Page 27 of Blind Spot
“That’s mentoring. It’s highly worthwhile.”
He touched the stone to the steel one more time and held the blade up to the light to check it. He hadn’t looked at me once since I sat down, which was how I knew he was listening to everything.
It was the Rook and Varga Show. In the room, they thought it was friction. They thought Rook found me exhausting, and I found him slow. The two of us built a comedy bit to survive five years of sharing a locker room.
It was the only way I got to put my hands on him in the arena. I couldn’t cross the room and touch the back of his neck, or sit by him on the bench. I used my mouth instead: needled him, narrated him, and made a total production out of it. A show was allowed, but a hand wasn’t.
Across the room, Heath caught my eye and half-smiled into his elbow pad, the way he did when the Show was running well. He’d been smiling at me like that for three seasons.
Pratt sat taping his stick, not looking up at me or anyone. I could throw everything at Pratt, and it slid off him onto the floor. I’d stopped trying years ago.
“Doors in ten,” Mark said from the hall. “Let’s go.”
***
I scored in the second.
We were down by one and pressing to tie it up. I had the puck on the half-wall and lost it. A defenseman stripped me clean, and I hate getting stripped by anyone other than Rook, but that’s a different thing in a different building.
I was already mad about the play, and then I heard Rafe behind me, that big stride eating the ice. He hunted the puck down behind their net and threw it to the front without looking. The kid knew where I was. I’d gotten myself to the top of the crease with my stick flat on the ice, and the puck arrived exactly where it needed to. I didn’t shoot so much as redirect it into the net.
The horn sounded. Nineteen thousand people who’d spent two periods sitting on their hands stood up all at once and roared. They loved us.
And then two hundred pounds of Saskatchewan meat hit me at full speed. Rafe grabbed me around the chest and lifted me, yelling something into my ear. The rest of the line piled on.
Somewhere in it, two thoughts hit me back to back that had nothing to do with the ice.
The kid’s just a hockey baby.He was so happy. He’d set up a goal for a guy he’d been studying for two months, and he was so excited he forgot to be polite about it.
And right behind it, before I could stop it:I was him once.
I’d been twenty once, looking up to older guys, learning how it all worked. Now, here was this baby with the bad haircut hugging me against the glass, and I was somebody’s older guy.
I knocked my glove against his helmet and steered us toward the bench before my stupid grin showed.
We won three to two. My goal held up.
***
They sat Rafe and me at the press table afterwards, under the hot lights. The kid held his water bottle with both hands like it might try to get away. It was his first post-game scrum.
“Varga, talk about the chemistry with Mikkelsen.”
“Chemistry? He’s twenty and does what I tell him. That’s our chemistry.” They laughed. “Joking. The kid knows how to see the ice.”
Somebody asked Rafe about the assist. His cheeks flushed red. “Varga was open.” It was three words. He’d done what I told him.
A guy I didn’t know, younger, with a lanyard from one site that ran lifestyle fluff about players. “Lucas, you’re one of the few veterans on this team still single. Rafe looks up to you. Any advice for him on balancing the personal side?”
It was nothing. It was a filler question, but it made the entire table tip toward me half an inch.
I gave them the grin and then the shrug. “Advice for Rafe? Call your mother. Mine’s in Minnesota, and she still finds out my plus-minus before I do.” They all laughed, light and easy, and the table tipped back. “The personal side waits. The game doesn’t. You get to the rest of it after.”
I’d said the line a hundred times in five years. It still came out clean. At least to everyone else in the room.
I went to work. “Ask the kid about his hands,” I told them. “Go ahead, ask him. They’re soft as anything. Where’d that come from, Rafe, the farm?”
A beat writer took the bait. “Rafe, those hands. Where’d you learn that?”
