Page 2 of Five Hole

I’ve been shaking that box next to my ear ever since.

“You could just tell me.” I keep it light, grin on, the good grin, the one that’s talked me out of penalty boxes and into a couple of beds. It has never landed on this man, which is honestly ninety percent of why I keep firing it at him. “Why does it matter? Tell me and I’ll fix it myself. I’ll never touch the shelf again. Best-behaved backup this conference has ever seen. Ask anybody. Ask the mop kid. He’s known me two years and has not had one complaint about me. Not one word. That’s a testimonial you can take to the bank.”

“You have never been well-behaved for a full minute in your life.”

Most words he’s put in a row for me all week. I about fall over. “Crisse, you’ve been counting my minutes, Wrobel? I’m touched. Truly.”

“I keep a list.”

“Of my minutes?”

“Of my problems. You are near the top.”

I put a hand over my heart. “Top of a Wrobel list, câlisse. Day one. Guys train years for that.”

“To be lower.”

It lands. On me. Clean, right up the middle. I have to fight not to laugh at the man insulting me. He picks up the chest protector and checks a strap that doesn’t need checking, and I keep talking, because talking’s what I do when the other guy won’t. It’s a reflex. Practically a diagnosis.

“You know what I think?” I lean a hip on the end of his stall and I can feel him hate it. He hates it in his shoulders. “I think you could put that glove back from all the way over there without even looking. I think you know where every piece of this lives, down to the last hair. So it’s not that you can’t reach it. It’s that you can’t stand it sitting wrong for as long as it takes me to say sorry.” I tilt my head. “Am I warm? Tell me I’m warm.”

His hands go still on the strap. Just for a breath. Then they move again, and he sets the chest protector down square in its spot without once looking at me. I’ve been around him long enough. The not-looking is the loudest thing he owns.

He stands. He isn’t fast, exactly. He crosses the room slow and certain, no hurry in it, no stopping it either, and then he’s close. Close enough I catch the cold coming off him, a guy who’s been sitting in a walk-in cooler of a room since before the lights came up. He lifts the glove off the wrong side and sets it back where it lives. The correction is so precise it’s almost gentle. Like he’s straightening a wing on something small.

“It matters,” he says, “because it matters.”

Then he looks at me. Straight up out of himself. There and gone.

And in the there-and-gone, something gives. High up, near the top of him. A window I hadn’t found. The light moves behind it once. Then the blind drops, it’s shut, and he’s stone again.

But I saw it. I saw it.

He goes back to the shelf like I already left the room.

I get my bag. I find my stall, three down from his, and I set my speaker where the speaker goes. I sit there with my pulse in my ears while the room fills. Guys trickle in, gear bags drop, the ordinary noise of a team waking up after a summer apart. Skate guards clatter into the bin. Somebody swears at a knot in a lace. Rocco Rizzo comes through and thumps my shoulder without a word, which from Rocco is a benediction. He drops onto the bench down the row to tape a stick he already taped yesterday.

Vinh flops down next to me. No gear yet, just here to be here. He steals the corner of the tape off my knee.

“You went and bugged Casimir already.” Not a question. “It’s the first day, Fortin. You couldn’t give the man one first day?”

“I said hello.”

“You said hello.” He grins. He’s got a way of grinning that makes you feel caught even when he’s the one who brought it up. “You moved his glove. Don’t tell me you didn’t move his glove. You’ve got the face of a man who moved a glove.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You’ve got several. That’s the problem.” He grins wider. “You know he’s the reason we got through the conference semi. You know that.”

“I know it better than anybody in this building. I had the best seat for it.” I hear it land a little too sharp, so I roll it back with a shrug. “The bench. Great view. He’s a wall. A guy’s allowed to admire a wall.”

Vinh looks at me a second past comfortable. He came up through figure skating, that one, and he clocks things the rest of us miss. Weight, edges, where a body’s going before it goes there. Right now he’s got all of it pointed at me and I don’t love it.

“Sure,” he says finally, easy, letting me off the hook because that’s just how Vinh is. “Admire the wall.” He peels the rest of my tape off, sticks it to my visor, and he’s gone before I can get him back.

Then the room is loud and ordinary again, guys and gear and a story about a boat nobody will ever finish building. I sit there with tape on my visor and my heart finally coming down out of my throat, and I think: there. That’s the gap. Never the glove. The glove was only ever the doorbell. The gap is the look he didn’t mean to hand me. I’m going to find every window this man has ever bricked over. And I’m going to put my face to the glass until he lets me in or throws something at my head.

This is the year I take his net.