Page 22 of Yard Sale

“Not really.” Sitting up, I flopped forward until my head met the edge of the desk. “My life sucks right now.” He burst into laughter, and I immediately bristled. “I’m pouring my heart out here!”

“I know. I know, bud. And I get you, okay? I used hockey to run away from having to face the trauma my parents caused, which only turned into worse trauma because then I acquired a stalker.”

I knew it was more than that, of course. Micah had also dealt with the reputation of being the guy who fucked anything that moved, which turned out to be a lie he used to protect himself. The worst part about that for all of us was the fact that we’d given him so much shit about it over the years.

And the guilt was sometimes hard to sit with.

But Micah was a lot stronger than I was.

“Tiago?”

“Mm.”

“Do you want to quit hockey because your vision is going?”

It took me a long moment to answer him. “How many totally blind guys aren’t goalies?”

He was quiet, which meant he was counting because of course this fucker would know the answer. “Seven,” he finally said. “Three in Seattle, one in New York, two in Miami…” I could hear fingers drumming on wood. “Holtzmann just got traded to Dallas. So one in Dallas.”

“Yeah, out of what? A thousand?”

“Five-hundred and forty-six,” he corrected me. The pedantic little fuck. I think I was using the word right this time.

“I’m not going to ask you what percentage that is because you’re being annoyingly smart. But it’s a tiny percentage, and most of those guys didn’t lose all their light perception while they were active players.”

Micah let out a soft breath. “None of them did, bud. You’re in a tough spot because it would mean learning a whole new method of playing. Half the accommodations for D-men are sight-based. I get it.”

I suppose he did, though he also didn’t because Micah and his brother had both been born without eyes, so they’d never understood what it was like to see at all. But he did understand me in ways most people didn’t. Like how it was to have a crappy family and all the ways the world liked to stand in our way.

“I just don’t know if I have it in me,” I went on. “My bones are old.”

“Your bone is old?”

“Fuck off, you know what I mean,” I snapped.

He burst into laughter. “Alright, bud. I get it. You’re not in the mood for jokes.”

I really wasn’t. I wanted to be, but everything felt like so much right now. There was this pressing weight on my chest, like because I was part of the PPHL, I wasn’t allowed to mourn the loss I was experiencing with my vision. Like I had to just embrace it and march in my little one-man blind pride parade because I would be shitting on the cause if I acted like this was a bad thing.

I also knew my friends would call me a dipshit for feeling that way, but considering how hard I’d fought Aravind on the concept of blindness being a spectrum, I wondered if I had the right to be sad about all of this.

Maybe my knee really was just an excuse.

“Do you love hockey?”

The question was so unexpected, I was struck silent for a long beat. “Uh…I mean. Why would you even ask that?”

“Because that was the question that made me realize I didn’t love hockey. And while retiring was hard, I have no regrets,” he answered. His voice was softer and kinder than usual. “I don’t think a lot of people think to ask guys like us about whether we love it or not. I think they expect us to be grateful we get to do it at all, you know?”

God, that was so very real.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not even very good at it.”

“Tiago—”

“I’m not being self-deprecating. I’m okay. I’m decent enough to get good contracts. My stats have always been pretty stable. I wasn’t breaking records, but I don’t fuck up as badly as other guys. I’m not going to retire a hockey legend though, even if I do stick it out.”

“Okay, so the next question is, what will your life look like if you decide to give it up? And, when you have that answer, how will it make you feel?”