Page 50 of Power Play

“No.” He put the tie around his neck. “I’ve watched Maren’s mother do it to Maren four times and Maren is twenty-seven.”

Then he picked up his jacket and crossed back to his own stall. I sat there with a skate half laced, feeling a lot better, and declined to look into why.

Theo circled back with the book already open, saw my face, and stopped.

“Elle est où?” He wanted to know where she was.

“Peoria. Première fois.” It was her first time away.

He had the book against his leg. “Elle reviendra demain,” he said. “Et elle sera insupportable.” She’d be back tomorrow, he meant, and she’d be unbearable.

“She’ll be worse than insupportable. She’ll have opinions about pancakes.”

“Voilà.” That was his point exactly. He went back to his book.

My phone was in the top of my bag and I got it out before warmups. I never did that. There were two from Delaney, sent a while earlier.

Delaney: gerald has been briefed on the situation

Delaney: holding up better than expected

It didn’t say where she was or what she was doing with an empty Saturday. It was two lines about a dragon, and the woman who sent it knew precisely what she was doing. She might be on my couch with her feet up under her and her hair down. I was standing in skates in a hallway with sixty minutes of hockey between me and either answer.

Me: tell him I appreciate the update

The phone went back in the bag.

My legs were under me from the first lap. Some nights my feet belonged to a stranger who’d mailed them in from another city. That night I took one stride and had all of it, every edge under me.

I did the laps long and easy, and a few in, the day was off me. Peoria was off me. The ice took it. It always did, and it was the only part of my life that had ever managed the trick.

Then I swung around the far end and did what I did at that point in every home warmup. I looked up at the family seats. The glass at that end had a smear on it at about Iris’s height, small handprints laid over each other until they stopped being handprints.

It wasn’t sentiment. It was habit, and the habit had a reason. Iris had been to only a handful of games in two years. A kid that small had to be brought and sat with for three periods, and the list of adults who would do it had never run past three names. Maren was in the tunnel with a kit bag. My mother was in Transcona. Delaney had the bath and the book on game nights. The few times my daughter made it into that row, she got up on the seat in her jersey and put both palms flat on the glass when I came around, and I tapped it with my stick on the way past.

Every other night the seat beside Iris was empty and I looked at it anyway, which I’d never admitted out loud to one person alive. I tapped the glass low on the way past, at an empty chair, in front of several thousand people, and I’d take it to my grave.

I finished the circuit. The horn was sounding, and my job was sixty minutes against a team that hit us harder than anybody in the division.

I skated off with the group, down the tunnel, through the room, and sat in my stall in front of the cat bed and its growing collection. My jersey was wet through the back.

Then I put my head down and did what I’d done before every game of my life, which was empty the entire contents of my skull onto the floor and leave it there for three hours. It emptied fine.

What I couldn’t change was the shape of the evening after it. It would be sixty minutes, then a shower, then the drive home in the dark to a house with one woman in it who’d asked me how I was doing and waited for an answer. I’d lie in bed and watch her window across the yard until it went dark, and I’d be awake for all of it.

The room dropped silent at the two-minute mark, same as always. I put my head back against the stall and made a deal with myself, which I hadn’t needed to do since I was a rookie.

I’d play the game and do the job for sixty minutes. Everything else could wait until I was off the ice.

Then Ryan led us out, and the building came out of its seats for it. The noise landed on me at the top of the tunnel and dropped away under me on the first stride out onto fresh ice. I played the best sixty minutes of hockey I’d put together all season, with one sentence circling the back of my head in my own voice out of an empty truck.

Nothing was going to happen tonight.

CHAPTER 12

Delaney

Iris packed three days’ worth of supplies for one night away. By the middle of Saturday afternoon there was a sleeping bag by the front door and a backpack beside it containing four books, a headlamp, and two pairs of underwear.