Page 62

She puts my card in the inside cover of her legal pad. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Brandt.”

They go on down the corridor. Priya says something. Yeardley answers; neither looks back. I stand outside a finance office in an arena with a woman’s card in my hand.

I don’t throw it away or put it in the file with the others.

I put it in my wallet, behind the card for the dentist, and I don’t decide anything at all.

Vera doesn’t call. She sends a car.

That’s new. Roth isn’t driving it; it’s a service.

“Sit down. Two things.” She has the glasses on. “The first is that the third of April is confirmed and priced. I’ve moved on it in four books. I would rather he didn’t have a spectacular week between now and then. If his hip is going to be a problem, I want to know Thursday, not Friday.”

“He’s fine.”

“The second is the twenty-fourth.”

I don’t say anything.

“April the twenty-fourth, at home, against Toronto,” she says, and turns her screen a few degrees. There’s a calendar on it, with three marked dates. “Same terms. That’s nine hundred thousand off his balance in seven weeks, which is a better year than he’ll have in the next four playing hockey, and you can put it to him in exactly those words if it helps.”

“You’ve put it in the schedule.”

“I put it in the schedule on Friday.” She doesn’t apologize for it.

“You haven’t asked him.”

“Marek, I’m not going to have the conversation you’re trying to start. He isn’t deciding; he’s participating. There’s a difference, and you used to be able to explain it to me.”

The heating ticks. Outside, a straddle carrier walks a container down a lane at four miles an hour. I’ve watched that machine do that for nine years, and I’ve never wondered where any of those boxes were going.

“I’ll tell him,” I say.

“When?”

“When it’s useful.”

“That,” Vera says, “is the first thing you’ve said since Christmas that sounded like you.”

She puts the glasses back on and goes to her screen. I’m at the door when she says, without looking up:

“There’s a shipping business on the ground floor of this building that turns over eleven million dollars a year and is entirely legitimate. I’m going to leave it to somebody in about six years. I’ve thought once or twice that it might be you.”

I stand with my hand on the door.

“That isn’t an offer,” she says. “I want to be clear, because you’re in a strange season. It’s a description of one of two futures that exist, and I’m telling you about it now because in three months it will be too late for me to bother.”

I let myself into his apartment at ten past midnight after the Vancouver game.

The lights are all on. His bag is in the middle of the hallway, dropped, not put down. His suit jacket is on the floor beside it. He’s sitting on the arm of the couch in his shirt with one shoe off and one shoe on.

“Hey,” he says.

“Don’t get up.”

“I wasn’t going to.” He tries to smile, and it doesn’t work at all. “I can’t.”

The hip has gone completely. He can’t bear weight through the left leg. He came up eight floors in an elevator, made it along the corridor to the couch, and stopped. He’s been sitting on the arm of it for forty minutes because sitting down properly means getting up again.