There’s just the six inches between his face and mine, and the thing he said. He’s supposed to be teaching me not to care whatpeople think, but he’s doing the opposite right now with the pie. My head is spinning.
“I think I’m a little drunk,” I tell him.
“Oh, you’re gone.” He says it gently, fondly. “You’re a security risk, Linwood. You’ve said Rowan’s name out loud twice. I’m cutting you off after this one — it’s a matter of national security.”
He lifts the wine out of my hand and sets it down on the sideboard, just past where I can reach it.
And I let him.
I walked into this house earlier today, certain, all the way down to the bone, that I could not stand him. Right now, I cannot, for the life of me, remember why.
I tell myself it’s the wine. The wine is right there on the sideboard where he set it, just out of reach, and it is a perfectly serviceable explanation.
“Eat your slice,” he says, nodding at my plate.
I take another bite of Rowan’s stupid, beautiful, classified pie.
And I don’t bother to hide that I’m smiling.
Chapter 23
Stanley
The back half of the night went easy, and that was the part that should’ve scared me.
The families folded into the living room and stayed there. Coach got the fire going too big, the way men get fires going when they’ve had a few and want something to manage. Somebody put a game on with the sound down to nothing. Coach and my dad got into it over a trade that happened in 2011 — a trade neither of them was responsible for, involving a player neither of them coached, and they argued about it with the heat of two men relitigating a divorce. The moms ended up hip to hip on the couch with their shoes off. Aunt Lisa fell asleep sitting straight up in the wingback chair and woke every few minutes to inform the room she had not been sleeping.
And I sat in the middle of all of it, full of pie that wasn’t mine and warm off one glass of wine, and watched Aspen Linwood be a person in her own house.
Somewhere in there, the lie just went. I couldn’t tell you the minute. One second, I was running a con on a roomful of people,and the next, I was a guy at a holiday next to a girl, laughing at her uncle, and there was no seam between the two, no place where the acting stopped, and the rest of it started. It all just felt like the truth, and I didn’t go looking for the spot where it wasn’t.
Then Carolyn found me on the couch and put her hand flat on the top of my head like I was eight.
“Bed, Stanley. You’ve got a plane in the morning and a game tomorrow night, and I am not sending you onto the ice tired.” She said it the way she’d say it to one of her own. “Go on. Up.”
So I went up to Aspen’s bedroom and set up the trundle. I turned off the light, expecting that to be the end of the night. Then I heard footsteps, and Aspen apologizing as she walked into her own bedroom. She turned on the lamp to get ready for bed. I triple checked that all my alarms were on and ready for the morning. Then the lamp went off, and the room fell silent. I figured she had a few glasses too many and that she’d fall asleep much faster than me.
“When did you know?” she asks through the darkness.
My eyes are still open, looking around at the dark. “Know what?”
“That you’d play. That this was the whole life. Not if you’d be good enough. When you knew it was yours.”
“There wasn’t a when, Linwood.” I’ve never said this out loud. Maybe to anyone, ever. The dark makes it cheaper, somehow — easier to spend. “That’s the part nobody believes when I tell them. My old man won the Cup the year I was born, took one look at the purple, screaming, seven-pound disaster they handed him, and decided right there.Name him after the trophy.So I was the trophy before I could hold a stick. It was decided for me.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“And everybody figures it’s this big certainty I’ve got going. Like I came out of the womb knowing.” I drag a hand downmy face in the dark. “I didn’t know a single thing, Linwood. I got told. That’s the whole difference, and nobody ever hears it. I have never once gotten to find out if I’d have picked it for myself, because nobody ever slowed the train down long enough to ask. There was no morning where somebody went,hey, Stan, you want this one?It just got handed over.Here. It’s yours. Don’t drop it. Smile for the photo.”
She’s quiet for a long minute.
“I started writing reports when I was fourteen,” she says. “Box scores first. Then zone time. Then whole games — ten pages, broken all the way down, on the kitchen table on a Sunday. You want to know why a fourteen-year-old does that.”
“Tell me.”
“Because if I set a report down next to his coffee, he’d look up. He’d read the whole thing. He’d ask me a question about it, and I’d have the answer, because I’d stayed up making sure I had the answer.” Her voice is very level in the dark. “I couldn’t play. I was never going to play. So I learned the whole thing cold instead — every system, every tendency, every line in the league — so I could be useful in the one room in that house that mattered. Useful was as close to that room as I was ever going to get.”
She breathes out, slow.
