Page 36 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

I say I understand, because I do, and because the correct response to Vera Lindqvist is always the shortest one.

At the door she says, “How’s his hip?”

I haven’t put the hip in a report. Vera doesn’t ask questions like that idly.

“Stiff in the mornings,” I say. “It doesn’t affect him after warmup.”

“Mm.” She has the glasses back on already. “Tell me on the day it does.”

The account structure I built for Kieran in November has four moving parts, with one soft place. I’ve known about the weakness since I built it.

The soft place is the licensing line.

Suze negotiates his contracts, equipment deals, and his one regional bank spot. She doesn’t touch small local licensing—there’s never been any, and the rep agreement carves it out as client business anyway. It’s a standard carve-out. It exists in half the agreements in this league. It’s there so a player can do a car dealership appearance in his hometown without four lawyers and a two-week delay.

At two o’clock on Monday afternoon, I sit in my office on the fourth floor beside the sewing-machine repair shop. My own bank account goes on one screen. Kieran’s account structure goes on the other.

I have two hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars in a retirement account I’ve contributed to since I was twenty-nine. I have sixty-two in savings and a little over nine in the operating account of a business with one client who doesn’t pay me.

I move forty thousand dollars.

It goes from savings into the Brandt Financial operating account. That afternoon, it moves into Kieran’s primary account under a description I type myself: LICENSING — HARBOR & MAIN CO. — Q1.

Harbor & Main is a real coffee roaster with two shops on the quay, plus a signature on a two-page agreement I’ll draw up properly if anybody ever asks for it. Their owner has met me once. She remembers a financial manager coming in for a flat white in December. He asked whether she would ever want an athlete’s face on a bag. She said yes, obviously, who wouldn’t. Then a man in a good coat paid for his coffee and left.

Forty thousand dollars against a debt of one point three eight million buys eleven days at the interest Vera charges.

I look at that number on the screen for a while.

Then I file the transfer, note it in the balance schedule, and write in my own notebook, on the line under the previous entry: 40,000 — mine. K doesn’t know. Don’t let him find it.

It’s the fourth entry in that notebook I couldn’t explain to the woman who employs me.

Tuesday, seven o’clock, Weyburn.

He has to leave at eight for the arena, which means I have an hour of standing in his kitchen going through the week with a man who doesn’t look at me while I do it.

He’s in the shower when I let myself in.

His jacket hangs over the chair back by the door. Canvas. Rained on once, dried on a radiator, still molded to his shoulders when he’s not inside it. I move it because the chair needs space for my bag.

The wallet is in the inside pocket.

I don’t go through his wallet. I’ve gone through four years of statements, every alert on three accounts, the medical claims, the flight dates, where he sleeps. I’ve never opened his wallet. That distinction means nothing to anyone but me.

It falls out onto the seat of the chair.

It falls open. The stub is folded in half, a corner standing proud, soft and furred at the crease from being handled since November. I’ve watched him take it out in a hospital lot, in this kitchen.

The shower is running.

I pick it up.

Saint Brigid’s visitor lot. Eleven thirteen p.m., late November, printed by a machine on the second-lowest level of a hospital parking structure while a man sat in a truck with his brother.

On the blank side, in blue ballpoint, in a hand that gets smaller as it goes down:

1,400,000