Page 7 of On His Team

Blue looks at him. “Nobody accused you.”

Stanley shrugs. “Felt implied.”

He throws his bag into the bed of the truck and spreads both arms toward the empty street.

“Happy fucking New Year.”

His voice carries halfway down the block.

Benson unlocks the truck. Percy gets in behind him and immediately puts his hood up, presses his head to the window, and shuts his eyes. Blue takes the middle. Stanley gets the passenger seat. I’m behind him.

The heat blows cold air at us for the first few minutes, so nobody bothers taking their gloves off. Benson starts the defroster, and we sit in the driveway watching a small clear patch appear at the bottom of the windshield.

Stanley twists around in his seat. “I want to say something.”

“No,” Blue says.

“I’m serious.”

“It’s too early,” Blue says.

Stanley ignores him. “I had to do unspeakable things to convince Aspen to spend Christmas at her parents’ house to watch eighteen games of our hockey.”

Benson looks over. “Your point?”

Then Stanley’s expression changes slightly. “I forwarded the report to Fuller.”

Benson takes his eyes off the windshield. “You did?”

“Yeah.”

There’s a short silence.

Nobody tells Stanley that was stupid.

Aspen knows hockey. Nobody in this truck needs convincing of that. Her dad is a legend, and he’s been an NHL coach for a long time. She spends half her life watching video professionally. It’s her job.

But there is a difference between listening to your friend’s girlfriend tell you something about your game and sending twenty pages of it to the guy responsible for deciding whether you play.

“I hope Fuller’s not too proud to read it,” Stanley says.

“He’ll read it,” Benson answers.

I think so too.

I’ve already read mine four times.

The first two pages are fine. Entries. Exits. Shot attempts. Possession numbers. Page three is where it gets annoying. Ninety-one defensive-zone retrievals across eighteen games. Sixty-two of them went up the wall.

That number alone doesn’t bother me. Sometimes the wall is the right play. Most of the time, getting a puck safely to a winger is better than trying something clever through the middle of your own zone.

Aspen’s problem isn’t that I use the wall. Her problem is that I’ve usually decided to use it before I have the puck. I look over my shoulder once while I’m skating back. Usually from twenty feet out. I see pressure coming. I decide where I’m going. Then I arrive squared to the boards because my body has already committed to the decision my brain made three seconds ago. By then, I’m not reading the play anymore. I’m completing it.

She wrote: Second scan prior to possession. Arrives closed. Limits available options.

Which is a nice way to say I make the same safe decision so early that sometimes I stop seeing everything else.

“I need Mackey,” I say, nodding.