Page 55 of The Reckless Rookie

Then I wipe my face and check the mirror and pull back onto the road, and I drive toward a life I don’t want, having done the right thing, having lost her anyway.

Nobody warned me those two could happen in the same breath. Do it right. Lose it anyway.

Turns out right doesn’t mean you get to keep the thing.

It means you get to keep yourself.

Chapter thirty

Finn

The new place outside Boerne has cattle and exactly one horse, an old gelding nobody rides because his back went bad years ago.

Cattle don’t read you the way horses do. They eat, shift, and watch only when you give them a reason. The quiet isn’t comfort. It’s absence.

I figured that’d be a mercy. Nobody reading me.

But I got used to being read.

The operation’s bigger than the Delgado place and half as alive. More acres, more head, a foreman named Pruitt who runs it off a clipboard and doesn’t care that a city pays to watch me skate, which is the one thing here I’ve got no complaint about. I muck and I mend and I haul. My hands know all of it now, and nobody says no until I get it right, because nobody’s watching close enough to bother, and I didn’t understand until it was gone that the no was somebody deciding I was worth correcting.

The county keeps my in-season requirement at twenty-five hours and stacks it into three ranch shifts around practice, games, treatment, meetings, and travel. The drive to the arena is under forty-five minutes when traffic cooperates. It’s still two lives, but it’s no longer a schedule built to break a rookie before the playoffs.

Marcus calls after my second shift. Sebastian’s firm acknowledged the preservation demand but didn’t produce the footage. The injured man’s civil claim is still open, which means the tape and every version of it are discoverable.

“They can delay,” Marcus says. “They can’t make it disappear now.”

I write down every date and every name. Old me would have called waiting weakness. This version understands it as pressure applied in the right place.

I make the drive to San Antonio whenever the team schedule calls. I strip the ranch off in an arena parking lot. Now there are only two men in the truck: the one who works and the one who plays. The third one, the happy one, I left at a stop sign on a county road, and I’ve stopped expecting him back.

We took the first round, and now it’s the second. One series from the conference final.

I’m playing the best hockey of my life, and I feel almost nothing about it.

I can’t say that to Mack, who keeps calling it a heater, who doesn’t know that a man with nothing left to lose plays loose because loose is just a nicer word for empty. The puck finds me. I get to it first. I go to the net-front and eat what their D hands me in the paint and I don’t swing back, and it isn’t even hard anymore, holding that line, because the thing that used to make me want to swing was having something to protect. I handed all of that back at forty miles an hour in the dark.

Here’s what I keep waiting for, and it keeps not coming.

The blow-up.

Old me had a move for a night like this. Lose the thing, find something to break so the losing has company. There’s a bar off Main Street, and a man like me could stand there until somebody supplied the wrong sentence. That door’s still open.

I keep walking past it.

Not because I’m strong. Because I know how it plays. The relief lasts one second, and then you’re standing over a fresh wreck with the old one still sitting in your chest, untouched, and now there’s two of them.

She’s close now. Weeks, maybe less. Breech, the vet said, watch her, and I’m forty-five minutes from the only barn I want to be standing in. Some nights I catch myself planning the drive back as if it’s allowed, then remember there’s a county order and a stall I was told to leave. The distance is smaller. The line isn’t.

And what I turn over the whole way home with the windows down, is that the bottom is where I finally find out what it did to me. Not on the ice, where eighteen thousand people are grading it. Here. Where the count is zero. A guy alone in a cattle town who lost the one good thing he ever made with his own hands, and did not go looking for something to break over it.

I don’t feel redeemed. Redeemed is a word for men who get to keep the girl.

I feel like myself. The one who was under all the swinging the entire time, waiting for me to run out of things to hit.

I pull into Boerne near two, and the cattle don’t look up, and I lie down in another bunk that smells like other men’s boots.

Chapter thirty-one