If they traded me, it would not be because of my game.
I knew what it would be because of.
And I couldn't even be angry at it correctly, because the thing it would be because of , the thing management wasperceiving,the thing ownership was calling a distraction , was a thing I had been protecting, had been careful about, had been managing with both hands for two years out of the same fear that was apparently also in the GM's office, and it was still ,still, costing me.
The parking lot was very quiet.
Charlie put his arm around me.
Not a speech. Not the geometry of it. Not thehere's what I think is happening and here's why it's going to be okay.Just , his arm, around my shoulders, solid and present and without requirement.
"No," he said. "It won't."
We stood there for a moment.
The flat light moved across the parking lot.
Somewhere behind us, the rink did its work , kept the ice, maintained the surface, the refrigeration units patient and reliable and entirely indifferent to the specific human weather of two men standing beside a car.
I breathed.
I did not cry in the parking lot.
I stood in the cold with Charlie's arm around me and I let the even be what it was and I thought about my game , my actual game, the game I had been playing since I was seven years old and had never once not loved , and I thought:that's mine. Whatever else they take, that's mine.
"What do I do," I said.
Charlie was quiet for a moment.
"Nothing today," he said.
I looked at the rink.
"Charlie."
"I know." His arm was still there. "I know."
We stood in the parking lot for a while.
The city moved around us, indifferent and ongoing.
Eventually I got in my car.
Charlie stood in the lot and watched me go.
I drove home.
I sat on the floor.
I did not pull the throw blanket over my knees this time.
I sat on the floor of my apartment and I thought about my game and the numbers and the line that clicked because of four years and muscle memory and something that was still there even when the warmth was gone, and I thought about the wordlikelythat I didn't know about yet, and I thought about a man who was building a case at midnight in an apartment three miles from here, and I thought:
Something is going to have to give.
I didn't know which thing.
I sat with that.
