Page 56 of On His Mind

“Your French is amazing,” Rowan deadpans

“Day lay yooks kwee — what is this? What is he saying, Pers?”

“Put it down,” Rowan says from the stove.

“Kwee blur.” Stanley says it enormously, to the room. “Kwee. Blur.”

Benson takes the book off him mid-word and holds it out at arm’s length like a man reading a plaque. He does it slower. He gets three syllables in, and Stanley laughs.

“That’s not it either,” Stanley says.

Benson shrugs. “It’s exactly it.”

“It sounds like a man drowning.”

“You sound like a man drowning.”

Rowan leans over Benson’s shoulder, looks at the page for a second, and goes back to the eggs. I hold my hand out. Benson gives me the book. And then Stanley plants both elbows on the table and says, “Say something.”

They’re all looking at me now. Even Rowan, half turned from the stove with a spatula in his hand. Stanley’s face is wide open, delighted, waiting.

Say something in French.Everyone asks it eventually. Teachers. Caseworkers. Grown men in doorways of houses I’d been in eleven days. Say something.

My hand goes still on the cover. I look down at the page where they left it, and I read the line back to them the way it’s written, flat, not fast, the sentence about a man walking to the window in the morning to see what the weather’s doing.

Stanley comes out of his chair. He’s got both hands in his hair and he’s saying no over and over, at the ceiling, at Benson, at nobody. Benson is laughing so hard he has to put the tape down, and Rowan says something dry that gets buried under Stanley shouting that the goalie has been sitting at this table for six months fluent and hiding it, that this is the single greatest thing he has ever witnessed, that he needs me to say it again, that heneeds me to say it slower, that he needs me to insult Benson in French right now, immediately, as a favor to him.

I don’t smile. I close the book.

Blue doesn’t ask me for anything. He’s silent right next to me, and when I look at him, he goes back to his eggs.

“Say the pony thing,” Stanley says. “Say I could beat a pony in a fight.”

“No.”

“Say it in French, and I’ll never ask you anything again.”

“You’d ask him something else in eleven seconds,” Benson says.

“Don’t tell him that,” Stanley whispers.

I eat two plates. The book goes in my bag instead of back on the table. The whiteboard’s in the kitchen doorway on my way out. Somebody’s drawn a mustache on the O in No. I read all five rules, shift my bag on my shoulder, and go out into the cold.

Eleven minutes to the rink. My ears are burning by the third block, and I’m still thinking about a tin of tea, which is the stupidest thing I have ever spent a walk thinking about.

I’m the fourth one here. And my sweater’s hanging in the third stall. I stop just inside the door with my bag on my shoulder. White practice sweater, my number taped above the hook. Not the second. Hutch is two down, pale under the eyes but grinning, telling Cole about a week of throwing up so hard he pulled something in his ribs. Something goes through my chest, hot and fast, and then it’s gone. I sit down in the third stall and pull my pads on in the order Josh taught me. There are three nets out for warm-up. Cole takes the first. Hutch takes the second. I skate down to the third. I set up in the paint and bang my stick on both posts. Left, then right.

Dunne works with Cole. Then he brings Hutch back, watching his tracking, making sure the week off didn’t take anything out of him. He glances down my end twice. He doesn’t come over. I runevery drill he gives them, alone, with nobody feeding me pucks. I set my depth and hold it. I push post to post and try to make it a glide instead of a lunge, the way Cole does, and it’s closer than it was in September. Drop and recover. Drop and recover. My thighs burn through the second set, and I keep going, the way I kept going through ten thousand of these in a garage in Maine that nobody ever watched either.

Then it’s team drills, and they light me up. Every fourth rep comes down to the far net, and the guys who take it are the ones with something to prove. Some don’t go in. I read Stanley’s eyes and ignore every word they tell me and get across in time. He swears at the ceiling. Benson comes down and shows me exactly where it’s going, and I still can’t stop it. I quit chasing the pass. I let it get there. And once, late in the second set, a defenseman I barely know winds up at the top of the circle and puts one high on my glove side. It comes off his stick rising, and I know that height. I’ve spent years learning to get away from a thing coming at my head at that exact angle. I don’t move. My glove goes up, and the puck buries in the pocket. The sound rings in my head. I flip it out to the corner and set my feet.

Dunne’s got his back to me, running Hutch through a series at the near net. The guy who shot it is already skating back to the line. Next rep comes. I set my depth. At the water bottles, Cole knocks my pads with his stick on the way past.

“Hell of a period, kid.” He says it the way you’d call a game a good game.

“Thanks,” I say.

He takes his reps in the first net. I go back to the third one and finish practice, and nobody scores on me for the last twenty minutes. The freshmen pick up pucks. There are six of us this year. Blue’s already at it when I get to the far corner. We work the ice from opposite ends and meet in the middle, and when the buckets are full, the rest of the guys leave.