Page 17 of Home Ice

Max: told you.

Chapter five

Rafe

The team plane boarded in the usual order. Veterans in the back, card table claimed before the door closed, coaches up front with the lineup sheet, and rookies wherever nobody else wanted to be. I had a window seat over the wing, which suited me fine.

I watched the bags going up the belt loader. Mine was third from the end, zipped square.

Trier passed my row on his way to the back, glancing down at the open duffel on the seat beside me.

“Rolled,” he said. “You rolled your socks.”

“They travel better rolled.”

“Fourteen years,” he said as he kept walking. “Fourteen years and now rolled socks.”

The plane filled in around me. Heath and Kieran had the row across from me. Kieran was reading a book. Heath was already asleep.

Varga came down the aisle last, and he was carrying a pillow.

It wasn’t a team pillow. It was his pillow, from his bed at home, compressed into a stuff sack the size of a watermelon. He carried it in front of him, held to his chest, the way other men carry a briefcase full of important documents.

“Before anyone says anything,” he announced, “I want you to think about the last road trip. I want you to think about how you slept.”

“Here we go,” said someone at the card table.

“Every hotel in this league buys the same pillows.” Varga stopped at my row. “The same ones. League-wide. You think that’s a coincidence? They’re engineered. They design them to be almost comfortable. Almost. And you know what an almost-comfortable pillow costs you?”

“Four percent,” said half the plane in unison.

“Four percent of your sleep.” He pulled off compression straps and freed the pillow. It expanded with a sigh, and he held it up as evidence. “Four percent for eighty-two games and the playoffs. Do the math. Nobody does the math.”

“He’s been doing the math for nine years,” Rook said from his seat near the front. “It’s still the same math.”

“Red blood cells and sleep, Mattias. That’s the whole sport. Everything else is decoration.”

Varga went back to claim a seat at the card table, tucking the pillow under one arm like a mascot. The game was already starting. Somebody had shuffled without cutting, and somebody else wanted it known that Varga still owed forty dollars from a flight to Nashville.

The flight attendant did her count. The door was still open, letting in a slice of January cold coming off the tarmac, and I settled against the window.

Rook stood. He walked forward to the front of the cabin, put one hand on a seatback, and turned to face down the length of the plane.

The card game stopped. Somebody reached over and turned the music down without being asked.

“This’ll be quick,” Rook said. “I know we’re on a schedule.”

The engines hummed, and an attendant pulled the door shut.

“Next season’s my last one,” Rook said. “I decided after talking to Varga and my agent. The team’s announcing it next week, and I wanted you guys to hear it from me first. That’s it.”

It was as direct as my announcement three days earlier.

Rook stood there with his reading glasses pushed up on his head. They were new since November, and he took exactly one day of grief about them before it was old news. He waited for comments.

“Okay,” Cross said. “Then we’ll make the rest of this season and next season worth it. We’ll do it right.”

Coach Markel nodded once from the front, like Rook had confirmed a practice time.