Page 43 of The Reckless Rookie

Jason’s the one who almost gets it out of me.

We’re mucking the far stalls, Thursday, the day before his hearing, and he’s wound tight as I’ve ever seen him, doing what I taught him not to do, which is chew on the fear until it bleeds.

“I keep running it,” he says. “What I’m gonna say to the judge. And every version, I sound like a guy making excuses.”

“So don’t make excuses. Say you did it, say what you’re doing, so it never happens again, and shut up. Judges can smell a rehearsed speech.”

“Yeah.” He forks a load, quiet. Then: “How do you do it, man? You’re carrying more than any of us out here. The felony, the games, the drive. And you walk around looking like a guy who won something.” He looks at me, honest, wide open, the way he only gets when it’s just the two of us and the horses. “What’s your secret?”

“Sleep,” I tell him. “Excellent time management. Highly recommend it.”

He laughs. I hate the sound of my own joke.

Something’s sitting on her, and I catch it Friday night and I let it go, and I’ll think about that later.

She’s on the counter with the paperwork again, but she’s not going through it, she’s holding it, and there’s a stillness on her that isn’t her usual stillness. Hers is a lit thing, aware, three moves ahead. This one’s flatter. A woman keeping her face on purpose.

I know the look. I invented the look. I wore it the one morning I sat in front of a judge and got told the rest of my life.

“You good?” I ask.

“Long week.” She sets the pages down and reaches for me, and it’s real, but it’s also a hand closing a subject, and I feel the redirect the way I’d feel a stick lift on a pass, smooth, practiced, meant to move me along.

I could push it. Part of me clocks the whole shape of it and wants to.

I don’t push it. Because I’ve got eleven days of the best thing in my life and a woman who reads everyone and lets nobody read her, and I’ve decided, without deciding, that I’d rather have it unexamined than crack it open asking a question she’s already told me twice she’s not going to answer.

So I let her move me along. I let her keep whatever’s in her pocket in her pocket.

I’ll think about that later, when later comes, and what she was carrying had my name on it.

At the door, when I go to leave, I’ve got my arms around her and she’s letting me, and her phone lights on the counter behind us, a name, Sebastian, and she steps out of them without a word to take it in the other room. She comes back a minute later with the wall an inch higher than it was, and she doesn’t tell me who, and I don’t ask, because I’ve got no standing to ask about a name that lights up her own kitchen at ten at night and gets answered on the first ring. She kisses me goodnight after. Careful. A careful that wasn’t there an hour ago.

Playoffs are six games out, the whole season narrowing to a point.

There’s something in her pocket she won’t show me.

I lie down in a room that smells like other men’s boots with a bad feeling I can’t source and tell myself it’s exhaustion.

It’s not.

I’ve got too much to lose now, and I’m the last one on this ranch who knows the taking’s already started.

Chapter twenty-one

Finn

Playoff hockey is a different animal. I learned that a long way from here, in junior barns and half-empty AHL rinks where the crowd was your billet family and eleven scouts, and the hockey was the meanest I’d ever played because everybody on the ice was fighting for the same twelve NHL jobs. You don’t forget what that felt like. You don’t expect to feel it again in a building this size.

Then game one of round one drops and it comes back all at once, the way cold water comes back, and I remember it in my body before my head catches up. Everything’s faster and heavier at the same time. Every hit’s got a message in it. The building doesn’t cheer so much as breathe, eighteen thousand people inhaling and holding it through a whole shift and letting it out only when the puck leaves the zone. The stakes I knew from the minors. The size of the room is the new part.

I’m alive in it in a way I haven’t been all year.

I came into this postseason tired but not broken. The county hours stay at twenty-five and bend around the team; Maren cleared the knee weeks ago. The commute still grinds, but I should be carrying more of it than I am. Instead the fatigue burns off somewhere in warmups and what’s left is clean. I win a puck on the wall in the first and the noise finds me, and it isn’t the held breath from the fall. The building has decided. I can hear it. We’re up one late in the second when they start hunting.

You can feel a team make the decision. We’re the better group tonight and they know it, and a team that knows it’s getting outplayed in the playoffs stops trying to play and starts trying to hurt, because a power play’s a coin flip and a fight changes the weather. Their bench gets chirpy. Their hits start landing a half-beat late. The refs feel it coming and can’t do anything about a thing that hasn’t happened yet.

I know this movie. I’ve been the guy they cast in it.