Page 42 of Across His Line

The club is in the city, an hour north, in a brick building with no sign on it, because if you have to ask where it is, you aren’t a member. A man takes my coat. Another man takes my father’s. We go up a staircase with a red runner and into a private room with dark wood on the walls and a fire going and a long table set for twelve, and there’s nobody here yet but one guy standing at the window with a glass of water.

He turns around when we come in.

Mid-fifties. Gray at the temples. A suit that’s good but not my father’s kind of good, and a team pin on the lapel so small you’d miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking at. I know what I’m looking at.

“Rafferty,” my father says, with his hand already on my shoulder, steering. “This is Mark Morley. Mark runs amateur scouting for the Sentinels.”

I know the name. I knew it before my father finished saying it. I read it last spring, a hundred times, in every article about the draft I told everyone I wasn’t reading. Director of Amateur Scouting. The guy who runs their list. The guy who sat at their table in June and decided who they took and who they didn’t.

They didn’t take me. Nobody did.

Morley shakes my hand. Dry palm. Short grip. He looks me in the eye for exactly as long as he needs to and then lets go.

And for about five seconds, all I can think is, you motherfucker.

Not Morley. My father.

He knew. He’s known for weeks. He called my coach twice, pulled me from a game, had my mother send a suit, and told me people you should know. He didn’t say a word, because if he’d told me, I’d have had a choice. I could have said no. I could have said I’d rather play. I could have walked into this room on my own, knowing what was in it. So he made sure I didn’t. He made sure I was standing here in his tie with his hand on my shoulder before I knew what I was standing in.

That’s what he does. He doesn’t give you a door. He walks you through it and lets you find out on the other side.

I want to take his hand off me. I want to turn around, walk back down that red staircase, get my coat from the man, and tell Martin to take me back to Woodbury in time for the third period. I can feel it in my legs, how good it would feel.

We sit down. My father at the head. Morley across from me. A waiter pours something into a glass I don’t touch.

“We’ve had people at four of your games,” Morley says.

I don’t move.

I was going to. I had my hands on the edge of the table. And then he said that, and everything in me goes still, all at once.

Four games.

Not tonight. Not because my father made a phone call. Before. They were in the building, in the stands, with their notebooks and their radar guns and their bad coffee, and I was on the ice, and I didn’t know.

“You were on our list last June,” he says. “Late. We liked the hands. Didn’t like them enough to spend a pick. There were questions.”

“What questions?”

My father shifts at the head of the table. He doesn’t like that I asked. Morley doesn’t look at him.

“Your skating was a year behind your hands,” Morley says. “You were playing against kids who couldn’t touch you, so it was hard to tell what you’d look like against men. And you decided too much on your own.”

“Meaning.”

“Meaning you hold onto the puck when you’re angry.”

I sit there.

That’s what Berwyn said on Tuesday with his whistle. That’s what Kennebeck says every time he comes off the ice with his jaw tight. I was open. And here’s a man I’ve never met, who’s never once been in my locker room, saying it across a white tablecloth like he’s been reading over my shoulder.

“You were interesting in June,” Morley says. “You’re a lot more interesting now.”

He goes through all of it. He doesn’t flatter me. I don’t think he knows how. He tells me my first three strides are better than they were six months ago, quicker off the line, lower. He tells me my release will play at the next level, that I get it off before goalies are set and that’s not something you can teach. He tells me where I like to enter the zone, wide on the right, and that I cut back to my forehand more than I should, and that by spring, every defenseman in the conference is going to know it. He tells me my shooting percentage, which I didn’t know, and how many times in four games I carried it in alone when I had a man open, which I definitely didn’t know, and the number is not small.

And he tells me about Rubin.

“Two for roughing,” he says. “Second period. Tie game. Against a team that couldn’t have hurt you if they tried.”