Page 23 of Puck the Coach's Son
Paul doesn't acknowledge the groan.
He turns. He walks to the door. I follow. I don't look back at the bar. I don't look back at the door to the alley. I don't look for Maddox. I can still feel Maddox's hand on my chest. If I look for Maddox in the room my face will do something my face can't do in front of my father, so I look at the floor and I follow my father out.
The car is the family car. The car he drove from our old city to this one, with me in the passenger seat and a U-Haul trailing.
I get in.
He shuts his door.
He doesn't start the engine.
The silence goes for a minute that feels longer. I've been counting my breaths. In four, hold seven, out eight. I've done the cycle three times. He hasn't spoken.
“Theo.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
His face isn't angry. His face is disappointed, which is worse. Disappointed is the face he has trained me with for twenty years. Disappointed is the face I will die to avoid.
“What was that?”
“I'm sorry, Dad.”
He doesn't blink. He waits.
“I asked what it was.”
I swallow. My throat clicks.
“The team wanted to have a drink. I didn't know there was going to be a?—”
I stop because my mouth almost saida fight.I almost said the wordfight.If I sayfight,he'll ask whose fight, and that leads to the rest of it, and the rest of it is a thing I can't give him tonight or ever.
“A what,” he says.
“An incident. Between the players. I didn't know there would be one.”
He watches me.
I watch the steering wheel.
He starts the engine.
He doesn't talk on the drive. He doesn't need to.
The quiet is the lecture. The quiet is worse than the lecture. The quiet is him letting me hear every word I didn't say on the sidewalk outside the bar, every word I'm not saying in the car, every version of the truth I'm keeping from him and that he's trained to detect even when I'm not speaking.
I watch the streetlights go by. I count them. I get to forty and stop.
My jeans are tight.
I'm furious about my jeans.
I'm furious that my body won't stand down.
