Page 76 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

I drive to the port district.

It’s a quarter past twelve on a Thursday and the light on the street is flat gray. The door buzzes before I hit the second step. He’s at the top of the stairs in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, no glasses on. He doesn’t have them in his hand, either.

“You’ve been to see her.”

“Two days,” I say. “You didn’t answer your phone for two days.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because she took me off your account on Monday afternoon and told me the terms of keeping my license,” he says. “I spent two days trying to find a way to tell you that I could live with. I didn’t find one.”

He steps back to let me in. I don’t go in.

I stand on the top step with one hand on the frame and the whole of the stairwell behind me smelling like wet stone.

“She showed me your accounts.”

“Yes.”

“The retirement. The car. The forty thousand.”

“Yes.”

“The hundred and ninety.” My voice catches on the number. “You stood in that office in March and offered her every dollar you had.”

“I did.”

“Then you came to my apartment on Monday. You told me not to let the goal in. You told me there was another way.”

I watch him. He doesn’t blink.

“Yes.”

“And when I asked you straight out if you were paying it, you said no.”

“I said no.” He’s not moving. He has both hands at his sides.

I hear the fridge going in the apartment behind him. That’s how quiet it is on this landing.

“The third game,” I say.

Nothing moves in his face, and nothing moves in mine.

“The twenty-fourth of April. Toronto. She told me in a room this morning like she was telling me about the weather.” I have to stop and start again. “When did you know?”

He doesn’t look away from me. I’ll give him that.

“Two weeks ago,” he says. “I’ve known for two weeks.”

I’m aware of my own hands.

They’re on the doorframe and on my hip. They’re level. There’s a bag of stock in a fridge four miles east of here that this man made out of a chicken he bought with his own money. There’s a bad barn two hours north, six acres around it, the sign gone green.

“Two weeks,” I say.

“Yes.”