Page 15 of He Has Trouble (Boston Brawlers Hockey)
Chapter 7
Angela left late in the morning and the day got cloudy. The emptiness hit me when the door closed behind her, like a wall of unforgiving cement rose unexpectedly in front of me and I slammed into it. The vacation my mind had been on came to an end, the feelings of closeness and warmth, that deep connection to another human being that I hadn’t been fully aware I was starved for, faded, receding under the reality of loss, regret, aloneness.
It didn’t take me long to turn off the ability to feel, to go back to the numb state I’d become familiar with. I sat at the kitchen table, poured a glass of whiskey from the cheap bottle I’d found. My father had no taste buds I discovered as I took a swig and choked it down like medicine. But I shoved the bottle away and tossed the empty glass into the sink where it crashed no doubt into a mess of shards.Fuck. There was no way I would allow myself to turn into my old man. I’d never been a big drinker and I wasn’t about to start now.
It was time to do what I needed to do. The team was expecting me back in two days. I made the call to coach. It was the day after Christmas and we had a game tomorrow that I was scheduled to miss. But it was iffy whether I could get back in time for the game at the end of the week when I was supposed to return. I needed to get a couple extra days off so I could bury my old man.So I could spend some nights in Angela’s arms.
If it was any other player any other time, coach would understand. As it was with my suspension, my second in my three-year tenure at Toronto, he might not be in a sympathetic mood. Not even for the death of a family member. I’d brought it on myself. If I hadn’t been one of the team’s top scorers at right wing, no way would he have put up with my rebellious attitude, my partying to the edge of unhealthy.
Shrugging, I pulled the phone from my pocket, still sitting at the kitchen table in the filthy kitchen where my old man had spent his last days. Drinking himself into oblivion, all the way to the promise land where he wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning to face another day without her. My mother. I didn’t count much. His son hadn’t turned out to be someone worth waking up for. Can’t say I blamed him totally. I was an angry fucker most of the time. We’d been quite a dysfunctional pair all through my adolescence and my teen years, taking out our anger on each other, reserving our very worst for the minutes we spent with each other—which I tried to minimize to double digits on any given day.
I punched coach’s number in my phone and listened to it ring two, three times. I was going to hang up, now aware that it was still early for some, only seven-thirty a.m. But he answered.
“What the fuck, Mackenzie?”
“Merry Christmas, coach.” I said more to make him feel like a jerk than because I’d meant it.
“Yeah, it was a merry Christmas yesterday. This morning not so much. What the hell did you wake me for?”
“My father passed away yesterday at Christmas dinner.” I was good at being an asshole, smiling at his silence, picturing his face turn red in shame.
“Oh… shit. Sorry. I… Anything I can do?”
“No. I’m not having a service. Just burying him, but I’ll need a couple of extra days.” Silence, then the sound of bedclothes moving and a door closing.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that. We got something going on. In the works.” His voice was hushed and serious then, no longer annoyed, maybe even a hint of excitement.Hell no.
“You’re fucking trading me.” Silence. This time it stretched, but I’d be damned if I’d break. This was his accusation to deny. He cleared his throat.
“I’m not at liberty to go into— “
“Bull shit. My dam father just died, coach. Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
He let out a heavy breath, but then he talked. “Nothing’s final, so do not breathe a word of it or I’ll ruin your ass.”
I grunted at his worn-out threat.
“We’re working on a deal for a trade. You for a defenseman and a draft pick.”
“What team.” My words were tight, demanding. He relented.
“Boston Brawlers. But don’t— “
“Are you shitting me?” The roiling in my gut at the talk of a trade came to a halt. My chest tightened and my breathing shallow.
“No. For some reason, they want you and our fucking GM is going to try and soak them for whatever we can. For my part, I say we can all use a fresh start.” He paused. I said nothing because I couldn’t. The thundering of my heart would have scared me if I wasn’t a strong and fit twenty-five-year-old, not a heart attack risk. But I was in danger of anxiety choking me, so I forced a long shuddering breath through my lungs, wishing with every ounce of the blood raging through me that Angela was here right now, to hold me together.
“I always wanted to be a Brawler,” I managed to sound flip because I needed to, it was my go-to defense mechanism, to hide my vulnerability.
“Fitting,” coach said. “But I’m truly sorry about your dad, Brady. I’ll tell the GM to negotiate a couple of extra days in the deal for you. Not a word about this for forty-eight hours.”
“Thanks.” Ending the call, I deflated, felt as if the whole conversation never happened, as if I had not just been traded the day after my dad died to the team we’d both dreamed about me playing for since I was seven years old and showed promise.
I felt dead inside, on auto-pilot. I had nothing against coach, not really. The emotion drained from me until I felt nothing one way or another about the trade to Boston, knowing I should be ecstatic. I’d grown up a Boston fan, dreamt since I was five years old in pee-wee hockey of playing for the Brawlers. Shared the dream with my dad. And my mom. When I started dominating my team and the whole youth league I played for. Turned out we’d all had the same dream, for me to play for the Boston Brawlers someday.
Someday had just arrived, exactly one day too late.
Being traded now, a day after losing my dad, felt too much like a bad joke. Me playing for my dream team now couldn’t feel real, didn’t feel real, lost all its meaning. The trade only piled on top the changes piling up in my life, derailing me. It was as if everything that was familiar, everything that was my life, was disappearing, deserting me.
