It's the end of everything I've bled three years for.
The car swings around in the gravel and leaves. It was just some kid using the empty lot to flip a U-turn. Headlights gone. Field dark again.
Neither of us moves for a second.
“It was nothing,” I say.
“It's never going to be nothing, though.” She sits up. The laugh's gone out of her. It hurts me to see it gone. “That's the part I keep running. There's no night where one set of headlights doesn't scare the shit out of us or end us. We just got lucky tonight.”
I don't have a good response to that, so I don't give her one.
My phone goes off against the wheel well. It’s Christian. My little brother doesn't call to shoot the shit. I do that. When he calls, there’s a reason.
“I have to take this. It's my brother.” I climb out of the truck bed and walk a few feet into the dark, because some things don't need an audience.
“Hey. What happened?” I listen. The water heater's dead, Mom's gone wherever Mom goes, and Christian is standing in a cold house with a fourteen-year-old and a ten-year-old looking at him like he's supposed to know how the world works. “How much? Okay, don't call some guy off Marketplace, you'll get robbed. I'll send it right now. You call the store in the morning to buy a replacement.” A pause. “You're doing fine, man. You're not supposed to know how to do any of this. Put Bean on so I can say goodnight.”
I talk to my ten-year-old sister Bean (real name Catherine) about her spelling test in the middle of a dead drive-in until she's bored with me, and then I hang up and stand in the dark a minute before I remember I’m on a date.
When I come back, Jasmine hasn't asked anything. She's just made room.
“Everybody okay?” she asks.
“Water heater died.” I use my phone to send Christian the money through the financial app he prefers. “Three hundred bucks.” I sit back down heavier than I got up. “That's the thing nobody gets about hockey. It's not a dream to me. It's hot water, and a kid's braces, and Christian getting to be nineteen instead of somebody's father.”
“I know,” she says, and the thing is, maybe she doesn’t actually know, but she definitely understands.
“Carolina called,” I say. I was holding this for later. “The visit at the apartment went the way it was supposed to.”
She goes still. “And?”
“Development camp this summer. Contract on the table after graduation. Two-way, entry level, but it's the league, it's the whole thing.” I make myself say the rest. “There's one string. I finish the season with nothing on my record. No incidents, not one. The scout said it twice, real friendly, the way you say a thing you mean. They want me, and I quote, locked in. No distractions.”
The words sit there.
“No distractions,” she says.
“His words. Not mine.”
“But you know who the distraction is in that sentence.” Flat. “It's the coach's daughter you can't be seen with, who works for the program that grades you.”
“Don't.”
“I'm not doing anything. I'm reading the sentence the way it's written.” She wraps her arms around her knees. “Four seconds ago, a kid in a Civic could have almost ended your career. No hot water heater. No braces. Everything gone to shit. That's the new math. You don't even have to lose your temper on the ice anymore. You just have to be standing near me when the wrong person looks up.”
“So why do you look like somebody handed you good news?” I ask, confused.
“Because it is good news. It's everything you've worked for; it's for your brother, your sisters. It's a warm house and peace of mind.” She turns and looks at me straight on, which she almost never does. “I'm allowed to be happy for you and be the problem at the same time. I am fucking amazing like that.”
That pulls a laugh out, I didn't think I had left tonight.
“Here's what I'm not doing,” I tell her. “I'm not going to sit here and watch you do the noble thing in your head where you figure out a way to back out of this. I can see you considering it. You want me to get on a plane to Carolina, and you go back to being nobody's anything…or worse with somebody else. That shit ain’t happening.”
“It would be the smart play.”
“It'd be the worst thing anybody ever did to me, and that’s saying something. One time, my best friend, when I was five, gave me ringworm.”
“Is ringworm contagious?”
