Page 1 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

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Thirty-four shots, and none of them go in.

The last one comes with eleven seconds left, a wrister from the top of the circle that I’ve read since the winger crossed the blue line. I take it in the chest, hold it. The horn blares. That’s the game: Toronto nothing, us two.

I tap the left post twice with my stick, then the right post twice. Always that order. If it feels wrong, I’ll do it over again. Tonight, it comes out right the first time.

Emil is over the boards before the horn finishes. He’s twenty-three and can’t stand still. He skates the length of the ice with his mask pushed up on his forehead like the win is his. I let him have that. Beau gets to me first, driving his shoulder into my chest hard enough to move me back a foot.

“Thirty-four,” Beau says. “Thirty-four, you miserable bastard.”

“Some of them were easy.”

“None of them were easy.” He grabs my mask cage and shakes it. “Say thank you, Beau. Say thank you for blocking that one in the second.”

“Thank you, Beau.”

“Better.” He’s already skating away, arms out, hollering at the corner where his wife and four kids sit at every home game.

The handshake line forms. I let Emil get into it ahead of me. He deserves the ice, and I don’t want the cameras.

The tunnel is cold, smelling of rubber matting and somebody’s cigarette smoke drifting in from the loading bay. My hip catches on the third step down. I put weight through it until it comes loose again.

I sit in my stall for forty minutes. Peel the tape off both wrists. Roll it into a ball. Put my pads in the bag in the order they come off, which is the reverse of the order they go on.

The room empties in stages. Beau last, because Beau is always last, standing in the doorway with his coat half on and his phone against his ear, telling somebody at home that yes, he’s coming, yes, he’ll get milk.

“You eating?” he says to me on his way past.

“Yeah.”

“Liar.” He knocks the doorframe twice with his knuckles and goes.

The showers drip. A vacuum starts up somewhere out in the concourse. My mouth tastes like the inside of a mouthguard. The sweat has gone cold in my hair. I sit there under the lights with a towel around my neck until the last of the equipment guys asks if I want the room locked. I say yes, and I get up.

The players’ garage is on level two, empty except for four cars. Mine is the oldest—fifteen years old, blue where it isn’t rusted. The driver’s door needs a shove before it opens.

I get in before I look at my phone.

Nine missed calls. All from Fin.

The first is at 6:52, fourteen minutes after warmup started. Then 7:20. Then five between the second and third periods. Then two after the horn.

There’s also one voicemail from a blocked number, forty-one seconds long.

I hold my thumb over it. The garage lights buzz on their timer. The concrete is wet by the drain where somebody hosed a car down. I sit there with the key in the ignition and my thumb on the screen.

Forty-one seconds is a long message. A wrong number would be four. A robocall is twelve before it hangs up. Forty-one seconds means a man came prepared. He wrote down what he wanted to say, then said all of it into a machine without hurrying.

Nobody with good news calls from a blocked number.

I delete it without playing it.

Then I call Fin.

It goes to voicemail. That’s when my hands start shaking.

Fin’s house is twenty minutes east, a two-bedroom with vinyl siding and a truck in the drive that says DOYLE CONTRACTING on the side in letters he paid a guy four hundred dollars to put on eight years ago. The porch light is off. The kitchen light is on.