Page 47 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

He doesn’t sit down. He stands in the middle of my front room in a coat he hasn’t taken off, and he looks at the window.

“Does a rebound count?”

I’ve known this question was coming since her office on Friday. I’ve run every version of the conversation in the car, the shower, lying on top of the covers beside him. I have an answer ready: don’t ask me that.

“No,” I say. “A rebound is a scramble. Three men in the paint, a stick in the crease, a review. That’s film somebody watches four times.”

“Okay.”

“You want a point shot.” My voice comes out level. It comes out exactly the way it does when I’m telling a man which of his accounts to close first. “From the blue line, through traffic, glove side, high. Don’t reach for it. Get the shoulder to it a fraction late and let it go past the elbow. Glove side high off a point shot is the most common goal in this sport, and no coach in the building will look at it twice.”

He’s very still.

“Early,” I say. “Inside eight minutes, while it’s nothing to nothing. If you wait until you’re up a goal, it looks like a man taking a night off. If it’s level, it’s a bad bounce in a tie game and the room forgets it by the second intermission.”

“Glove side high.”

“Off a point shot. Not a wrist shot from the circle; they’ll ask why you weren’t square. And Kieran.” I make myself say the rest. “Stop everything else. Everything. If you let in a second one, it stops being a bad bounce. It becomes a pattern. Patterns get looked at.”

He nods once, at the window.

Then he says, “You said you’d find another way.”

“I did say that.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

He takes off his coat, puts it on the chair. Then he comes over to stand in front of me. He puts his hand flat on my chest, as he did in his own kitchen in February. This time, he leaves it there. I cover the back of his hand with mine, hold it against my shirt.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

“You’re at the tunnel tomorrow,” he says. Not a question. “Not upstairs. I want to know where you are.”

“I’ll be at the tunnel.”

13

Iwake up at nine.

That’s the first surprise. Seven hours straight in my own bed, for the first time since Vancouver. I get up. The hip complains for forty seconds, then surrenders. I make eggs and eat all of them.

Morning skate is optional, and I go. I take shots for twenty minutes and I’m sharp, which I can tell inside four pucks. Everything is early. Everything is square. On the drive home, I get every light on Corliss and there are kids on the outdoor sheet at eleven in the morning on a school day, four of them, one net. I sit at the light and watch them until it changes.

Then I sleep two hours, like always before a home game. Wake. Shower. Suit. Nothing different. Nothing difficult.

Left wrist. Then right, mirrored, same order: thumb anchor first, three passes up, the last one flat.

The tape lies flat on the first try. I sit with my hands on my knees looking at it for a while, because I’d assumed it wouldn’t.

The room is normal. It looks exactly as it did on Saturday. There’s a stereo going that belongs to whoever won the last game. Beau is in his stall in shorts and a towel arguing with a defenseman about a truck. One of the young guys is asleep on the floor under the tape shelf with his hood up, which he does before every game.

Pittsburgh tonight. Second-place team, third of a road trip, and a goaltender playing his fourth in six days.

I go out for warmup at ten past six.

The building fills from the corners in. The ice is new and it smells like a cold room in a hardware store. I stand at the far end taking shots for eight minutes. I feel completely, entirely fine.