Page 20 of Victory Lap

It’s 6:10 in a kitchen that is not mine. I know where everything is anyway. I learned it the first morning. Mugs above the coffee maker, spoons second drawer, the counter cleared every night by a woman who spent a career knowing exactly where her feet were. This house runs on the same clock I do.

I make the coffee. Two cups. His will go cold for twenty minutes before he finds it, because that is what he does with coffee, and I have stopped defending it from him.

He comes down at 6:40 with the envelope in his hand.

“You’re up,” he says.

“It’s 6:40.”

“It’s summer.”

“It’s 6:40.”

He sets the envelope on the counter between us and slides it over. Doesn’t say anything. His face is doing the thing where he has decided something and is watching to see if I’ll fight it.

“That’s yours,” I say.

“Read it anyway.”

I dry my hands first and then read the sentences. Atlanta’s forecheck. The second-period kill. The seam we closed. Karl watched his son’s team take the Cup from him and he graded the film, because the film is how the man says everything. I am halfway down the page thinking this is between them, I should not be holding this, when I get to the bottom three sentences.

I read them twice.

“He wrote this,” I say.

“He wrote it when it stopped hurting. That’s how the notes work.”

“After every game.”

“After. Never before. He’s only broken that rule once.”

“Montreal,” I say. “You never told me what it said.”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“That one’s mine.”

“Fair.”

Your goalie. Not the backup. Not Soucy. Not the kid who took his net for five games, which is what the papers called it, as if a net is a thing you take and not a thing that is handed to you by a man limping through a doorway he refuses to let anyone see him limp through.

“He watched the whole Final,” I say. “Every angle.” I put the page down flat because paper remembers folds and this page is going to live a long time. “Coaches have told me I flash well. Good glove. Quiet in the crease.” I count the phrases on my fingers without deciding to, thumb to index, middle, ring. A career of scouting reports, and they all describe the same man from the outside. “Nobody writes down the seeing. It doesn’t show up on film.”

“It shows up on his film.” Soren takes his coffee, finally, and drinks it cold without noticing, which I have decided to find endearing until I die. “He wanted somebody to see me. All his life. That’s what that sentence is.”

I slide the page back into the envelope and square the corners. “Put it somewhere flat. No folds.”

“Yes, coach.”

His mother comes down at seven exactly, dressed for the day, feet in first position even on a staircase. She looks at the envelope in my hands, then at her son, and pours herself coffee like a woman confirming a suspicion.

She takes the stool at the end of the counter, and looks at me. “Your mother and I spoke the other day.”

The coffee stops halfway to my mouth. “When?”

“Tuesday. And again Thursday. She has strong opinions about tablecloths, and I have strong opinions about almost nothing else, so we have divided the labor.” She says it lightly, with the matter already settled underneath. “August. Montreal.”