Page 73 of Blind Spot
I focused my attention on the chowder in front of me. It was so much more than soup.
This was the chowder at its source. Rook had carried his version of it across the city of Chicago six years ago and set it on my coffee table next to my prescription pad and my crutches. It changed my life, but Rook’s was the franchise version. This was the original.
“It’s good,” I said. The two words undersold the event, but they were what I had.
“Mattias makes it close,” his mother said. “But he uses the wrong clams. They don’t have the right ones in Chicago.”
“I’ve driven to every store,” Rook said.
There was a Maine dog too. It was an old black Lab who’d come over and set his gray chin on my knee without ceremony. I sat with his head’s weight on me and ate my chowder.
After dinner, Rook caught my eye and tipped his head toward the door. “Want to show you something,” he said.
The shore in December was hard sand below the tide line and frozen ridges above it. The water washed in slowly and was the color of a nickel. Wind off the ocean found every seam in my coat. Rook walked me down a path through bent pines to where rock jutted out into the waves. I listened to them crashing around us.
“Used to come down here when the rink was closed,” he said. “It’s the only other loud place in town.”
He took me to the rink after, the actual one, a low cinderblock building twenty minutes up the coast with a hand-painted sign and a half-dozen cars in the lot. A learn-to-skate class was just coming off the ice, a dozen kids the size of fire hydrants getting scraped up off the sheet by their parents. They had helmets that were too big, and one of them was crying about a mitten. The man at the desk looked up and knew Rook on sight.
We stood at the glass. The ice was chewed up by the little ones, with shavings shoveled into the corners, and a couple of orange cones knocked on their sides.
“Six in the morning,” Rook said. “My dad would drop me here and go to work. I’d be the only one skating for an hour.”
The gate at the far end opened, and five men in beat-up gear clumped onto the ice, sticks over their shoulders. They were dads we’d just seen and a coach who’d run the kids’ class. One of them dropped a mesh bag of pucks that scattered like roaches. Somebody hollered down the bench for anybody who wanted in on a pickup game.
Rook watched them skate out.
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’ve got the face. You want to play.”
“I don’t.”
“You have the face. I can see it. They have rentals, sizes nine through thirteen, and you are dying to get on that ice.” I was already moving toward the desk. “We’re renting skates. This is happening. You can’t take a man to a rink and make him watch.”
He didn’t argue. He gave the desk man his size and pulled out a card. The guy waved the card away. “I recognized you when you walked in the door,” he said. “This one’s on us.” We sat on a cold bench, lacing rentals, and I felt twelve years old.
We skated out from the gate. The ice was bad, and the boards were soft. It was the best rink I’d been on all season.
The coach skated over. He was middle-aged. He’d been a skilled player in his prime. It was obvious from the first three strides. He looked at Rook, then looked again, longer, the recognition coming up slow.
“You’re the Hawks’ D-man,” he said. “Rook.” Then he looked at me, and a grin started. “And—get out. You’re Varga. We watched you score Saturday at my brother-in-law’s. The two of you—“ He looked between us. “You came up together? You’re on the same team.”
Rook said, “Yeah. We’re together.”
The coach heard teammates.It was the only thing the sentence could mean to him. He clapped his glove against Rook’s shoulder and said, “Good, we’re short a couple, so you’re with me. Your buddy’s on the other team. That keeps it even.”
“You good with that?” Rook asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Prepare for burial, old man.”
It was a beer-league scrimmage with no goalies. The dads were gassed after two shifts. The coach was the only one out there who could still really skate, and it was the most fun I’d had in months.
Somebody’s kid kept score wrong on purpose. They put me on the other side from Rook just to make it fair. That lasted about four minutes. They gave up and put us together to watch.
Rook’s a defenseman through and through, but here, on true home ice, he joined the rush.
