Page 49 of Power Play

I’d made a number of rules in my life and kept nearly all of them. I’d never been late to Iris’s daycare, not one time, including when I had the flu. When Katya left I said out loud in an empty apartment that Iris would never know a single day of it, and she never knew a single day of it.

So when I said it out loud with both hands on the wheel, I meant it.

It was the same door, the same corridor, the same fluorescent hum, and the same smell of rubber and disinfectant and wet gear and cold. Every rink I’d ever walked into smelled like that, from a barn in Transcona with a leaking roof to this one, and I’d never minded it.

Dom had the weight room lights half on. I did the hip series and the band work and the slack stretch at the end.

“You’re early,” he said.

“I’m always early.”

“You’re early for you.”

I let that sit. Dom didn’t require an answer, which was why Dom was good at his job.

Then came the stall, and the tape. I did two sticks, the same as before every game since I was fifteen. I went toe to heel, with thumb pressure at the heel so the edge sat flat, then wax, then the knob, which took me longer than anybody else in the room because I built it in three passes. Cole had been calling it a diagnosable condition since my first week in Phoenix.

Kasperi sat down across from me and put his phone away, which with Kasperi meant he’d decided what he was going to say before he sat down.

“Your daughter is at a sleepover,” he said. “So tonight your house is empty.”

“Tape your stick.”

The house wasn’t empty. He had it wrong, and I wasn’t going to hand a Finn the correction.

Everybody had told me the hard part was the front end, the diapers and the two a.m.s. Nobody had said one word about the back end, where the work succeeded and my daughter walked into a house in Peoria without one backward step. She was going to keep walking into rooms without me for the rest of her life, a little at a time, starting with a sleepover, a flashlight, and no banana.

Cole rounded the corner from the shower wearing a towel and no visible plan to put clothes on.

“Kovac. I need you to confirm a rumor. Iris told Danny that Gerald has been on a hunger strike for weeks.”

“He hasn’t broken yet.”

“Weeks.” Cole put his free hand over his heart. “That dragon has more conviction than our entire second line.”

“Get dressed.”

“There are forty-one cats in that folder I sent you, Eli. Forty-one.”

The cat bed was still in my stall. Cole had put it there on Tuesday. It was round and gray, with fleece lining and a small embroidered fish on one side. It hadn’t been moved and it hadn’t been mentioned, and every man in the room was enjoying the silence more than he’d admit. Instead they’d started leaving things in it, one at a time, and I never caught anybody doing it. So far there were four pucks, a roll of tape, and a granola bar, which was new. I sat down in front of the lot of it, put my skates on top of the pile, and started getting dressed.

Ryan pulled up at my stall with his tie in his hand.

“How’s your kid?”

“Somebody else’s problem until noon tomorrow.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Ryan Lindqvist never repeated a question, and wouldn’t take a worse answer. He stood there until a better one showed up.

“She didn’t look back,” I said.

He nodded slowly and didn’t tell me it was a good thing. I already knew it was, and he knew knowing it didn’t help.

“First one’s the worst,” he said. “For you. Not for her.”

“You don’t have kids.”