Page 73 of On His Mind
Rowan shakes his head.
Benson doesn’t say anything.
“Roster.” Stanley holds up a piece of paper I didn’t know he was holding. “We lost Cole. We lost Dan. We’ve got a transfer defenseman out of Colgate with a neck like a horse. Jonathon’s back, and Jonathon thinks he’s better than he is, and I want that on record now so I can point at it in February.”
Rowan snorts.
“And they brought in a freshman goalie.” Stanley drinks. “Kid’s drafted. Fourth round, Nashville.”
He’s looking at me when he says it.
“Anyway,” he says.
He points his water at the whiteboard in the kitchen doorway. “We still follow the house rules. No ands, buts, whats, or ifs. Same as it’s always been. This year’s no different.” Then he steps down off the table and comes and takes me by both shoulders and shakes me once, hard.
“You’re gonna be better than Cole was,” he says. “I hear you’ve been on the ice since they put it back in. Who told me that? Somebody told me that.”
I don’t say anything. The whiteboard’s over his shoulder while he shakes me. I read all five rules the same way I’ve read them all summer. Something goes tight low in my gut.
“Somebody order the pizza,” Rowan says.
Stanley claps. “That’s your job now, Laurens.” He winks and then leaves.
The bags stay in the hall three days.
Stanley never unpacks. His things migrate — a shirt of his turns up in Blue’s room, his charger lives in the kitchen, and the bag collects dust.
Rowan reorganizes the fridge on Saturday morning. Stanley destroys it by Saturday night, looking for mustard. They argue about fantasy football for forty minutes, and it becomes an argument about whether Rowan has ever watched a football game in his life. The frittata pan comes out. The burnt edge is still there. And I sit at the end of the table with my back to the wall and my book open — the second one now, a different French paperback — and Stanley shouts something across the kitchen with three French words in it and no meaning at all. I don’t look up, and Blue pulls out the chair on my left and sits down without a word.
I’ve got doubles at the Camerie until classes start. Marco’s glad to see me every shift, which he expresses by giving me more work. I run bottles. I train a kid named Kevin who’s a sophomore and terrified of everything. I flip the chairs at midnight and mop myself out the back door, and then I walk home.
Over the summer, this restaurant was the whole of my life. I came here from an empty house, and I went back to an empty house. The house was where I slept, and this was where I lived. Now I come up on Hawthorne Street at half past ten, and every light in the place is on. There’s music, and Stanley’s out on the porch arguing with somebody on the phone, and he throws an arm up over his head when he sees me coming down the street.
Informal skates start in two weeks. Captain-run, no coaches. Real practice the first week of October. Classes Monday.
It’s the twenty-eighth of August. She still hasn’t texted.
Josh calls on a Wednesday to ask how I’m settling in for the new school year.
“Good,” I say.
“Still have the job?”
“Yep.”
There’s a long pause. “Scholarship still good?”
I nod. “Yeah. I had to turn in a few things, but it’s good.”
“Good,” he says. “You sound good, Pers.”
“I am.”
There’s a pause on the line, and I can hear him working up to something, and then I hear him decide not to. “Well,” he says, and clears his throat. “Alright, then.” He fills the rest of it telling me about the truck. It needs a transmission. Mary says to sell it and he says he’d sooner sell Mary. Eight minutes. I don’t say the thing I want to say. It sits behind my teeth the way it always does. The call ends. I sit in my room in the dark with the door shut and the house going on underneath me.
The top drawer of my dresser sticks. There’s a broken watch in it, and under the watch, there’s a piece of paper folded twice. A whole year, and I haven’t opened it. I sit on the edge of the bed and unfold it.
Blocky handwriting, pressed hard enough to dent the paper.You versus you, kid.That’s all it says.
