Page 78 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

She doesn’t send me out while she copies them.

That’s the part I wouldn’t have predicted: a woman who’s spent twenty years making sure nobody’s in the room when the paperwork’s made keeps me in the chair for fifty minutes on a Monday afternoon. A girl from the outer office runs my own bank records through a machine on the credenza behind her—sheet by sheet, the lid going up and down.

The machine is slow. It makes a noise like a man clearing his throat.

“You’ll want to know what this is for,” Vera says, without looking up.

“No.”

She squares the retirement statement and hands it back to the girl. “It’s a file. It has your name on the tab. Everything in it is real, sourced from institutions that will confirm it, and none of it touches me. If you ever become a problem for this office, I wouldn’t need to invent one thing.”

“I understand the structure. I built it.”

“This is the best piece of work anybody has done for me in six years. It’s a forgery in your own hand, and it went to a registered player’s agent through an electronic system with a timestamp on it.” She puts it on the top of the pile. “You’ll keep your license. I have no use for a private financial manager who isn’t a private financial manager. You’ll keep the practice, the four clients, the office over the sewing shop, and I won’t put a hand on any of it.”

I sit with my hands on my knees.

“And?”

“You’ll stay away from him.”

There it is. It doesn’t come with a threat attached because it doesn’t need one. There’s a file on the credenza with my name on the tab.

“How far away?”

“Entirely. No visits, no calls, no messages, nothing through the brother, nothing through the agent. Leonard has the account. You’re not to be within a hundred yards of his building.”

“Yes.”

She stops with the glasses in her hand. “That was quick.”

“It’s the answer I’ve got.”

It’s the single most useful lie I’ve told in nine years, because a man who agrees in seven seconds is a man who’s stopped calculating. A man who’s stopped calculating is finished, and Vera Lindqvist has been reading finished men across that desk since before I was old enough to sign anything.

She puts the glasses back on. “Thank you, Marek.”

I get up. My chair goes back into the carpet dent it came out of. Out in the corridor, Roth is standing by the elevator with his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t press the button for me. I go down three floors alone.

Four days later, Kieran Doyle stands on my top step and puts his hand out for a key.

Tuesday.

There’s a bar on Fenner Street with two screens, a linoleum floor, and a woman behind the counter who’s never asked me a question. I’ve been going there since I was thirty-one. I sit at the end nearest the door with soda water. I haven’t had a drink since my father’s funeral.

The game is on the far screen with the sound off.

Ashgate at home against Vancouver, which doesn’t matter to anyone, because the playoff position was lost on Sunday in a building four hundred miles away while I was sitting in this same chair.

Emil Sandoval is in the crease.

He goes out for warmup with his mask up and does the routine: left post twice, right post twice. Then he skates the top of the circles once, comes back, and does it again because he’s forgotten which order he used. I’ve watched two hundred hours of a man doing that correctly. I know a copy when I see one.

Kieran is on the bench in a suit with a headset off one ear.

Not dressed. Not injured either, so far as any broadcast will say. In the second period a graphic says healthy scratch and stays up for six seconds while two men talk about the club wanting a look at their young goaltender with the season effectively finished.

He’s on the screen four times. Each time, he stands at the end of the bench with his arms folded, his face still. The fourth time, during a television timeout in the third, Emil comes down the bench. Kieran leans in with a hand on the back of his neck and says a few words. Emil nods twice, goes back down, and stops the next one.