Page 109 of Cherry Picking

“Yeah.”

“I say it once, and then it is finished.” He points a gloved finger at my chest. “You made me look like a disaster. Five-one is not my score.”

“I’ll get you a shutout,” I promise.

“You are a winger; you cannot get me a shutout.” He pulls the headphones back up and walks off, and that’s Duval’s version of closure.

Hartwell finds me over at the skate rack. In New York, he’d put a hand on my shoulder and kept it moving. This morning, he stops and asks, “You good?”

“I’m here.”

“Not what I asked.”

I stand there holding a skate and think about a woman on a desert landing telling me she only gets me in fragments. In pieces from strangers.

“No,” I tell him. “But I’m working on it.”

Sam offers a single nod and lets the subject drop. But Augie, goddamn him, won’t come within ten feet of me for the rest of the morning.

In three seasons, I don’t think he’s ever once managed to pass my stall without delivering some absurd commentary. Today, he tapes his sticks four stalls down, his gaze fixed on the floor, behaving as if I’ve become invisible.

On the ice, the performance continues. He takes every rep with Fozzy and hugs the far boards during the transition drills. When Bellan calls for a bag skate, Augie stays two lines ahead of me the entire time, his back turned like a wall.

Once we’re finished, I catch him in the corridor outside the video room, away from the rest of the noise.

“Aug.”

He doesn’t even break stride.

“Augie.”

He stops, his spine going rigid. When he pivots to face me, he’s angrier than I’ve ever seen him. It’s a bizarre transformation for a man with a twice-broken nose and a permanent smirk. He’s the least serious human I know, but right now, he looks genuinely dangerous.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do the thing where you offer one sentence and act like we’re square.” He slams his water bottle onto a passing laundry cart to free his hands. “I’ve spent months asking if you’re okay. You tell me you’re good, and then you take your rage out on a kid who barely survived high school—”

“He’s twenty-two, Augie.”

“I don’t give a damn about his age,” he snaps, his voice scaling up. “You tell me you’re good. Every single time. And I believed you because I thought you’d find your way back eventually.”

“I know.”

“You know.” He lets out a sharp, humorless bark. “You let me sit next to you for four months just handing you beers. You can talk to me before things get physical. I’m supposed to be your friend. You have, what, two of those? It’s a short list, and I’m on it, and you didn’t use me once.”

The hallway goes dead quiet. In the room behind him, a sudden eruption of laughter sounds, bright and oblivious.

“My brother was fucking my fiancée,” I say.

Augie’s mouth snaps shut, his expression going blank.

“Two and a half years ago. I know you read the headlines, and for once, they’re true.” My voice feels thin and strange, but I don’t stop the momentum. “I found the evidence on his phone, and I cut him out, and then he died.”

“Briggs.”

“He got clean that same week. I found that out Saturday.” I stare at the wall over his shoulder. “He was an alcoholic, and I didn’t know. That’s how he and Ophelia found each other—because I wasn’t there for either of them.”