Page 17 of Blind Spot
“Lucas.” Varga leaned back in his chair. “First time he’s used the first name. I almost cried into my glove.”
“You didn’t cry.”
“No, but I almost did. It’s been a long week. I’ve been carrying a lot of feelings about that Saskatchewan rookie.”
I strained the cooked pasta and tossed it in the pan with the sauce.
“What did you do?” Varga asked. “Office? Laundry?”
“Some paperwork.”
It was the same answer I used when something was too complicated, or I hadn’t decided yet how to describe it.
He didn’t push. He never pushed in the kitchen. He pushed at the rink, and he pushed at the meat counter at the Jewel-Osco.
We ate at the kitchen table.
“The kid is figuring out edge work,” Varga said. “Did I tell you that? It’s a Saskatchewan problem. They skate on rivers. The rivers are straight. He’s twenty years old, and he’s never had to turn properly in his life.”
“He turns fine.”
“He turns fine on television. In drills, he apologizes. During the first crossover at the voluntary skate, he apologized to me. In the second one, he apologized to himself. The third one I made him stop apologizing.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I told him, Rafe, you don’t apologize on the ice. If you’re going to apologize, do it in the parking lot, where the coaches can’t see you. And he nodded.”
“He didn’t sayyes, sir?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes he nods like my father. My father nods at things he completely disagrees with, all the way through the disagreement, and then at the end he says one sentence in Hungarian that ruins your life. This kid is going to be a problem in fifteen years.”
“He’s not going to be a problem.”
“He’s going to be a problem for some general manager who isn’t us. We’ll be retired. We’ll be in a cabin somewhere watching him on television and saying, that kid, we taught him that nod.”
“You taught him that nod.”
“I taught him the nod. You taught him the silence. Between the two of us, we’ve created a monster.”
I told him about watching the baking show episode again. Then I asked why he didn’t watch cooking shows that weren’t about baking.
“The sugar,” Varga said, “is the whole thing. The sugar is what makes baking shows work. Cooking shows don’t have sugar. Cooking shows have salt. Salt is a fight. Sugar is a—sugar is friendship.”
“Sugar is friendship?”
“Sugar is friendship. I’m telling you this for free. You can write it down. Bread shows are the highest form of baking show because bread is the most patient form of sugar. Bread is sugar that has been waiting.”
“Bread has almost no sugar.”
“Bread is made of sugar, Rook, biochemically, every bread person knows this. The yeast eats the sugar; you are wrong about bread —“
“I’m wrong about bread.”
“Why aren’t you arguing?”
“I’m eating.”
“You always argue at the sugar part.”
