Milo
Milo Vance had a system, and it was simple: don’t feel things, and if you accidentally feel something, sit with it in silence until it goes away.
Four to one. Columbus. The kind of loss where nobody on the bus ride home made eye contact, where the equipment manager moved through the locker room like a man defusing a bomb, where even Kasner, who could find the bright side of a severed limb, had nothing to offer except his shitty music turned up too loud.
Milo peeled the tape off his wrists in three strips each. Left, then right, same order every time, because the order was the one thing in his day that did exactly what he told it to. The adhesive resisted, then gave. That sound, the slow rip of tape separating from skin, was more satisfying than anything that had happened on the ice tonight.
Around him, two of the younger guys were arguing about a play in the third period. The argument was already revisionist. They were rewriting the game into a version they could live with, which was a neat trick Milo had never figured out how to do. He’d been playing professional hockey for eight years, and after every loss, the game just sat in his chest like a rock he’d swallowed. No revision. No rewrite. Just the rock, and the knowledge that he’d have to carry it until the next game replaced it with a different one.
He pulled the right skate’s lace free and started on the boot.
“Food?” Brody said from his stall.
“No.”
“Steakhouse has that—”
“No.”
Brody nodded once and went back to his own tape. Good man, Brody. Two years of being road roommates and he’d figured out that the best thing he could do for Milo after a loss was stop talking. Most people never figured that out. Most people heard silence and panicked and tried to fill it, and every word they used to fill it made Milo want to put his head through the wall.
Kovac rose. The room shut up, because rooms shut up when Kovac did anything. That was the main reason Kovac was a good captain. Some captains gave speeches. Kovac just existed with authority.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Seven AM. Be better.”
He sat back down. Nobody had anything to add to that, which was the second reason Kovac was a good captain.
The coaches’ door opened. Strand came through along the far wall, not toward the players but past them, saying something low to an assistant that Milo caught the shape of but not the words. He moved through the room without disturbing it, shoulders level, hands at rest, and pushed out through the corridor exit. The door settled back into its frame and the room kept going as if he’d never been in it.
Milo finished the gear in order. Shin guards, pants, shoulder pads. He showered after the room cleared out, because the water pressure was better and because he didn’t love being naked around twenty other men. Not for the reason he couldn’t think about. For the other reason, the normal one, which was that he liked being alone. That was the reason. The only reason.
He stood under the hot water with his palms flat on the tile and replayed the third period one more time. The puck on his stick in the slot, the half-second where the shot was there, the goalie’s pad sliding across, the puck deflecting wide. The flat dead sound of rubber hitting boards behind the net. That sound was the sound of nothing happening, and Milo had heard it twice tonight.
Two shots. Zero points. One hit that had split a guy’s lip on the glass, which the ref hadn’t called, which meant Milo had drawn blood and gotten nothing for it. Great. Productive evening.
* * *
The car smelled like his equipment bag. It always smelled like his equipment bag. At this point he wasn’t sure the car had ever smelled like anything else. He’d probably try to sell it someday and the dealership would open the door and flinch and quietly suggest he keep it.
He drove the route on autopilot, the familiar sequence of turns and lights running themselves while he replayed the third period. Again. The shot that wasn’t there. The pass he’d forced. The turnover at the blue line that had led to nothing good. His brain was a highlight reel of his own failures, looping, and the only thing that had ever made it stop was the bar.
Not the bourbon. Not the warmth. The bartender.
He wasn’t going to think about that. He wasn’t going to think about why the game stopped replaying in his head when he sat on the third stool from the right and a man with paint on his wrists poured bourbon without being asked. He wasn’t going to think about broad shoulders and glasses that slid down and hands that moved through the narrow space behind the bar like the space had been built around them. He wasn’t going tothink about any of that, because thinking about it would require acknowledging what it meant, and acknowledging what it meant would break the system, and the system was the only thing keeping him functional.
So. The bar.
He parked on the second level of the structure across the street and looked at the donut sign. Six letters, four working. N, U, T, S. He considered that, decided it was funny in a way he’d never tell anyone, and got out of the car.
* * *
The door was wrong before he opened it.
No, that wasn’t right. The door was the same door, heavy and crooked in its frame, paint layered thick enough to feel under his hand. But the sound coming through it was off. Sports radio. Tinny, too loud, leaking through the gap between the door and the frame where the weather stripping had given up. The bartender played vinyl. Always. A woman’s voice under piano, or a trumpet doing something low and warm, or a bass line that filled the room without crowding it. Not sports radio. Not a postgame show about the loss Milo had just showered off.
He pushed through anyway.
The bar was the same bar. Black walls, cherry mahogany, the low light pulling the red out of the wood. The stools with their uneven legs. The EMPLOYEES ONLY sign with the E hanging crooked. Everything in the right place.
