Page 43 of Across His Line

I don’t say anything.

“I’m not telling you not to be physical. Be physical. It’s part of why we’re interested.” He turns his water glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth. “But defensemen in this league aren’t going to give you the second chances college defensemen do. You lose your head for one shift, it ends up in the back of your net, and somebody in my job writes it down.”

It’s the most anybody has said to me about my own hockey in my entire life without my father in the middle of it. And it isn’t nice. And I find I don’t want it to be.

“Here’s what I can tell you,” he says. “I can’t tell you where you’ll go. Nobody can tell you that in November, and anybody who does is lying to you. But you’re making people come back. Guys who saw you last year and wrote you off are buying tickets again. You’re on boards now that you weren’t on in June.” He shrugs. “Keep doing what you’re doing, and by spring, people will have a much clearer idea where you fit.”

“And if somebody picks me,” I say. “Next summer.”

“Then they pick you. And you stay at Woodbury, and you keep playing college, and you keep getting better. They hold your rights while you’re a student. Nobody’s pulling you out of school.” He glances at my father for the first time, just briefly. “Getting drafted isn’t a contract. It’s a team saying it wants to keep watching you.”

Then he folds his hands on the table and looks at me.

“Do you want to play professionally, Rafferty?”

“Yes.”

I don’t even think about it. It’s out before he’s done with my name. It’s the first honest thing I’ve said all night, maybe all month, and I feel it go out of me, clean, like a puck coming off the blade exactly where you meant it.

Morley nods. That’s it. He doesn’t smile. He just nods like I gave the right answer to a question on a form and turns to say something to the waiter.

I sit with my hands on the tablecloth, and something opens up in my chest that I don’t have a name for. I know how this works. I’ve read all of it. Getting drafted doesn’t put a dime in your pocket. You sign later, if they want you, and the first deal is small by the standards of the people at this table, and maybe you spend a year or two riding buses in the minors before anybody lets you near an NHL rink. I know all that.

But it would be mine.

Somebody would look at what I can do, my hands and my legs and my shot, and decide it was worth something. Not my last name. Not my father’s phone calls. Not his friends who sign things. Me. A contract with my name on it and nobody else’s. A paycheck that doesn’t come from the firm. An apartment with a lease I signed, in some city I picked, with a key my father doesn’t have.

For eighteen years, every road I’ve been able to see has ended at the same desk, in the same building, with my father’s name on the door and my name going on it underneath.

And here’s one that doesn’t.

I can see myself at twenty-five. That’s what gets me. I’ve never been able to do that before without it looking like him. And for a second, sitting in a private room that smells like woodsmoke and money, I can see it. A locker room. A jersey. A life I made with my own two hands.

Then Morley’s phone buzzes, and he excuses himself and steps out into the hall, and my father leans back in his chair.

“Now you understand,” he says, “why missing one meaningless game was worth it.”

And just like that, it’s his. Whatever had opened in my chest a second ago closes, and I’m sitting in his club in his tie at his table, and the road I could see is a road he paved.

“They were already watching me,” I say.

“And now you’re having dinner with the man who runs their draft board.” He takes a sip of his wine. “You’re welcome to tell me the difference doesn’t matter.”

I can’t. He’s right, and so am I. Morley’s scouts were in the stands because of me. Morley’s sitting at this table because of him. And I’m never going to be able to pull those two things apart again, no matter how hard I try, because he made sure of it.

The one thing in my life that was mine, and he found a way to put his name on it, too.

The rest of the table fills in at seven-thirty.

It was never a dinner for three. I should have known. My father doesn’t waste a private room on one conversation. Couples come up the red staircase in twos, men my father golfs with and their wives in the kind of jewelry you only wear to rooms like this. The noise rises, the fire gets built up, and the waiters start moving around the table with bottles and their eyes on the floor.

Morley comes back in and sits where he was, and somebody asks him about the power play, and just like that, the most important conversation of my life becomes small talk.

The Ashbys come in last. Graham Ashby does something with private equity that my father respects, which means he does it better than my father would like. His wife has a laugh like a glass being tapped with a spoon. And their daughter comes in behind them in a black dress that probably cost more than everything in Tessa Canten’s closet, with her hair up and her shoulders back like she’s been carrying something on her head since she learned to walk.

“You remember Caroline,” my father says.

I remember Caroline. Summers at the lake. A tennis lesson when we were eleven. She’s a sophomore now at an Ivy League school. She sits next to me because somebody made a seating chart, and she smiles at me with very white teeth and asks about hockey in a voice that’s been trained to sound interested in anything.