Page 77 of Puck the Coach's Son
He's staring at the ice with his mouth slightly open and tears, real ones, small, from overwhelm, shining along his lower lashes. A teammate to his left says something to the guy further down about the penalty kill and doesn't notice.
I lean back against the boards.
“Your line's up next shift,” I say.
He blinks at the ice.
“I can't.”
“You can.”
“Mad.”
I set my glove back over the knee of his pants like nothing happened.
“You can. You will. You're going to walk to that door. You're going to skate your line. You're going to come back and sit down. And I'm going to sit here and think about what I just did to you.”
He breathes.
Then he says, very quiet, “Okay.”
I watch him hop the boards ninety seconds later with his helmet back on and his gloves on and I want to do this every fucking game for the rest of my career.
We win 4–1 on Phoenix's empty-netter and nobody on our bench looks at me and Paul hasn't said a single word to me since the second period. I like that. He's saving it.
Horn goes. Handshake line. I skate through it like a normal person. I don't punch 44. I don't even look at him. I want him to spend the next year of his life wondering why.
We file off the ice into the tunnel.
Theo is in front of me in the line filing off. The back of his neck is that exact shade of pink. I walk so close behind him that our skates almost touch. Nobody notices. The chirps and the laughter of a team that just won are loud enough to hide anything.
At the mouth of the tunnel there's a hallway that forks off to the video room, the visiting trainer's office, and a storage closet I've been in exactly once, in October, when I came in at six in the morning to get a replacement stick out of a crate. I know the door isn't locked. I know nobody on our staff is going to be down there for at least another fifteen minutes.
I grab Theo's sleeve.
“Left.”
“What?”
“Go left. Now.”
He goes left.
I shove him through the door ahead of me and shut it behind us and turn the lock.
Storage closet. Eight feet by ten. Metal shelves along one wall. Boxes of tape, a crate of pucks, two spare sticks in the corner. Bare bulb. Concrete floor. The door is the kind with a piece of frosted glass at eye level, so if anybody comes down the hall, I'll see the shadow before they try the handle.
Theo is breathing hard in the middle of the floor.
“On your knees.”
“Mad—I just—I came on the bench?—”
“I didn't.”
He goes to his knees.
He's still in full gear from the waist up. The skates make him lurch when he drops. He catches himself on one hand on my thigh. I let him. I don't help him.
