Chapter 6 Lundy
The van pulls out on Saturday morning with a crooked roof box, five waving Murrays, and one unicorn belted into his own seat. The house exhales, suddenly twice its size.
The Cup arrives three hours later.
There is something about the sight of the case coming up my father’s driveway.
Every man who wins it thinks about the day it comes to his house.
I thought about it, when I was twenty-three and the future was a hallway of open doors.
I thought about it less in Seattle. By last summer I had stopped thinking about it at all, filed it with the other things that happen to other goalies.
Not once, in any version, did I imagine the day it came to me, it would come up this driveway.
My father’s team lost this Cup. My name is on it.
Both things are going to sit in his kitchen all afternoon.
The keeper carries it in. My mother has cleared the kitchen table, which has hosted forty years of Lundmark logistics and exactly zero trophies. He sets it down in the middle like a centerpiece from a strange wedding.
“One day,” the keeper says. “It travels in the case. No pools, no lakes.”
“We have a pond,” my mother says.
“No ponds.”
“It was a question of scale,” she says, “not intent,” and hands him coffee until he sits down and stops quoting rules.
My father is not in the room for this. He is in the yard, doing a thing to the grill that the grill doesn’t need, and I let him have it. There’s an order to today. I can feel the order the way Jules feels a play developing. My father in the yard is part of it.
The day is small on purpose. That’s the choice I made when the schedule came around, and Jules didn’t say anything, which is his highest form of agreement.
No rented hall. No hundred people. The Cup, this house, my mother’s kitchen, the man I love, and the coach who couldn’t crack him.
Some men take it home to a town. I took it home to a table.
My mother has her moment first. She thinks nobody sees it.
Everyone sees it. She waits until Jules and I are pretending to be busy with lunch.
She crosses to the table with the cloth she uses on the good glasses.
She wipes our fingerprints off the silver, slow, her ballerina posture doing all the talking.
She switched allegiances at every one of my games against my father and has never once apologized for it, and now there’s a version of this that doesn’t need switching.
When she catches me watching, she doesn’t stop polishing.
“October,” is all she says.
“So you’ve mentioned.”
“I’ll be mentioning it for years.”
Lunch happens around it. That’s what nobody tells you about a day with the Cup.
It just sits there while you eat, enormous and calm, like a relative everyone is being normal about.
Jules makes his half of the meal and I make mine.
I make his plate the way he actually eats now, the whole way, no mercy.
He eats it beside my mother without flinching.
She watches him do it with a face I recognize from every family dinner I have ever cooked.
Then my father comes in from the yard, wiping his hands, and looks at the Stanley Cup on his kitchen table.
The room does not hold its breath, because my mother and Jules have the sense to be elsewhere very casually. It’s just him and me and the Cup.
He stands over it the way he stands over film.
Reading. My father has spent a lifetime half a step from this trophy.
As a player, he touched the conference hardware once and never the big one.
As a coach he has now lost a Game Seven for it, at home, to a kid he taught to skate on a pond we are apparently not allowed to put it in.
He puts one hand flat on the bowl. Not a grip.
Just contact, the way you’d rest a hand on a horse.
He takes an envelope out of his shirt pocket and holds it out. “Here. Before your mother cries.”
I know what it is before I touch it. I’ve been getting them since I was fourteen.
After every game I’ve ever played, a note.
Two lines or ten, seldom soft, always exact.
The rebound control in the second. The glove position on the far-side rush.
Proud of you is in there a few times a year, carrying more of the page than the sentences around it.
He has never missed a game, and he has never once sent one before a game.
That line he drew the day I was drafted, so that nobody could ever say the coach was in the goalie’s head.
He broke that rule one time all year, in Montreal, and I kept that text like other people keep photographs.
There was no note after Game Seven. Five weeks of nothing. I didn’t say anything, because what do you say, you lost the Cup on home ice, where’s my homework?
The envelope has been opened and resealed at least twice. I unfold the page.
It’s a scouting report. Of course, it is.
My father watched his son’s team beat his team for the Stanley Cup and he took notes.
Atlanta’s forecheck, first period. The kill in the second, the seam they closed that his power play needed.
A line about M?kinen’s goal, professionally bitter.
And then, at the bottom, where the summary goes, where years of habit puts the verdict, three sentences that are not about systems.
I watched your leg come apart in Game 2 and I watched you dress for every game after it, and I have coached men who would not have done either. Your goalie sees the game the way you do. You played too well, both of you, and I have never in my life been prouder of anything.
“Dad.” The words are blurry on the page.
“It’s a scouting report,” he says, to the window. “Don’t make it a thing.”
“It’s a thing.”
“It’s July,” he says, which in this family means it’s allowed to be a thing in July.
And then my father, who is never surprised, who reads rooms for a living, looks at the Cup on his kitchen table and lets me see his face do something undefended for about two seconds.
I put my arms around him the way he’s hugged me since I was small enough to disappear in his coat.
Neither of us counts the seconds. The Cup sits there, calm, like it has seen ten thousand kitchens and knows exactly what it’s for.
The talk, when it comes later, fits in two lawn chairs.
“The leg,” he says. “How is it really doing?”
“It holds on the pushes. It complains on the recoveries.”
“Complains how often?”
“Mornings. Long drives. When it rains.”
“Get it imaged in August. Not September. By then, you’ll be polite about it.”
“I’m always polite about it.”
“That’s the problem I’m naming.”
He nods at the yard like the yard confirmed it. “The loss stopped hurting around the second week of July,” he says. “In case you were tracking.”
“I was tracking.”
“Next season.” He turns the beer bottle once in his hand. “Your backup started five games of a Cup Final and handed the net back clean. What do you do with that?”
“Share it on purpose this time.”
“Good answer.” A pause the length of a line change. “Took me longer than that to find mine.”
We sit like that or a while, neither of us filling the quiet.
“Montreal’s rebuilding,” he says. “Their front office has called me twice since the Final.” He turns the bottle again. “Your GM’s phone is going to ring all summer.”
“GMs phones ring every summer across the league.”
“Not like this year. Winning makes everybody expensive.”
And then he tips his beer toward the kitchen window, where Jules is at the table showing my mother something in the newspaper.
“Him,” my father says. “Walk me through him.”
So I do. Not the season. Him.
“He does the crossword in pen. He has an aquarium and feeds the fish on a schedule that has never once needed me. He needs quiet at times, and then other times he needs not quiet.” My father listens like film, no interruptions, full attention.
“He says things once. If you miss it, you don’t get it back. ”
“I threw everything I had at him,” he says finally. “Four different looks in Game Seven. He solved every one of them by the second shift.” He shakes his head. “Marry that.”
I stare at my dad. “Nobody said marry.”
“Your mother did.” He stands, collects both bottles, coach again. “When is his day?”
“August. Montreal. His mother has been planning it like a state visit since the parade in Atlanta.”
“Good,” my father says.
In the evening, the keeper comes to collect it, white gloves, the case, the forms. My mother touches the bowl once more before it goes. My father walks it to the van like a colleague.
“Take the highway,” he tells the keeper. “The surface streets are a war zone after seven.”
The keeper, a man who has driven this trophy through more summers than my father has coached, says he will take it under advisement. My father watches the van to the corner anyway, the full coach check, until the cargo is somebody else’s problem and heads inside.
And then it’s the two of us on the porch, the yard going blue. A crossword arrives from somewhere on Jules’s side of the bench.
“Seven across,” he says.
I don’t have it. He waits. He’d wait all night. Down the lawn, the guest house sits dark and tidy, holding the shape of a family that filled it. In a kitchen behind me there’s a scouting report I am going to keep until I die.
“Give me a hint,” I say.
“No.”
“One letter.”
“No,” says Jules, comfortable, and clicks his pen. “You have all night.” We stay out there until the porch light is the only light. Two goalies and no net, nothing coming that we can’t stop.