Page 49 of Home Ice

“Sure,” I said.

It came out before he’d finished the sentence. He stood with his gym bag hanging off one shoulder and looked at me.

“No,” he said. “I asked if you wanted to.”

“Right. Yeah.”

“That’s not an answer either.” He wasn’t loud about it. That was the strange part. Varga did everything at full volume, and this he did quietly, in a concrete garage. No echo. “Rafe. Simple question. Do you want to come with me to meet a bunch of middle-aged Hungarians? Not is it fine, or does it work? Not is it good for everybody? Do you want to?”

I opened my mouth to say sure again and stopped it when I felt it coming. There was nothing behind it. I held my keys.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Exactly,” Varga said.

He didn’t explain it or add anything to it. He squeezed my shoulder once. “Ten o’clock. Wear shoes you can move in. Marta will find you.” Then he walked off between the trucks, whistling something, an errand finished.

The invitation was still standing. He hadn’t taken it back, and he hadn’t accepted my sure, so it was there, open, waiting on an answer I didn’t have.

I got into my truck and put my phone in the console. It landed crooked. I squared it to the edge.

I started the truck, checked the mirror, and backed out. When I got home, it was time for my nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep.

Everything was right. I pulled the blackout curtains, put my phone on the dresser, and set both an alarm and a backup alarm for two-thirty. It was one fifteen as I lay down, the same as every game day since September. Inside my head, I heard Varga’s question again.

Do you want to?

I slept maybe forty minutes total—in little bits and pieces. At two-thirty, the alarm went off, and I was already awake.

I was in the truck by three. I took my laps and kept my routine, stretching at the red line. A few laps with a puck followed, and then I shot twice into the net from the circle.

At the glass by our end, early fans had signs up already. There was a kid in a jersey three sizes too big holding MIKKELSEN spelled out in glitter with the second K backward. I tapped the glass by his sign on my way past, and a huge smile filled his face.

Two teenagers held a bedsheet with my number and Max inside a heart. Little sawdust flecks were glued around Max’s name.

A puck came off the boards to me and I flipped it over the glass to the glitter kid. Forty strangers around him cheered.

“You see the woman in 114?” Trier asked, skating past me.

I looked. Halfway up, dead center, a woman in a Steamers jersey had planted herself with her arms crossed in a row of our fans, daring somebody to say something.

“She got here early,” Trier said. He collected a puck and skated off.

Varga stopped beside me at the line. “You good?”

“Yeah.”

He studied me and slapped my shin with his stick blade. “Score early. I have plans for this game.”

My first shift, I carried the puck along the wall and watched their weak-side defenseman all the way up. He stayed home. So I hit the line and bumped it back to Heath, business as usual, and we cycled forty seconds of clean possession before their goalie stopped a shot under his arm.

On the bench, Coach Markel leaned down the line. “He stayed.”

“He’s watching our center, not the puck,” I said.

“He won’t all night.”

Second shift, he jumped, and I wasn’t ready for it.