Chapter 4 Lundy
My father’s house has two of everything. That is what happens when a man coaches for twenty years and my mother is not allowed to buy a third couch. Nobody said anything about a second guest room, a second refrigerator, or an entire second house at the bottom of the yard.
The second house is why the Murrays are coming.
Five of them, on the road trip Murray has been threatening the group chat with since the playoffs started.
He called last week and asked if we knew a hotel near the Chicago area that could survive his children.
I said we know a guest house. I heard myself say it, the we arriving before I’d approved it, and my mother made a sound from the kitchen like a point being scored.
Five weeks ago my team beat my father’s team in this city, in Game Seven, for the Stanley Cup. Now I drink coffee in his kitchen with the goalie who did it.
Nobody talks about this. It sits at the table with us like a guest who eats a lot.
My father is good at it. He has been a professional about hard rooms since before I was born.
He treats Jules the way he treats promising film.
Attention, and a notebook he thinks nobody sees.
My mother is better than good at it. She had Jules sorted within a day, which I could have warned him about.
By the second morning she’d stopped offering him things and started placing them, which is her way of saying I see you.
The morning after we arrived, she caught me alone at the counter. My mother is small and precise. She spent a career as a ballerina learning to make stillness look easy. She looked up at me with her coffee held in both hands and said, “I called it in October.”
“Mom.”
“I said it in October. I told your father. He said, Marcy, he mentions a lot of teammates. I said, not like this one. Not the same.” She patted my arm on the way past, twice, the second one for emphasis. “You’ll want to give me some credit at the wedding.”
“Nobody said wedding.”
“I also said it in October,” she said, and went to fix the flowers.
The Murrays arrive in a van that is large enough for a small army and still needs cargo space on top.
Murray gets out first and shakes my hand and then my father’s, and there is a full second where decades of hockey stand in the driveway deciding what to be.
Murray has played fourteen years. My father coached against him for most of them.
Five weeks ago our team ended my father’s season on his own ice.
Also, Murray is a guest. Also, his kids are already out of the van.
“Karl,” Murray says.
“Kyle.” My father looks at the van, the roof thing on top of it sitting slightly crooked, the little girl marching a stuffed unicorn up the walk. “Good trip?”
“Long. Beautiful.”
“Long,” his wife adds as she walks over to us.
“Lawn’s in good shape,” Murray offers, which is true and also the whitest flag ever waved.
“Clay soil,” my father says. “You have to aerate.”
Murray nods slowly, the way you take a hard coaching point in front of your kids.
And that’s it. Two men who will not discuss the Cup Final, standing on a lawn, discussing the lawn. Both of them so polite it develops texture. Jules beside me watches them with the expression he gets studying a power play.
“They are being very strange,” he says, quietly.
“They’re being extremely normal about it. That’s what’s strange.”
The kids enter the conversation as kids do. Tyler is seven and comes in already narrating.
“This is the biggest yard I have ever personally seen,” he announces, to no one, to everyone.
Emma is five and introduces the unicorn to everyone individually, including my father, who shakes its hoof with the gravity of a man accepting an award.
“Brian gets scared in new houses,” Emma explains, presenting the unicorn for inspection.
“Actually, he’ll sleep in the big house tonight. ”
“Of course he will,” my mother says, accepting room assignments from a five-year-old like this house has always been run that way.
Charlie comes last. Twelve years old, arms folded, the practiced boredom kids wear when they’ve decided the trip isn’t allowed to be good. She surveys the yard, the guest house, the enormous man on the porch, and puts all of it away somewhere behind her face.
Dinner is loud. Eight people, two tables pushed together, my mother running plates and Murray’s wife, Laurie, telling the story of a motel that advertised a spa, which turned out to be a small above ground hot tub wedged between the ice machine and the dumpster.
“The website said oasis,” Laurie says, over the noise. “It said sanctuary.”
“It was warm,” Murray offers.
“It was between the ice machine and the dumpster, Kyle. The ice machine had a warning light. That was the ambience.”
My mother laughs so hard she has to set down the plates.
“Brian didn’t like the spa either,” Emma says, and the table accepts this as testimony.
My father asks Tyler about the trip and receives eleven minutes on trucks.
“The eighteen-wheelers have flames on them,” Tyler reports, somewhere in minute nine. “But that’s decoration. Not speed.”
“Noted,” my father says. Jules eats beside me, and when the noise crests he doesn’t leave, he just puts his knee against mine under the table, and I hand him the hot sauce before he asks. The whole way spicy. New policy. I’m still not over it.
“Do you know about weigh stations?” Tyler asks him.
“Tell me about weigh stations,” my father says, like a man opening film on a division rival, and Tyler inhales and starts detailing the fine points of said weigh stations.
“Tomorrow,” Murray says over dessert later, “we were thinking of going to a rink. Tyler wants to skate. Tyler has been falling down on purpose all summer and calling it training.”
“They’re tricks,” Tyler says.
“You’re right. They’re tricks,” Murray agrees.
“There’s the practice facility,” I say. “Twenty minutes from here and nobody using it.” I look at my dad, and he nods.
At the end of the table, Charlie moves her fork around her plate and says nothing, planning, I would bet money, to finagle her way out of it. Beside me, Jules is quiet in the specific way he gets before a start. Reading something the rest of us haven’t noticed yet.
After dinner, the kids get herded toward the guest house in relays.
Emma brings Brian back up the lawn at the last minute, because the big house was promised, and my mother tucks a unicorn into the good guest bed with complete seriousness.
Out on the porch, my father and Murray sit with beers and don’t talk for half an hour.
Two men, one lawn, all of June between them.
When Murray finally heads down the yard, my father calls after him.
“Aerator’s in the shed. I’ll show you in the morning.”
“Looking forward to it, Karl.”
In this family, that is a signed peace treaty.
Twice tonight I catch my father watching me cross the room.
Not the son check. The coach check, the one that reads strides.
The leg is fine, is a thing I would say if he asked, and it would be mostly true.
He doesn’t ask. He watches me carry a stack of plates one-handed and says nothing about any of it.
Then, later, passing behind my chair, he puts one hand on my shoulder.
He leaves it there for exactly as long as it takes to reach for the bread.
That’s the talk we haven’t had yet, traveling in its smallest available container.
We keep circling it, he and I. He said we’d talk when it stopped hurting. I know my father. It stopped hurting a while ago. Now it’s just waiting for a room quiet enough, and this week every room has a unicorn in it.
Later, brushing his teeth in my childhood bathroom, Jules says, “The girl.”
“Charlie.”
“She watches everything and pretends she saw nothing. She sat where she could see both doors.” He rinses his toothbrush. Sets it parallel to mine, adjusts it once. “Tomorrow I’m bringing the extra pads.”
He doesn’t explain. I don’t ask. Ten months of this man has taught me that his reads arrive before his reasons.
“Okay,” I say. “Bring the pads.”