Page 108 of The Grumpy Defenseman
I stood on that walk in the dark and listened to my family hurt and could do nothing about it. I could not take the photo back. I could not unprint the column. I could not give my father back the privacy he had spent his whole quiet life keeping.
But I made a vow nobody was going to catch me again.
Not in grief.
Not in a moment I had not chosen.
Not ever.
I made the vow.
I walked to my car.
I had kept it fortwelve years.
Until Sam.
“So I’m allowed to want something else now.”
The crow called again.
“There’s a woman, Dad.”
I had not planned to say it like that. It came out that way anyway. Sometimes sentences knew where they were going before you did.
“Her name is Sam. She’s a photographer. She’s difficult.”
I almost laughed. Dad would have liked that word. He had used it for Mom for forty years and meant it as a compliment every time.
“She sees me in a way I haven’t let anyone see me since you. And I’ve been locking her out because I didn’t know how to let someone in without making it about hockey. Hockey was safe. Hockey had rules. Hockey was the thing you and I had, and if I let it change, I was scared I was letting you go too.”
The wind moved low through the grass.
“But I wasn’t. I know that now. You weren’t hockey. You were the man who drove the machine so a four-year-old could skate. And the man you were when the machine was off is the one I actually learned from. You were patient. You were steady. You did not talk unless you meant it. You came home every night and sat at the table.”
I swallowed and looked at Ranger.
Ranger was looking at the stone.
“I’m going to try to do that. With Sam. With the team. With Mom, Lena, and the kid. I don’t know if I’ll be good at it. You weren’t always good at it either, and you kept at it anyway. So I’ll keep at it.”
I crouched down and put my hand flat on the grass in front of the stone. The ground was cold through the fabric of my jeans.
“There’s a groove in my right hand,” I said more quietly. “From the stick tape. Twenty-five years of the same grip. You probably had one just like it from the dock. She found it the first time we were together. Put her thumb on it and readit like a map. Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody except you.”
I let out a breath I had not known I was holding.
“That’s how I knew.”
Ranger laid his head on my boot.
“I’ll be back sooner this time, Dad. I promise.”
I stood and brushed off my knee. Looked at the stone one more time.
“Tell her I’m okay,” I said.
My grandmother was buried three plots down. She had outlived him by six weeks, and my mother had refused to bury her anywhere else.
