Page 123 of Power Play

“What?” I said.

“Brandt.”

My stomach dropped a full second before I understood why. “What about him?”

“Traded.” He put the phone in his back pocket. “Buffalo.”

The trouble with the freeze was I’d thought it was kind.

Eli had explained it to me on Christmas, as he explained most of how his world worked, without lifting his eyes from what he had in his hands. The league stopped all of it for a stretch around the holidays. There were no trades, no waivers, no family packing a kitchen on the twenty-third. I’d said, out loud, that it was kind, a decent gesture for a business that size to bother making, and he’d said it’s not forever and told me it lifted on the twenty-eighth. I’d heard the date. I hadn’t heard what it meant, that the twenty-eighth of December was the first morning anybody could get the call again, and that the first thing the freeze did when it lifted was this.

Jonah Brandt was a bottom-six winger who’d been a Sidewinder since the team was a rumor. He had a career’s worth of penalty minutes and a reputation for blocking shots with parts of his body that other men protected. I’d watched him stand in front of a slap shot in November and come up grinning with no front tooth, and Iris had asked if he’d get a dollar.

His wife was Steph. I knew her first from the preschool lot, where her boy Leo had the drop-off locker next to Iris’s and a way of sprinting at the door that no adult had ever slowed down. I knew her second from the family section, where she sat two rows ahead of me with a baby on her hip and narrated every shift to an audience of one who cared only about the air horn. She’d been the first wife to turn around and talk to me as though it had never crossed her mind to wonder what I was. You’re the one Iris won’t stop talking about, she’d said, in October, and handed me half a bag of pretzels, and I’d loved her for it with my whole stupid heart.

“When does he go?” I said.

“Tonight.” Eli set a fork beside the blue plate, handle toward Iris, tines in. “They want him in the lineup by their next game.”

“Tonight. He flies tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“And Steph? And the kids?”

He turned to me then with the long level look he wore when he’d already done the arithmetic I was only starting. “They’ve got a week,” he said. “Maybe less. Lease, school, all of it. He plays for Buffalo next game and they pack a house behind him.”

Iris had fallen quiet over her eggs. She’d caught the shape of it as she caught everything, sideways and without the words for it, and she reached up and put her palm flat on my forearm, which was her father’s move, the small arm at full stretch.

“Is Leo moving?” she said.

I glanced at Eli over the top of her head. He looked back and gave me nothing to work with, because there was nothing.

“I think so, bug,” I said. “I think Leo’s going to live somewhere new.”

She considered this with the gravity she brought to all large questions. “Buffalo,” she said, trying it in her mouth. “Does it have buffalos?”

“I don’t know, bug.”

“It should. It’s the name.” She delivered it the same as all her rulings, as a correction to a world that kept getting the obvious wrong, and went back to her eggs, satisfied she’d located the one acceptable feature of the situation. I sat there with my coffee going cold and didn’t trust my face, so I got up and poured it out and ran the tap for longer than the cup took, and Eli said nothing from across the kitchen, which from him was the same as a hand on my back.

Eli left for the rink before ten. There was a skate, and a room changed when a man got pulled out of it, and Eli would be the one standing at Brandt’s stall while Brandt cleaned it out, because he always was. He stopped at the door with his jacket on and put his hand on the back of my neck under my hair, briefly, the shorthand he used when he didn’t have time to say it.

“You okay?” he said.

“I’m fine. Go.”

He looked at me for a beat past the word. He always heard it, my fine. He just didn’t always have time to open it up, and that morning he didn’t, and I was glad, and I hated being glad.

He’d put his phone down on the counter to hunt for his keys, and it lit up while he looked, and the top of the team chat was there before the screen went dark, because he’d left it face up and I was standing right there. It wasn’t the chat I’d gotten used to seeing over his shoulder across the fall, the one that ran all day, Cole’s campaign of the week, Kasperi with no concept of what should stay in a man’s head, Theo dropping a line of French that only Eli ever answered. There were three new messages, and all the air had gone out of the chat.

Kasperi: He blocked everything. Everything. I never saw a guy block like that.

Cole: Love you brother.

Theo: On est avec toi.

My French didn’t go far, but it went as far as avec toi. We’re with you, Theo had written.