Page 51 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

I open it.

Outstanding: 1,048,000.00

Three hundred thousand dollars gone, exactly as she said. Not a payment, not a rearrangement, not a promise. At six o’clock, that balance still had three hundred thousand more on it. At eleven thirty, it doesn’t.

I look at it for a long time with the heater blowing.

Nine years of six thousand dollars a month. Nine years of every dollar going out the door the day it came in, and a woman in a camel-colored coat took more off it in eighteen minutes of a hockey game than I’ve moved in the whole of my adult life.

That’s what I’m worth. That’s the actual figure.

I should be sick. I keep waiting to be sick.

What I am is hungry and cold. My hip has gone solid from forty minutes of standing still in the third period. I want to be in a room with the only person alive who knows that the first goal wasn’t a screen.

I put the truck in gear.

I get to the ramp. The guy in the booth waves me through, says great game. I turn left onto the harbor road instead of right. I don’t have to think about it.

14

He’s on the landing at seven minutes to midnight, still in the suit.

His hair is wet. Half an inch of March rain has been coming down since the second period, and he’s walked from wherever he parked without doing his coat up.

“You won,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I step out of the doorway. He comes in and stops three feet inside. He doesn’t take the coat off. He stands in the middle of my front room in a wet overcoat, hands at his sides, rain ticking against the window. He doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t look at me.

I take the coat off him myself. He lets me. It’s heavy with water. I hang it over the radiator; the room starts to smell like wet wool.

“Have you eaten?” I ask. He shakes his head. “There’s soup.” He doesn’t answer. I turn toward the kitchen. The phone on the table lights up—a message arrived at nine. I read it upside down.

V: Well handled. Second one—the third of April, home. Same terms. Don’t tell him yet, or he’ll play worse for three weeks.

Three weeks out. Nineteen days.

He’s behind me, four feet away, in a room with one lamp on. I turn the phone face down on the table with two fingers and leave my hand on it for a second longer than I need to.

I could say it now. It’s one sentence. There’s another one, the third of April, she sent it while you were driving here.

He would take it standing in that spot with his hands at his sides. Then he would go and be sick, or he would say okay. Either way, the nineteen days between now and the third of April would be nineteen days of a man knowing.

That’s the reasoning. It’s sound. I used it in December on the brother, and it held then, too.

“Kieran.”

“Don’t.” He’s looking at the wall. “Don’t ask me how it went. Don’t tell me it was a screen. If you say the word screen I’m going to walk back out that door.”

“All right.”

“Beau tapped my pads.” His voice doesn’t change at all. “The kid who was in front of me came back to the crease at the stoppage and apologized. Twice. He put his hand on the net, said it was a hundred percent on him, then went out to win a faceoff. Nils told the room it wasn’t on his goaltender. Emil wrote down what I told him and said nobody’s ever said it like that. A guy in a booth in the garage waved me through, said great game.”

The refrigerator cycles on.

“Every single person in that building was kind to me tonight,” he says. “Every one.”