"Hey." His voice is the same. It sounds like him, and I can picture him on the couch in the living room of the apartment I've been in twice.
"How was the game?" he says.
"Good. We won. I had a backhand goal in the second."
"A backhand? You never go backhand."
"I have lately."
"Since when?"
"September."
"Huh." A pause. When he was here, he would have wanted the details. The angle, the goalie's positioning, the lane. He would have rated the goal on his internal scale and told me the rating and we would have debated every decimal.
"That's good," he says. "That's really good, Wes."
"Yeah. How was practice?"
"Fine. Marchetti is still doing that thing where he puts his pre-wrap on top of his slides."
"He's been doing that since training camp."
"I told him it's a cry for help. He said it's a system." Another pause. Longer. "The team is good. We're, you know…It's good."
"Good."
The silence sits between us for three seconds. The space on these calls has been getting wider. Neither of us knows how to fill it because filling it used to happen in the kitchen with the laptop open and the spreadsheet loading and his bare feet on the tile.
"I should sleep," he says.
"Yeah. Early skate?"
"Seven-thirty."
"Get some rest."
"You too." A beat. "I miss you."
“Miss you, too, Luca.” I have more I want to say but hold back. Instead I give the easier words. “Love you.”
“Love you.”
The call ends. I set the phone down on the counter and look at it. The screen goes dark. I stand there for a minute, maybe two, and then go to bed.
The next night, I go to Kevin’s place for dinner. Austin is already there when I arrive. Grant is on the couch with a beer, one leg over the arm, shoes on Kevin's coffee table. Kevin has ordered Thai.
"You're late," Kevin says.
"I'm on time."
"You're late by my standards."
"Your standards involve arriving before the food, which is not a standard."
"It is a standard. It is the foundational standard. Austin, tell him."
"He's not wrong," Austin says. He is unpacking containers on the kitchen island. "The food is the event. You arrive before the event."
