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“I got him with the hips.”

“You used to get guys with the stick.”

“I used to have knees too. You want to work through the whole list, or is there a destination.”

“I’m just saying it’s a veteran move.” He drinks my water and hands me back the empty bottle. That’s his idea of a gift. “It’s a good move. It’s a move a guy makes when he can’t do the other one.”

“Correct. I’ve got about nine of those left and then I’m coaching.”

“You’d be a terrible coach.”

“I’d be a magnificent coach. I’d be beloved.”

“You’d be fired in November.”

“By a man who never played. That’s the dream, Brick. That’s how you know you’ve arrived.”

Morrison laughs down the bench, and Sully turns around to tell us the period isn’t over. It is. The whole exchange goes into nobody’s file.

Mack is two spots down with his helmet off and his elbows on his knees, watching the ice, and he doesn’t say anything at all. That’s what Mack does now. He has laughed at everything I’ve said for eleven years, including the ones that weren’t funny and once at a funeral because I kept at him until he did. I’ve had about forty ideas about it and have been invited to share none of them.

I lean over and knock my glove against his shin pad on the way past him.

“Your turn to be interesting.”

“Working on it,” he says, which is three words more than I got out of him in Nashville.

Thursday morning Astrid has me on the treadmill at the annex with a camera on a tripod in front of me, running at a speed she picked without consulting me, and forty feet away on the ice Roman is explaining something to Cross at a volume you could hear from the parking lot.

“Thirty seconds. Do not reach with the right.”

“I’m not reaching with the right.”

“You are reaching with the right.”

“I’m reaching with the right the correct amount.”

The belt keeps going. She writes something down and doesn’t look up, and I spend a portion of the thirty seconds I have left thinking about the fact that she has her sleeves pushed up, in a building where I’m employed, where I have no business having an opinion about it.

Then, in the voice she uses for rep counts, she says:

“Anything on the off side this month?”

On my off side, sometimes, the bottom hand goes. Three weeks now. Twice in Dallas and once at home against Nashville, and one in Dallas lasted long enough that I had to put a man into the boards to cover for it. It’s not the shoulder. The shoulder is two years old and has a file and a program and a woman whose entire job is to be told about it. This one is three weeks old and it’s in the hand I hold the stick with.

I have not said it to Maren. I have not said it to Guerra. I have not said it to Mack, who would notice before anybody.

My stride doesn’t change. Eighteen years of not changing my stride.

“Off side’s fine.”

“Mm.”

“Why.”

“Because you take forty percent of your draws there and I would like to know what the hand is doing.” She comes around the front of the treadmill where the camera is and crouches down, and she watches my feet, and then she stands up and writes. “Twenty seconds.”

She lets it go.