I said, “Maple.”
She turned. There was foam on her wrist. She was careful not to touch her face with it.
“What time do you close.”
“Eight at night,” she said. “Six on Sundays.”
“Got it.”
I left.
The Frostbite Arenawas four miles east of town, set back off the highway in a stand of pines. I parked my truck in the staff lot at eight-fifteen and sat in the cab with the engine off until the cold started to find my hands.
Maddox Ash was at the rink-side door when I came in.
“Iron.”
“Maddox.”
Maddox clapped me on the shoulder twice. The clap had weight. Maddox’s hand, I knew from twelve years of friendship, was the hand of a man who had played one season in the show and lost the rest of his career to a knee that had bent the wrong way. The hand had a particular kind of strength in it. The strength of a man who had decided to stay in the game from thewrong side of the glass. To build something instead of playing in it.
“You ready.”
“No.”
“Good. Anyone says yes is lying.”
The locker room was full. Eight men in various stages of dress. Six were still pulling on jerseys. Two were doing tape work on their wrists. I had seen photos of all of them. I had read every one of their stat sheets. I could have given any of them their plus-minus from last season. Their numbers were a language I still spoke when I was alone in the apartment in the dark.
Maddox brought me into the room.
“Boys. Knox Kovak. Twelve seasons in the show, two Cup runs, two of the best save percentages in Eastern Conference history. Coaching our goalies now. Listen to him. He is going to make you better.”
There were nods. Hands extended. Names traveled past me and lodged where they were supposed to lodge — Wilder Pratt with the green eyes, Banks Bankhurst who looked too thin around the edges of his face like grief had taken shape, Theo Nash who did not look at me directly, Hudson Vance in the corner who looked like he could break things and probably had.
Beckham Cole, the head coach, was already on the bench. He came over once and shook my hand and saidwelcome home,like home was a place I could go back to instead of a place I was running from.
Then he went back to watching the kid in the net warm up.
The kid was nineteen years old. AHL contract. Sixth-round pick. I had read his file on the plane. The file said the kid was good. The file did not say the kid was scared.
I could see the scared from the bench. It was in the way the kid’s glove hand trembled. In the way he was overcommitting to the left. In the way he was thinking instead of feeling.
I sat on the bench and watched him take twenty pucks before I said anything to anyone.
When I stood up, I let the breath out slow. I had not been on the ice in two years and one month and four days. The kid was waiting. The crease was waiting. I was the one stalling.
I stepped onto the ice for the first time in two years and one month and four days.
My skates remembered. The blade edges found the ice and the ice held. My body remembered what to do. My ankles remembered the position. My hands remembered the reach.
The cold remembered me too. It hit me in the ankles and the wrists and the back of my neck the way it had when I was nineteen and standing in the crease at Boston University the first day Caleb had told me,kid, you’re going to be a goalie. That’s just what you are.The cold was familiar. The cold was home.
Maddox skated past me going the other way, slow. He bumped his shoulder against mine once. Not hard. A greeting. An acknowledgment.
“Welcome back, Iron.”
I watched Maddox’s shoulder leave my shoulder. Watched him keep skating toward the boards.
