Page 12 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Two sets of organizational eyes triangulating on the same event.
A contract-year player was never just at a community appearance. He was at an unofficial evaluation. You learned that early in the league and never unlearned it, the way you never unlearned where the blue line was.
The community event ground on: handshakes, photographs, and the choreographed warmth professional sports required of its players. I did my part. Stood where I was told to stand. Offered the version of myself the organization had paid for: cooperative and empty.
The boy with the stick had rattled me.
Not the interaction itself. That part had been instinctive, the kind of thing that happened when my guard dropped for a few seconds and the person underneath acted before the defenseman could stop him. What rattled me was afterward. The way the walls slammed back into place the moment the boy walked away, and how much heavier they felt than before. Like I had been reminded of something I used to carry more easily.
My sister would have called me on it. She had a gift for that, for seeing through the armor I had spent years building and pointing at the soft tissue underneath with the precision of a surgeon and the tact of awrecking ball. Last time I visited, her son had asked me why I never smiled in the pictures on TV, and she had said, “Because your uncle thinks his face will break if he tries.”
She was not wrong.
The event wound down. Parents collected their kids. Players drifted toward the exit with the relieved energy of men whose obligation had been fulfilled. I positioned myself near the door, standard operating procedure, and waited for the all-clear.
Brick walked past with Samantha beside him. They were talking, the kind of conversation people had when they actually liked each other. She said something I could not hear, and he laughed in that way he had where his whole body participated.
“Dinner?” Brick asked her. “Few of us are grabbing food.”
On most teams, that would have been casual. On ours, it was how the room held together. The guys showed up. Staffpretended it was not part of the culture while quietly depending on it.
She hesitated. A brief calculation I could see in her posture: weight shifting, eyes flicking toward me and away.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll come.”
Something in my chest moved. Not a lot. Not enough to call it anything. Just a small displacement of weight, like a puck deflecting off a stick blade at a bad angle. Unexpected trajectory, no time to adjust.
I looked away before she could see it.
Silas Vane caught me on the way out. He fell into step beside me, hands in his pockets, wearing the posture of a man who wanted you to think you were having a casual conversation when you absolutely were not.
“Good event,” he said.
“Standard.”
“The photographer’s integrating well.”
I did not respond to that, because responding would have meant acknowledging that I had noticedhow well she was integrating, which I had, which was nobody’s business.
“Contract window opens in three weeks,” Silas continued, his voice cool enough to leave frost. “Ownership wants a clean narrative going into negotiations. Committed to the city. No distractions.”
The word sat between us like a puck on the blue line.
Distractions.
“I’m aware,” I said.
“I know you are.” He gave me a look that contained more information than the sentence that followed it. “Just making sure we’re all on the same page.”
He peeled off toward the administrative offices. I walked to my truck. The San Antonio heat wrapped around me the second I stepped outside, heavy and close, and I stood in the parking lot longer than necessary, keys in my hand, staring at nothing.
Somewhere inside the building, Samantha Cole was making plans for dinnerwith my teammates. Laughing at Brick’s jokes. Reading rooms with that photographer’s precision that saw everything and gave nothing away.
And I was standing in a parking lot, performing the familiar calculus of self-preservation: how much distance was too much, how long I could keep the walls at full height before the weight of them started cracking the foundation.
My phone buzzed. A text from my sister.
Lena: The boys want to know when you’re coming over. Ranger ate a shoe. It was yours. Sorry, not sorry.
