Page 12
I should get in my truck. My bag is on my shoulder, the strap cutting in. I’m standing here in a concrete garage at midnight, and I’m not moving.
“Twenty-one shots,” he says. “You didn’t have much to do.”
“You watched it?”
“I have visibility on your calendar.” His face gives nothing away. “That was the arrangement.”
“That’s not the same as watching the game.”
He doesn’t answer that. He looks at the concrete for a second, then back at me. Whatever almost showed on his face is gone.
Up close, he’s four inches shorter than me, broader through the chest. A knuckle on his right hand sits crooked from an old break. He smells like cold wool and coffee. His coat is too light for a garage in late November.
I haven’t had a conversation this long with anyone other than my brother in a year.
Then he says, “I need your brother’s address, and I’d rather ask you than get it another way. The house, not the yard.”
The strap cuts into my shoulder. Somewhere above us, a car starts and pulls out.
“You’ve got it already. You’ve got everything. You had my accounts before you had my name.”
“I have a mailing address on a business filing. I want the house, from you, tonight.”
“Why does it matter that it’s from me?”
He doesn’t answer.
“You just said you’d stay away from him.”
“I did say that. I’ll hold it.” His brown eyes stay on mine. He barely blinks. “I still need the address.”
I give it to him.
4
The report goes up at 12:11 on Monday morning, as it has every Monday morning for nine years, from a laptop that’s never been connected to the network in this office.
Four headings, no prose. Vera reads numbers, not paragraphs. BALANCE. One million four hundred thousand. No movement. Nine thousand two hundred forty written off at contact, then initialed.
SCHEDULE. Home Tuesday, home Thursday, at Buffalo Saturday, at Pittsburgh Monday. Two back-to-backs in the following fourteen days. Morning skates at ten thirty, on the ice by nine when he’s home.
CONDITION. Sleeping. Eating twice a day, both times late. No treatment logged, no missed practice, no listing on the injury sheet.
PROJECTED. Four years and eleven months remaining on the contract at seven point two. Bonus structure attached, games-played thresholds highlighted. Endorsement income negligible and unlikely to grow, because the man won’t do an appearance.
I read it twice, then send it at eleven minutes past. Not ten. Not twelve. She set that time nine years ago without explaining it. I never asked why. I’ve come to believe the point is exactly that: a small, pointless rule held for a decade, telling her which people still do what they’re told when nobody is checking.
Then I close the laptop and sit in the dark of my own kitchen with my hands flat on the table.
Condition: sleeping.
I wrote that on the strength of nothing. I have no medical data, no report from the club. What I have is a phone that stopped generating four a.m. alerts on Thursday and a call from an equipment manager on Friday morning about a missed alarm, which arrived in my inbox as a calendar exception because I have visibility on his calendar.
He slept eleven hours and I wrote sleeping on a document that goes to a woman who bets on him.
On paper, that’s only bookkeeping. I’ve written worse about other men. For the restaurant owner in Sudbury, I wrote drinking again eleven Mondays in a row. I never gave it a second thought.
The difference is that I know why he slept. I turned off his bank alerts because I told myself a man with a dead phone battery or missed alarm can’t be reached, and being reachable is the point of my structure.
