Page 5 of The Grumpy Defenseman
A muscle in his cheek moved. Not quite a clench. More like a thought his body had before his brain approved it.
“Fine,” he said, and walked away.
I watched him go while the gym emptied around me and the fluorescent lights keptup their tuneless buzz. On the TV mounted above the treadmills, a sports anchor was talking about contract negotiations, and I caught a fragment: “…McKinney’s deal expected to be a priority this offseason…” before someone changed the channel.
Contract year. Of course. Every move he made this summer was being measured and assigned a dollar value. No wonder he treated every interaction like a controlled substance.
I slung my camera bag over my shoulder and headed for the exit, already thinking about tomorrow’s session. Ten minutes. One reluctant subject. An empty rink lit with the kind of overhead glare that flattened everything it touched.
I would need to bring my own light.
Evan
Five forty-seven. The rink was mine.
I pushed off hard from the boards, blades cutting a clean line through ice that had been resurfaced twenty minutes earlier. Glass-smooth. Perfect. The Zamboni had left the faint mineral smell I had known since I was old enough to stand on skates: engine exhaust and something chemical I would recognize anywhere.
My father drove the Zamboni at the Clearfield Municipal Rink from 1996 to 2011.Not as a career. As a second shift. During the day, he managed the shipping dock at a plumbing supply company. At night, he resurfaced ice for $8 an hour because it included free rink time, which was the only childcare he could afford.
My mother worked nights at St. Vincent’s. So, from the age of four, I went where Dad went. He set me on the ice with a stick and a puck after the last session cleared out, and I skated alone for an hour while he drove the machine in slow, overlapping circles, smoothing out everything that had been torn up during the day.
I had learned to love empty rinks not for what they contained, but for what they did not. No voices. No audience. Just blades on ice and cold air in my lungs.
Twenty-five years later, the ritual was the same.
I ran through my warm-up laps. Slow at first, then building. My edges bit into the turns with the precision of ten thousandhours of practice: crossovers, backward-to-forward transitions, motions so automatic my legs ran them while my mind went elsewhere. Which was the point. The ice was the only place my head went quiet.
After the laps came shooting. I lined pucks along the far blue line.
Forehand. Top right.
Forehand. Bottom left.
Backhand. Five-hole.
The net caught them with a satisfying snap. One after another. Mechanical. Precise.
I did not hear the door open.
I did not hear footsteps on the rubber matting along the boards.
I was running a breakout drill, retrieving the puck behind the net and driving it up the ice with the acceleration that separated adequate defensemen from reliable ones, when something at the edge of my vision registered. Not movement. Stillness. A body at the boards that had not been there thirtyseconds ago.
I completed the drill, because that was what you did. You finished the play. Then you assessed.
Samantha Cole stood at the boards near center ice, camera bag on the bench beside her, camera hanging at her side. She was not shooting. She was not adjusting settings or doing any of the things photographers did when they arrived at a location.
She was just standing there. Watching.
I coasted to a stop. My breath clouded in the cold air between us.
She did not say anything. Did not wave or fill the silence with nervous chatter. She stood there with an expression I could not place. Not calculating. Not performing interest. Something quieter. Like she had walked into a room she had not expected to find and was still deciding what it meant.
I skated toward her. The sound of my blades in the empty arena was the loudest thing in the building.
“Morning,” she said when I was close enough to hear her at a normal volume.
I nodded.
