Page 35 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

Then I sit back on my heels and let his wrist go. He’s against the doorframe, eyes shut, shirt out, head back.

I get up. My knees are wrecked; the hip screams. I brace a hand on the counter until it passes. Then I go to the sink, rinse my mouth, and wipe it with the back of my wrist.

He’s fixing his clothes. He does it without looking at his hands, still against the frame, still not fully upright. It takes him three tries to get the belt.

I’ve never seen his hands shake.

“Kieran,” he says. “Come here.”

I take my wallet out of my back pocket.

The stub is where it always is, folded once, soft at the crease now from eleven weeks of being folded and unfolded. Saint Brigid’s visitor lot, 11:13 p.m. 1,400,000 on the blank side in blue. 11,406 under it. A line under that.

I take the pen out of the drawer by the sink.

Under the line I write 4,160, and then I put a small mark beside it, a check.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“Nothing.”

He stands in the middle of my kitchen with his belt undone, shirt out. He looks wrecked and unguarded.

“Kieran, put that down and come here.”

I fold the stub in half and put it back in the wallet. The wallet goes into my pocket. I turn off the light over the stove.

In the dark, he’s a shape by the table with one hand half out. The only light comes from the green cranes across the water, climbing the wall behind him.

He doesn’t go for a while. I hear him pick up his coat and put it down again.

“You should go,” I say. “You’re back here at seven on Tuesday.”

10

Vera has the market pages up on the screen when I come in on Monday, which she doesn’t usually bother with in front of me.

“Sit down. Look at this.”

I sit. She turns the monitor forty degrees so I can see it, then puts on her glasses.

It’s a totals board for the Ashgate games out to the end of the month. The numbers under the goals lines are small and mean.

“Two eighty on the under against Vancouver,” she says. “One ninety against Ottawa. That’s not a market that thinks anything is uncertain. That’s a market that has read the same nine box scores I have and priced your goaltender into the ground.”

“He’s won six of seven.”

“Yes, which every clerk in this business can also see. I no longer need a man in his kitchen to tell me he’s sleeping badly, because he could sleep on a bench outside the arena and still stop thirty shots. Your Monday reports were worth eleven thousand in December. They were worth four in January. This week, they’re worth the cost of the coffee you drink writing them.”

Outside, the container yard keeps moving. I’ve spent nine winters being briefed in this room.

“The balance is current,” I say.

“The balance is one point three eight million dollars against a man whose usefulness to me has just become theoretical.” She sets the glasses on the desk between us, folded. “I don’t keep positions that only pay when I’m lucky, Marek. You know that about me. You’ve known it about me for nine years, and you’ve always been on the correct side of it.”

“What are you proposing?”

“I’m not proposing anything today. I’m showing you the room as it is.” She turns the monitor back. “Bring me something by month’s end, or I’ll stop asking what the account can do and start deciding what it will be. Those are different conversations.”