Page 85 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“Right.”

I have no standing to ask her anything else. I took a key out of a man’s hand nine days ago on a set of stairs and I didn’t let him finish a sentence.

“Thanks,” I say.

I walk back down the corridor, past the vending machine and the woman under the coat. I sit in the truck in a hospital parking lot two hours from my own bed. Both hands stay on the wheel. The engine stays off for a long time before I turn the key.

Priya has me in her office on Monday at eight in the morning.

The club lawyer isn’t here yet. That’s her first sentence.

“He’ll be here Wednesday. Nothing happens before that.”

She stands behind her desk with a folder she doesn’t open.

“The league has moved from a footage request to an interview request. They want to speak to you about the first periods of six games. They’ve asked for you specifically and two other people in this building whose names I’m not going to give you.” She puts her hands on the back of her chair. “The club has retained counsel for you. His name will be in an email by ten. Until he’s sitting beside you, you say nothing to anyone, in a corridor, on a phone, or at a bar, and that includes me.”

“Okay.”

“Do you understand what I’ve told you?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“Say it back to me.”

“I don’t talk to anybody until the lawyer’s here.”

“Good.” She sits down. “Kieran. When I asked you in a hallway three weeks ago if there was anything you wanted to say to me, I asked it once because that’s my policy. I want you to know that the policy is the only reason I haven’t asked you again.” She puts her glasses on and opens the folder. “That’s all.”

I sit at the kitchen table that night and I don’t put the big light on.

There’s a lamp in the corner, the harbor out the window, the cranes going green over on the far side, and a pot of tea I make and don’t drink. The bag of stock is still in the fridge behind me because I can’t make myself throw it away or use it.

I get a legal pad out of the drawer with the takeout menus in it.

Then I write it all down.

Every game. Every date. The eleventh of March, Pittsburgh, at home, 5:52 of the first, point shot, glove side high, three hundred thousand dollars off a balance of one million three hundred and forty-eight thousand. The third of April, Buffalo, at home, 8:04.

The previous March goes on its own line. I sit looking at it for a while before I write the rest.

The eleven thousand four hundred and six dollars of Fin’s notices. The four thousand one hundred and sixty for the movers. The forty thousand that came in as Harbor and Main but wasn’t Harbor and Main. What I told Suze on the phone in February, word for word, as near as I can get it. What Priya asked me in the hallway. What I said. The twenty-fourth of April, Toronto, first period, refused in a parking lot on a Wednesday at ten past four in front of a man who wrote it down.

It takes two hours and eleven pages. My handwriting goes to hell in the last three.

Twice, I have to stop and walk to the window. Neither time is because of the games. It’s the small entries. I have to write down that a screening defenseman skated across the blue line on the eleventh of March to apologize for being in my way. I told him no problem and tapped his shin pad with my stick.

No investigator on earth needs that. It goes on page seven anyway. Then I sit down again.

I don’t write Marek’s name. Not once. I write the manager, then the manager was instructed.

Then I take Frances Yeardley’s card out of the inside pocket of the coat on the back of the chair, where it’s been since the twenty-first of March with my own arithmetic on the back of it and a four circled at the bottom.

I turn it face up.

I put the card on top of the pad, square to the top edge. Then I sit in the dark kitchen looking at eleven pages of paper until the cranes go off at midnight. The card looks too small to hold what happens if I use it. I leave it there anyway. For once, I’m not solving the next hour. I’m only deciding what I’ll tell the truth about when morning comes. The tea has gone cold beside me. I don’t touch it.

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