Page 19 of Victory Lap

“That’s the problem I’m naming.”

He nods at the yard like the yard confirmed it. “The loss stopped hurting around the second week of July,” he says. “In case you were tracking.”

“I was tracking.”

“Next season.” He turns the beer bottle once in his hand. “Your backup started five games of a Cup Final and handed the net back clean. What do you do with that?”

“Share it on purpose this time.”

“Good answer.” A pause the length of a line change. “Took me longer than that to find mine.”

We sit like that or a while, neither of us filling the quiet.

“Montreal’s rebuilding,” he says. “Their front office has called me twice since the Final.” He turns the bottle again. “Your GM’s phone is going to ring all summer.”

“GMs phones ring every summer across the league.”

“Not like this year. Winning makes everybody expensive.”

And then he tips his beer toward the kitchen window, where Jules is at the table showing my mother something in the newspaper.

“Him,” my father says. “Walk me through him.”

So I do. Not the season. Him.

“He does the crossword in pen. He has an aquarium and feeds the fish on a schedule that has never once needed me. He needs quiet at times, and then other times he needs not quiet.” My father listens like film, no interruptions, full attention. “He says things once. If you miss it, you don’t get it back.”

“I threw everything I had at him,” he says finally. “Four different looks in Game Seven. He solved every one of them by the second shift.” He shakes his head. “Marry that.”

I stare at my dad. “Nobody said marry.”

“Your mother did.” He stands, collects both bottles, coach again. “When is his day?”

“August. Montreal. His mother has been planning it like a state visit since the parade in Atlanta.”

“Good,” my father says.

In the evening, the keeper comes to collect it, white gloves, the case, the forms. My mother touches the bowl once more before it goes. My father walks it to the van like a colleague.

“Take the highway,” he tells the keeper. “The surface streets are a war zone after seven.”

The keeper, a man who has driven this trophy through more summers than my father has coached, says he will take it under advisement. My father watches the van to the corner anyway, the full coach check, until the cargo is somebody else’s problem and heads inside.

And then it’s the two of us on the porch, the yard going blue. A crossword arrives from somewhere on Jules’s side of the bench.

“Seven across,” he says.

I don’t have it. He waits. He’d wait all night. Down the lawn, the guest house sits dark and tidy, holding the shape of a family that filled it. In a kitchen behind me there’s a scouting report I am going to keep until I die.

“Give me a hint,” I say.

“No.”

“One letter.”

“No,” says Jules, comfortable, and clicks his pen. “You have all night.” We stay out there until the porch light is the only light. Two goalies and no net, nothing coming that we can’t stop.

Chapter 7: Soucy