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“I put you on the access list,” he says. “For the building. So you don’t have to do whatever you did the other night.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Front desk logs visitors by hand. It’s a paper book, and anybody can read it.” He stops. I can hear a rink behind him, the particular hollow scrapes and shouts of it, a whistle, somebody laughing a long way off. “So just sign in with them.”

“That’s sensible.”

“Yeah.”

Neither of us hangs up. It goes on longer than it should, four seconds, five, the rink sounds coming down the line. Then he says, “Saturday’s Nashville,” which I didn’t ask him about. The call ends.

I write it down.

I sit with the pen still in my hand, car-wash renewals in front of me. I should be entering this contact into the account log. This is the second time I’ve hesitated.

I open it. Contact made. Terms accepted. Resistance noted: none.

Next contact scheduled.

My thumb goes to Saturday before I decide anything. Saturday is Nashville. It’s a day he plays, and there’s no professional reason for me to be within a mile of that building on a night he’s at the rink.

I enter it anyway.

Then I put the phone face down on the car-wash renewals. I sit in my office with my hands flat on the desk. After a while, I get up to look out at the quay. A container ship comes in under tugs, lights on, moving so slowly it takes the whole hour to cross my window.

3

Morning practice is at ten thirty. I’m in the room at nine.

Nobody comments on it anymore. Six seasons ago, a sportswriter wrote four hundred words about it. He called it a ritual. It isn’t. He also called it discipline. That isn’t right, either. I get here early because ninety minutes is how long it takes to make the inside of my head quiet enough to stand in a net.

The room is cold and half the lights are on. I sit and I tape.

Left wrist first. Under the heel of the hand, twice around, up and across the back, twice around again, finish on the inside where I can see the end of it. Then the right, same, mirrored. If the end of the tape on the right doesn’t land where the end of the tape on the left landed, it comes off and I do it again.

It comes off twice this morning. The third one is right.

Emil arrives forty minutes later with his hood up, phone out, and both earbuds in. That’s his whole personality before ten. He sees me and takes the buds out.

“You’re here.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re always here.” He drops his bag, still talking. None of it requires an answer. He sat through three periods of tape last night. He has a theory about the Toronto second line. He wants to know if I saw the winger drop his shoulder before he shot high glove. I did. It’s why nothing went in.

“Show me on the ice,” I tell him.

So we go out first, twenty minutes before anyone else. I take his shots. He shoots hard, usually high. He wants to beat me more than he wants to be my friend. I stop nine and let three go by. A kid keeps shooting if you let him win sometimes.

“Again,” he says, after the ninth. “One more. High glove.”

“You’re telegraphing it.”

“With what?”

“Your back shoulder drops before your hands do.” I push the mask up. “You’re doing what the Toronto kid does. That’s why you saw it.”

He stands there with the puck in front of him, mouth open. I can see the lesson land. Then he skates back to the top of the circle to try again, with his shoulder still. He misses the net by four feet, then swears at the roof.