranged where I signed jerseys and she filmed me being examined by a seven-year-old with a toy stethoscope who declared, gravely, that my heart was “too slow,” and Junie said, “we know, buddy, we’re working on it,” to the seven-year-old, over my head, and I let that stand too.
I was letting a lot of things stand. The stall had a cat in it, the group chat had a wallpaper, my Thursday had a hospital in it, my save percentage had a slope on it, and the whole structure was fake, per a shared document, load-bearing rule and all.
Friday, after the optional skate, I was last off the ice, which is standard, because leaving the ice is part of the shape and the shape doesn’t rush.
Tuna sat in the tunnel mouth waiting, folded ear forward, and escorted me up the rubber mats like a tiny orange official.
In the room she went straight to the stall and I stood there holding my mask and we regarded each other.
“Fine,” I said. “The strap stays out. That’s the term. There’s one term.”
She stepped off the strap, curled onto the chest protector, and began to purr with her whole insufferable body, and I moved the strap, and that was that.
Relocation complete. I’d have to tell Gus.
Gus would take it fine. Gus had told Junie once, on camera, that Tuna “picks people who need supervising,” and the clip had done four hundred thousand views, and I had watched it twice, alone, which is one more time than never.
Coach Barb passed through the room while I was hanging gear, on her way from video to the coaches’ office, gum going, clipboard under one arm.
Barb does not stop walking to talk to you.
Stopping is for emergencies and anthem ceremonies.
She slowed, though, half a stride, level with my stall, and looked at the cat, and then at me, and then at neither of us, at the middle distance where coaches keep the standings.
“Whatever you two are faking,” she said, “your save percentage is up nine points. Keep faking.”
She was gone before I could decide which part of that to deny.
Tuna looked up at me from the chest protector with her flat orange judgment, and I sat down on the bench next to my own stall, evicted by an eight-pound cat, and said, quietly, in Swedish, the thing I would not have said in any language anybody in that building could read.
The cat kept my confidence. Cats and goalposts. It’s why we get along.