I filed it under things that didn't mean anything. The category was already too full.
I thought about it the entire rest of the night.
3
Here's the thing about being the life of the party: you can't stop.
Can't like the alternative is standing still long enough to notice things. Like the way your skull was informing you, politely but firmly, that it had opinions. Like the fact that the noise wasn't landing right tonight, that the drinks were fine and the people were fine and the whole evening was aggressively, relentlessly fine, and fine wasn't what this was supposed to be.
I'd scored on national television. I'd taken a hit and gotten up. The Morr Roar had come down from the upper bowl in a wave.
Tonight should have felt like something.
Part of it was the headache I was refusing to acknowledge.
The rest of it was Cross.
The Ice Doc was still at the bar. Over by the wall, same spot, same drink probably, doing that thing where he existed near a social event without participating in it, like a piece of furniture that had graduated medical school.
He wasn't talking to me. He wasn't telling me what to do. He wasn't doing anything except standing there being six-foot-one of complete stillness in a bar that was doing its absolute best around him.
So why was he still here?
If he were babysitting me, he could at least commit to it. Say something. Pull out the tablet. Do the doctor thing. Instead he was just there, in my peripheral vision, which I was not checking, which I kept checking anyway.
I turned my back on the wall. I gave my full attention to the person in front of me and was enthusiastic back at them because that was the job and I was good at the job.
The TVs above the bar were cycling through postgame coverage, some talking head segment I wasn't watching, when I heard Jenkins's name.
Not from the team.
Three guys a few feet down the bar. I caught it in pieces, through the music, through the noise.
The gist, assembled from fragments: Jenkins was a fourth-round reach who had no business on a first line. Wouldn't be there at all if Morrison wasn't carrying the whole roster. Speaking of which, did you see that hit? Morrison's cooked. Team's been built around a guy who plays like he's auditioning for his own funeral. Wardens are one bad game from being exposed and everyone knows it.
I turned around.
Didn't make a decision to. My body just redirected.
"You wanna repeat that?"
The guy closest to me was maybe twenty-five, thick in the way guys got when they played rugby in college and hadn't stopped eating like they still did. He looked at me with the slow-processing expression of someone who'd had four drinks before I became his problem.
"Easy," he said. "Just talking hockey."
"Sure," I said. "Keep talking, then."
He didn't love that. The guy next to him didn't love it either. I was aware, in the distant background of my attention, that several nearby conversations had gone quiet.
"Jenkins has forty points in forty games. You're a guy in a bar being wrong out loud. One of those is more embarrassing than the other,” I said, because I was not, historically, the type to de-escalate. "You should write that down somewhere so you remember it."
The first guy's face did something complicated. "The hell did you just say?"
"Wesley." Someone behind me. Not relevant.
The guy took a step forward. He was close enough now that I could tell he'd had more than four drinks, and that this had moved past the hockey analysis portion of the evening into something more personal. His friend put a hand on his arm but he shook it off, which was the move of a man who'd decided on a thing.
Then several things happened fast and in the wrong order.
