Page 7 of Five Hole

Rocco looks at him a long moment. “Eat your dinner,” he says, and goes back to his own. It’s the funniest thing anybody’s said all night, precisely because he didn’t mean it to be. Then somebody’s got a clip up on a phone, a save from a summer-league game somewhere, and it gets passed down the table until every goalie in the room, which tonight means me, gets asked to grade it. I give it a six.

“A six,” Rocco says, and doesn’t smile, which is what makes it land.

“My mother’s a four. She knows why.”

Half the table chokes on their dinner. I start a second, smaller war.

Moose Tessier comes through with the sign-out sheet. Our equipment manager since before the flood, a man who’s seen everything twice and comments on roughly none of it. He hands the freshmen their gloves. Moose does a thing, older than any of us, sacred. He gives every freshman the wrong size the first time. Straight-faced. He hands a kid with paws like dinner plates a pair built for a much smaller man. And waits. This year’s freshman jams his fingers in about halfway, looks up in slow dawning horror, and the table loses it. Moose watches it happen with the face of a man watching the tide come in on schedule.

He gets to me. He looks at me over the top of the sheet with the same look he’s given me every fall since I got here, and the look says he remembers exactly what I am and has decided to allow it.

“You again,” he says.

“Me again. Miss me?”

“No.”

“There it is. That was a hesitation.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Everybody at this table heard a hesitation. Ask them. Ask the freshman with the little hands.”

He almost smiles, and a Moose almost-smile is a thing you tell your grandkids about. He hands me my real gloves. Right size. No bit. From Moose that’s basically a graduation gown.

“Sign the sheet,” he says, already moving, and doesn’t look back to check that I do.

The depth chart goes up after dinner. Marquette posts it on the corkboard outside the room, and the whole team drifts over to read a thing every one of us already knows.

Goaltenders. Wrobel, C. Fortin, E.

I read it slow, like it might have changed since dinner. It hasn’t. It never does. Somewhere a printer spits out the same two names in the same two spots every fall. And every fall I stand here and let it land on me like it’s news.

One and two. His name and then mine. His net and then the bench. Same as it’s been. Same ink. Same order. I stand there and read it anyway, and I feel the animal in my chest get up on its feet and stretch.

He’s reading it too. Off to the side. Apart the way he’s always apart, near the room and never in it. I drift over, because around him I can’t not, it’s a documented condition. I pitch it low, just for us.

“You ever get sick of reading your own name up there?”

Nothing. Never anything.

“Enjoy the top of the list, Wrobel. Lists change.”

He doesn’t look at the board. He looks at me. No heat in it. Flat. Which is somehow worse than heat.

“Not that one.”

Here’s the stupid part, the part I’ll be sore about at lights-out. It lands like a win. His. He got the last word, it was three words, and they were the right three. Some piece of me that’s spent its whole life wanting to be worth answering lights up. Like he handed me a present and didn’t even mean to.

I want to say something back. I’ve got three things loaded and I fire none of them, because his eyes are still on me, flat and level. And for once in my life I understand that the smart move is to let the man have the point and walk away carrying it. So I do. I tip him a nod like I meant to lose. He doesn’t tip one back. He turns to the board again, which is his way of ending a thing.

Long season.

* * *

I take the long way back to the Stable, through the cold, because the animal in my chest won’t lie down. The streetlights buzz. My breath goes out ahead of me. The town’s small enough that the last of the shops are already dark. A dog barks at me from a porch and thinks better of it. I pass the barn on the way and it sits there black and huge, holding all of tomorrow inside it. I put my hand flat on the cold brick of it for no reason I could tell you, then feel like an idiot and keep walking.

My room’s dark and the thin wall is right there. On the other side of it, quiet, is a saint arranging his day into rows.