Page 156 of Across His Line

He nods. “That.”

I look down at my notebook.

“You’re going to figure it out,” he says.

And he goes.

He pulls the door almost closed behind him. Not all the way. I hear his footsteps cross the hall. I hear his door open, and he doesn’t close it.

I open the notebook again. I take the pen out of the crease. And I look down at the page, at CAP circled at the top and ME = CAP at the bottom and all the lines in between.

I draw a line through CAP.

Under it, I write:

NO CEILING.

24

It’s Sixty-Eight Degrees

Rafe

I’m on the couch in my room with a game on the TV. West Coast, two teams I don’t care about, third period, and I’m not watching it. I’m thinking about her face when I said it.

If you want it to be.

She turned red.

I knew what I was doing when I said it. I even thought about it before it came out. I said it to see what she’d do. And she sat there on that bed with her finger stuck in her notebook, and her face went pink first, and she couldn’t look at me.

I make myself look at the game. A defenseman for the team in white is cheating up on the left side, and it’s going to cost him. Two passes later, it’s in the back of his net. Hockey always makes sense.

I don’t think about her blush. I think about her notebook.

CAP. Circled at the top. All those lines with her in every single one of them.

I’ve never thought about money like that. Not once. Money was just there. The car was there. The house was there. And hockey was going to make more of it. Draft, then a contract, then whatever came after. It was never a question of how. It was just a question of how much.

And she just took her whole life apart and thought bigger. She taught herself the ceiling of business. She doesn’t want to be rich. Not really. I listened. She wants freedom.

I know something about that. I know a lot about that.

But she’s building her way out of it from nothing. And I’m going the direction everybody has always told me I’m going, as fast as I can, and I’ve never once stopped to think about whether there’s a ceiling because my whole life, everybody’s been telling me how high I’m going to go.

The door opens across the hall, and then she comes in and closes my bedroom quietly behind her.

She’s showered. Her hair’s wet and combed straight back off her face, dripping a little onto the shoulders of a big gray T-shirt that comes down almost to her knees over the same sweatpants with the hole in the knee. Thick socks. No makeup. She smells like the soap in the guest bathroom, cedar and something.

She crosses the room and sits down on the far end of the couch, her end, with the whole middle between us, and pulls her feet up under her.

I keep looking at the TV. And the thing in my chest lets go again. The same thing as in the car this morning when she was coming here and not going there. The same thing as this afternoon, on the bottom step of the old house when I watched her shoulders come down.

Relief.

Apparently that’s what I'm calling it.

She watches the game for a while. A minute. Two. A whistle. A faceoff.