Page 10 of Breakaway
"The return verdict?"
"Yes, with reservations. The reservations are the toast."
He closes the laptop and leans against the counter and drinks his coffee. The balcony door is cracked and the air has the weight of early morning before the heat sets in. His feet are bare on the tile.
"I found a cubano place on Brickell," he says. "Supposed to be serious."
"How serious?"
"The menu is four items. That's usually a sign." He takes another sip of his coffee.
"Four items is confidence or bankruptcy."
"Exactly. We should find out which."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow." He finishes his coffee, rinses the mug, sets it in the sink. "Morning skate at nine?"
"Nine-fifteen. They pushed it."
"Good. I want to work on my release point. It's been off since Seattle."
"Your release point is fine."
"My release point is a six-eight."
"You're rating your own release point now?"
"Everything gets rated, Mercy. That's the system." He grins, using the nickname he’s picked up from the rest of the team. Then he takes his laptop off the counter and walks toward the guest room and the hallway is quiet after he is gone.
Morning skate is sharp. Coach runs the lines through a neutral-zone breakout for twenty minutes and Paulson and the kid and I cycle through the drill until the three of us stop thinking about it and it’s muscle memory. Paulson carries the puck up the left wall. I cut across the middle. Berger reads the seam before it opens and is already there, stick flat, weight low, collecting the pass in stride. The whole sequence takes four seconds. Nobody says out loud that the twenty-two-year-old on his third week in this building is reading the play at the speed of the two guys who have been running this line for years.
He does it again on the next rep. Paulson chips the puck off the boards and I'm trailing the play and Berger picks up the chip, looks left, looks right, and puts the puck on my tape without looking back. The pass is flat and clean and arrives where my stick is going to be, not where it was. I don't have to adjust. I don't have to slow down. The puck is just there.
"Kid sees the ice," Paulson says to me at the bench, toweling off his neck. "How long has he been doing that?"
"Since he got here."
"He's reading you before you commit. That's not a rookie thing."
"No. Though technically he’s not a rookie now."
Paulson watches Berger take a wrister from the circle. The release is quick and the puck goes high glove and the goalie gets a piece of it but has to work. "His release point is better than a six-eight," Paulson says.
"I know."
"He knows too. He's sandbagging the rating so you'll argue with him about it."
I don't answer that. I watch Berger take another wrister and the release is the same, quick and high and clean. What I won’t say to Paulson is that in my fifteen years, I’ve never had a winger set me up with the puck so perfectly. Like the pass already knew where I was going.
The apartment is quiet that afternoon when Berger comes through the living room around six. I'm reading on the couch. He has his phone in his hand and one earbud out, a grey t-shirt and shorts on.
"My sister Sina called," he says. He drops onto the far end of the couch and pulls one leg up under him. "She's getting married in the summer."
"Yeah? Where?"
"Bern. The whole family. She wanted to make sure I'd come back for it."
