Page 22 of The Forbidden Center

Rydell lines up across from me.

His bottom hand slides low on the shaft before Sully’s arm is even up, which tells me everything. He has already decided to tie me up and let his winger dig it out.

So I don’t try to win it.

Puck drops. I’m into him before it lands, take his stick off its line with my leg, and leave the thing sitting where Mack can walk in and collect it.

“That’s a penalty,” Rydell says.

“That’s technique.”

“In what sport?”

We go again. He adjusts. I let him enjoy that for one rep, then take the next clean to my backhand, and the one after it off his own skate.

Four of five.

Nobody claps for that either.

It’s still the best part of my day.

The machine takes pictures of the exact joint that decides how much longer I get to do the only job I have ever wanted, and the entire time I’m required to do nothing at all.

There’s a bulb in my left hand I’m supposed to squeeze if I need them to stop. I spend a while deciding whether squeezing it would count as quitting. Nobody is watching. There’s no version of this where anybody would know.

I don’t squeeze it.

Ruth offered to drive me before I left the house. She has run my schedule, my refrigerator, and every other part of my life I’m willing to let another person touch, for eighteen years. She’s also the only person on my payroll who has ever told me no and let it stand.

I told her I had a car.

She told me that was not the same as having sense.

I drove myself.

By the time I get back upstairs the knocking is still going around inside my head.

I wait at the counter while a delivery comes in and two people check out, and I notice that I’m standing here expecting the line to understand who is in it.

The woman from Thursday looks up from the printer and slides an appointment card across the counter.

“Monday at eleven thirty with Astrid.”

A beautiful woman who doesn’t smile back isn’t a problem. Letting her watch my right arm fail under fluorescent lights is a different category of event entirely.

I could have met her in a bar. There are a great many bars.

“You look disappointed,” she says.

“I’m thinking about lighting.”

“That sounds medical.”

“It isn’t.”

Her mouth twitches, and before she can enjoy herself a girl in the waiting area says, “Gabi, does this printer work?”

Gabi. Somebody could have told me that on Thursday.