Page 32 of Blind Spot
“Where I bail you out, you mean.”
“...Yes, sir.”
“Don’t yes-sir me, I’m not Coach. What do you need?”
“Nothing. I—it’s the off day. I didn’t have anybody else to ask.” A pause. “Kieran invited me to the aquarium. He does volunteer stuff there, I guess. He said I should come and watch the beluga feed.”
“Kieran invited you to look at fish?”
“Whales. Belugas are whales. Those aren’t fish. And one of them has a calf.”
Varga set his cup down. “You like that stuff,” he said.
“I’m from a farm in Saskatchewan.” It was his explanation, and then his tone turned quieter. “I’ve never seen a whale in real life. There’s no ocean for two thousand miles where I grew up. I used to have a poster.” He stopped. “Anyway.”
That was the kid’s entire life in one word.
“Go,” Varga said. “Tell Kieran you’re coming. Don’t leave him standing there with his belugas. Take a picture. I want to see the calf.”
“Okay.” I could hear the kid smiling. “Thanks, Varga.”
“None needed.”
“Hey, before I let you go,” Rafe said. “Some guy emailed the team account, doing a feature on the room. Wanted twenty minutes. PR sent it to a few of us. Did you get that one?”
My coffee was halfway to my lips. I set it back down on the counter.
“Everybody gets those,” Varga said. “Tell PR to handle it. You don’t talk to anyone you didn’t grow up with, Rafe. Rule one.”
“Okay. Thanks, Varga.”
“Drink water. See you on the ice.”
He thumbed the call off, and the kitchen went quiet again.
Turning toward the refrigerator, he opened the door and peered inside. “We’re out of eggs,” he said. “I bought a dozen Saturday—“
“You made an omelet that would feed four on Monday.”
He picked his espresso back up, drank half of it, and looked at me over the rim. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
Chapter eight
Varga
Practice ran long, and by the time I had taken my skates off, the room had thinned to the guys who linger and the guys who couldn’t find their second glove. I was telling Trier about cooking duck.
“It’s a confit situation; you render it low and slow in its own fat, and what you get back is not a duck leg, it’s a religious experience. You, with your chicken thighs in your air fryer, you’ve never lived—“
“I’m happy with my air fryer,” he said, and headed for the shower.
“He’s happy,” I told the nearly empty room. “He’s settling. Write it down.”
Nobody wrote it down. It was late October and all the rookie-camp electricity had bled out of the season. The training room door was open, and Marco was swearing at somebody’s hamstring in Italian.
I was working a knot out of a lace when Rafe appeared and sat one stall over on Trier’s bench.
