Page 92 of Home Ice

“I’ll be at some games,” he said. “The good ones.”

Almost everyone migrated to the living room, but I stayed in the kitchen with Kieran, offering my services. He washed the dishes, and I dried. Neither of us spoke. There was plenty of conversation drifting toward us from the living room.

In the truck, on the way back to my shop, Rafe talked the whole way. He talked about Rook and retirement, and whether Peaches would even like the cat tree. He had at least one thing to say about everyone at the dinner.

***

The booing had stopped. Max said so, and he would never lie about that. On the morning of the game, I decided I wanted to see it for myself, in person.

I opened my laptop.

The seat map came up, ring after ring of little colored dots, and the site and I disagreed immediately about where the good seats were. It kept steering me into the lower bowl, center ice, seats it said offered a premium experience. They would be the seats where the camera would surely find me and broadcast my face in sports media across the country.

There was an alternative, but I’d decided against it. I could have texted Rafe, and he’d get me put on a list where I’d end up sitting next to the wives of players. Mark could do his magic, too. He’d shaken Ma’s hand at the Palmer House and given her a number to call.

Any of those would have worked, but they would have turned my presence into an event. I didn’t want the machine to see me. I only wanted to be present in the building.

In the upper bowl, there were entire rows of dots nobody wanted. I found a section high in a corner, twelve rows from the roof. From up there, I would depend on the jumbotron to read faces, and no camera in the building would have a reason to point at me. The site called the section value seating.

I picked my seat and checked out.

Chapter twenty-three

Rafe

“Minnesota makes heavy use of the forecheck,” Coach Markel said, tapping his tablet against the boards until we circled in. “Two men deep, all night, every shift. They want the puck back four seconds after they lose it. Most nights they get it. So we’re not going to give them a puck that goes north.” He looked down at the tablet, then up at me. “Rafe. Say the thing you said at dinner.”

I hadn’t known Heath would repeat what I had said. “Their third pair gets caught flat if you make them turn twice.”

“Louder.”

I cleared my throat and nearly shouted, “Their third pair can’t turn twice.”

“That’s the game plan,” Coach Markel said. “That’s the whole thing. Everybody wants to beat that forecheck by outrunning it. You can’t. You beat it by making them change direction, and then making them change direction again. They lose it on the second one. East-west before north. Twice through, both units. Go.”

Rook had to pretend to be part of Minnesota’s third pair, and he hated it. The drill only worked if he did his job, and that was getting beaten. On my second time through, I took the puck across the top instead of up the wall, waited for his hips to commit, and brought it back against the grain. He got one full turn in and half of a second one. By then Heath had the puck at the dot with nobody within a stick’s length of him.

“I would like it noted,” Rook said, gliding back to the line, “that an actual Minnesota defenseman is slower than I am.”

“Nobody’s noting that,” Heath said.

“This league lies to its elders.”

We ran it until the second turn was muscle memory, and then Coach Markel moved his cones, and we ran it some more. My body worked out the pattern quickly.

The hallway afterward was crowded again, and it took me a second to sort out why it looked wrong. It was the same size crowd as during the bad weeks. Twice the normal cameras, faces from national shows, and a boom mic. The difference was in their faces. I saw smiles.

Varga surveyed all of it from the tunnel mouth with his gloves under one arm.

“Look at this, Rafe,” he said. “This is a different crowd. Today, they love love. Do you know who did this?”

“Max,” I said.

“Correction. I did this. In November, I taught you to be boring, and you were boring at the correct professional level for five months, so when the interesting thing finally happened, the city was starving for something new.” He nodded at his own logic. “You’re welcome. Yes, Max helped.”

“Max helped,” Trier said, coming up the tunnel behind us. “That should be the title of the video, Max Helps.”

I was almost to the room when Mark came around the corner with his phone in one hand and a folder under his arm.