Page 99

“When what’s too much?”

“Talking. Being talked at. I’ve had four hours of company a day for eighteen months. About ninety minutes of it was worth having.” He turns the cup around. “I don’t know what I’m going to be like in a kitchen. That’s not a bid for anything. That’s just where I am.”

“You’ll be fine in a kitchen.”

“I might not be.”

“Then you won’t be,” I say. “You’ll tell me. We’ll deal with it. That was condition two, and it goes both ways.”

He looks over at me. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’ve had eighteen months, a suspension, and a brother who talks constantly,” I say. “On Friday, you’re coming to the rink.”

He looks out at the road.

“Am I?”

“You are,” I say.

Friday is Detroit at home.

I’ve been back since October. Nineteen starts. The first four were the worst hockey I’ve played since I was twenty. The fifth was fine. After the eighth, Nils said four words to me in a corridor. I haven’t needed anything since.

The room is different. Beau retired in the summer of the suspension year. He does the radio now and comes down before every home game to knock twice on the divider by my stall before delivering an appalling one-liner. Emil is in the other conference on a real contract. He texts me on the days I play. Last year he sent me a photograph of a black three-ring binder with a broken corner sitting on a hotel bed.

I tape my wrists in the same order—left first, thumb anchor, three passes, last one flat, and then the right, mirrored.

It comes out right the first time.

Marek is in section 214.

That’s where he sat in December of the first year with an eighty-eight-dollar ticket, bought on his own card, never claimed as an expense, never mentioned to me. I found out in a letter at a kitchen table in the March after he went in.

Tonight the ticket cost him ninety-four dollars. He paid for it with money from a job keeping accounts for a heating and plumbing outfit out of a storefront on Corliss Street. That’s what a man with a federal record and no license gets. He stood at the box office window on Wednesday and bought the ticket himself.

I’ve never looked into the crowd in my life.

I look up at 214 during the anthem. Seeing him there catches me off guard for one second. Not panic. Not debt. I close my glove hand around the top of my stick and keep it there until the anthem ends.

He’s standing with his coat over one arm. His hands are at his sides. He’s not looking at the flag, either.

The first period is bad for eleven minutes, and then it’s not.

They come at us in waves early because we’re seven points out and they can smell it. I get a piece of a two-on-one with the blocker. The puck hits the crossbar and goes out. After that, my hands come down from my shoulders, where they’ve lived for the first ten minutes of every game since I came back.

People say you never get a lost year back. They’re right about the legs. They’re wrong about the rest. What I have now that I didn’t have at twenty-seven is perspective: a puck coming at my head at ninety miles an hour isn’t the most frightening event of the decade. It turns out that helps.

I block twenty-six shots.

One in the third, off a deflection at the top of the crease with a man on my back, is the best save I’ve made in four years. Three to one. The horn goes. The building gets louder than a team seven points out has earned.

I go last in the handshake line, because that’s what I do.

Afterward, there are eleven reporters. Two ask the question they still ask, in the polite version. I give them the answer I’ve given for sixteen months: I did what I did. The league dealt with it. I’m not going to make a story out of my own conduct for the benefit of anybody’s column.

Then I shower, get dressed, and come out of the players’ entrance at half past eleven. He’s leaning against the front of the truck in the cold, hands in his pockets. He could have gone home after the horn. He could have waited somewhere warm. Instead, he’s exactly where I know to look for him, which turns out to matter more than I expected.

“Twenty-six,” he says.