Page 67 of On His Mind

Tie. Bus. Hotel. A bag of chips out of a vending machine because the meal money’s for the guys who played. Bus. Tie.

Eleven games. My gear sits in the stall, dries out, and stops smelling like anything.

We lost in the first round of the conference tournament on a Saturday night in Ohio, four to two, and it wasn’t close in any way that matters.

They score, making it three-one, and the bench goes quiet in a way I’ve never heard. Not down. Finished. Stanley’s still yelling, but he’s yelling into a room that’s already emptying out. We pull Cole with two minutes left, and they hit the empty net from their own blue line, and the horn goes, and that’s the season.

That’s it. That’s how it ends. Not badly. Just on a Saturday, in Ohio, in front of a hundred people who don’t know our names.

Cole skates down to the far end alone and stands in his crease for maybe eight seconds with his mask up on his head, looking at nothing. Then he skates over and shakes the other goalie’s hand. Four years. Sixty-some starts. It ends with a puck going into an empty net from a hundred and eighty feet.

Nobody says anything for ten minutes. Coach Fuller says something short and true and leaves. Guys sit in full gear with their heads down and their gloves still on, because taking your gloves off means it’s over.

Stanley cries. The loudest man in this program sits in his stall in his jersey and cries into his hands. Benson sits down next to him and puts a hand on the back of his neck and says nothing. Rowan stares at the floor. Blue takes his skates off one lace at a time. And down at the end of the room, Cole takes his gear off for the last time. Nobody makes it a moment. He just undresses the way he has a hundred times, and this time when it’s off, it’s off, and there’s no drill tomorrow. He graduates college, and this is over for him. He sits in his shorts with his elbows on his knees, looking at his pads on the floor, for a long time.

I don’t move. I don’t say anything. I’m nineteen, and I’ve never once said the right thing in a room like this, and I know better than to try.

Cole finds me an hour later, outside the bus, in the chilly wind, while everyone’s loading bags.

He’s got a stick in his hand. Not his game stick — a paddle, taped, worn down to bare wood on the shaft where his glove sits. He holds it out to me handle first.

“Here.”

I look at it. “That’s yours.”

“It’s a stick, kid. I’ve got nine of them.” He shakes it once, impatient, and I take it, because he’s holding it out and Josh raised me not to leave a man’s hand hanging.

I’ve watched him play with this stick for seven months. Everything I know I stole off the end of it.

“Net’s yours next year,” he says.

That isn’t true. It isn’t remotely true. Hutch is a senior now. Hutch is the backup, which means next year Hutch is the starter, and every man standing in this parking lot knows it, including Cole, including me.

I look at him.

“I know what I said.” He pulls his coat closed. “I’ve watched you take shots at the bad end of the ice this whole season with nobody looking at you.” He glances back at the rink, then at me. “And that glove hand. You got something. So take the net or don’t. But you better know it’s coming for you.”

I stand there with his stick in my hand. There’s a thing you’re supposed to say here. Other people know it. It comes out of them without any effort at all, and I have never once been able to find it, not in nineteen years, not in fifteen houses, and I can’t find it now, in a parking lot in Ohio, holding the only thing anybody in hockey has ever handed me on purpose.

“Cole,” I manage.

“Yeah.”

That’s all I’ve got.

He looks at me for a second. Then he cuffs the side of my head, hard, the way you would a little brother, and he gets on the bus.

I stand out there in the cold holding his stick until the driver honks.

The seniors clean out their stalls on Tuesday. It takes about forty minutes, and it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever watched. They come in with trash bags. Not boxes.Trash bags.Four years of a man’s life comes out of a wooden stall, and it turns out most of it is tape. Three broken sticks he meant to fix. A wrist brace. A bottle of Advil. A photograph taped inside the wall so long that it comes off in two pieces. A mouthguard. A shirt he was superstitious about. Most of it goes in the bag. The bag goes in the dumpster behind the rink. Then the equipment guy comes down the row with a screwdriver and takes the nameplates off the hooks. Just takes them off. Four of them, four screws apiece, sixty seconds a man, and he stacks them in a milk crate and carries the crate out, and the wall above the stalls is bare wood with four clean rectangles where the varnish never faded. Cole watches him do it.

I carry three bags out to the dumpster because they’re heavy and I can’t stand still. Cole carries his own, and at the door, he holds it open for me with his shoulder, the way Blue does, and neither of us says a word.

By Wednesday, the new nameplates are going up. The freshmen coming in for summer skate will never know that the room was ever any different.

Finals are the last week of April, and when the grades post I read them four times.

3.9.