Page 108 of Full Contact

“Go,” he said. “They’re in the room. Mark told me ten minutes ago.”

“Walk down with me?”

I left my coat on the hook and joined him.

The room Mark reserved was at the end of the players’ corridor, past the trainers’ room and the door to the video suite. The corridor smelled of rubber matting and the menthol rub the trainers went through by the tub.

The room itself had a long table, a coffee machine nobody trusted, and a whiteboard with half a power-play diagram still on it. Even through the closed door, I could hear several people talking at once, and Pickle above all of them.

Heath stopped with his hand on the handle.

“They paid for their own flights,” he said.

“I know.”

“Hog doesn’t even like flying. He drove twelve hours.”

“I know. I met him. He was very nice to my cat.”

Heath laughed, briefly, and opened the door.

Pickle reached him before it was all the way open. He’d started saying something—“You look like a lawyer, what happened to—“ Heath grabbed him, and whatever Pickle had planned to say about the suit went into Heath’s shoulder. Heath held on. Pickle thumped him twice on the back and then just stood there being held.

Behind them, Hog stood. He held a bundle of yarn in both hands and waited his turn.

“Pickle,” somebody said from the back of the room. “You’re blocking the door. Some of us didn’t come a thousand miles just to stand in the hallway.”

“Eight hundred,” Pickle said, muffled.

“It felt like a thousand.”

Heath laughed into Pickle’s hair, then released him. His eyes had gone shiny, and he was grinning. He stepped through the doorway into a room full of people who had known him before anybody in Chicago did.

“Trier,” he said, over his shoulder. “Stay a minute. Meet everybody.”

I stayed.

Heath went around the room with a question saved for each person, as if he’d been carrying them for months. He asked Jake about his knee and Evan about the new coach, and he asked Juno how her episode about the bus had done.

Desrosiers was by the coffee machine looking like a man who’d landed at nine the night before and hadn’t slept much since. Heath shook his hand and asked about his parents in Montreal. Desrosiers said his mother had sent a tourtière, which was in the hotel refrigerator, and that if Heath didn’t come by for a piece before Sunday, she’d hear about it.

“She’ll hear about it either way,” Heath said. “She listens to Juno’s show.”

Rhett was a solid, quiet man with sawdust permanently ground into the knuckles of one hand. It made me think of Rafe’s boyfriend Niko. Rhett shook my hand and asked whether the cat had really let Hog touch her.

“She did. Then she made him keep doing it for twenty minutes.”

Eventually, Heath got to Hog.

Hog held out the bundle. “It’s finished. I brushed most of the dog off it.”

Heath unfolded it. It was a scarf, longer than he was tall, in wide alternating stripes: Storm blue, Ironhawks red, then blue again. He spread a section between both hands and ran his thumb across the stitches. A short pale hair caught the light on one of the red stripes.

“Most of the dog,” Hog said again. “Not all of it.”

“You didn’t have to clean it.”

“It was covered.”