Page 4 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

The kettle is starting to tick. In eight hours I have an interview in Queen Anne with a sad, private man and two kids who need somebody who won’t perform. That woman doesn’t have a page. That woman never did.

I type it the way the box wants it, capitals and all. DELETE JUNO.

Enter.

The screen holds for a second. Then it’s just Velvet’s front door, logged out, as if there was never anybody by that name.

Before the water boils, I take the ring light down. Tripod folded, lamp unplugged, mask zipped in with the cables, all of it back under the winter blankets. This time I peel the tape off the floor.

Eleven hours, start to finish, 3:40 to 2:40, and I never posted a thing. Nobody saw it but me.

Two years of my life go quiet in the time it takes to boil a kettle. I tell myself that’s the end of it. I am about to be extremely, catastrophically wrong.

Gus

The first batch of pancakes is burning, and nobody in this kitchen is surprised.

“They’re burnt,” Teddy reports from the counter, where he has been narrating my cooking since he woke up.

“They’re always burnt. Scrape the black part off and tell your sister that’s how they come.”

He considers this the way he considers everything, with full emotion on his face. “Margot says you burn them because you don’t flip at the right time.”

“Margot’s right, and also she can flip the next batch.”

Margot does not look up from her book. She’s at the table with her cereal — she stopped eating my pancakes about a year ago, quietly, the way she does everything now. The book is the fourth one about a girl detective. Nora read her the first one. I ask if she slept okay. She says fine. That’s the whole conversation, and it’s longer than yesterday’s.

Teddy fills the silence for both of them. The game he’s inventing this week is called Floor Danger, and the rules change depending on which parts of the kitchen he currently wants to jump off. The game used to be Margot’s. She invented the first version when she was six and refereed it with a whistle Nora regretted buying. Teddy doesn’t remember that. I remember it for everybody.

I made too much batter again. The extra pancakes go into a container, and the container goes into the fridge with the other containers. On Sunday I’ll throw them out and wash everything and put the empties back in the cabinet.

The agency is sending a fourth candidate at ten. Three have come and gone already — one quit by text, and the other two I turned down after a single afternoon each. The last one crouched to Teddy’s level and used a voice I’m certain she practiced in the car. Margot looked at me across the room with an expression I’ve been trying to forget ever since. It said, this is what we get now. It said, don’t you dare.

I came down the stairs one at a time this morning. Twenty-one seasons of hockey live in my right knee, and I feel every one of them around dawn. Six weeks until the season starts, which is when my job wakes up. I’m a part-owner of the Cascades now, which mostly means I shake hands where they point me and give the same eight answers at charity dinners. It’s not hard work. It just requires me to be somewhere that isn’t here, smiling, more days than this house can currently afford.

I tried running it alone last spring, and the wheels stayed on longer than anyone expected, which is not the same as staying on. There was a Thursday in May when a sponsor lunch ran long. Teddy stood outside swim lessons for forty minutes with his towel around his shoulders, telling the front-desk girl his dad was extremely famous and extremely late. He wasn’t upset. That was the worst part. He’d already built it into his day.

Nora’s mother takes the kids on Thursdays. She would take them every day if I asked. There’s a reason I don’t ask.

Eventually the kids are fed, the griddle is soaking, and I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with a towel in my hand, not using it.

The doorbell rings at ten exactly, and Teddy beats me to the hall by half a house. He’s already opened the door by the time I get there — we’ve talked about that — and he’s looking up at a woman in flat shoes with her hair pulled back.

“Are you the new one?” he asks.

“I’m the interview,” she says. “The job comes later, if I don’t blow it.”

“June Ashby,” she tells me over his head, and shakes my hand like it’s a normal hand.

The agency makes candidates sign nine pages before they learn my name. I hate that. Mitch insists on it — Mitch runs the Cascades, has known me since we were rookies together, and guards my privacy harder than I do. So she’s had my name for two days at most. Here is the strange thing, the thing I notice inside the first minute: the name isn’t doing anything to her.

There’s a case in the front hall. Nora set it up — the ring, one of the replica Cups, a framed photo from the parade — because she said pretending it didn’t exist would be worse. Everyone who comes through this door stops at it. The plumber stopped at it. The last candidate gave it a full minute and then told me where she’d been during Game 6.

June walks past it like it’s a coat closet.

I do interviews in the kitchen, because the living room makes people sit up too straight and start performing. She takes the chair I offer, and Teddy takes the one next to her, uninvited, holding the notebook he keeps for serious matters.

“I have questions,” he says.