Page 6 of Her Coach

“Mercer,” he said. “Hell of a thing.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We stood there for a second. His kids were looking at me. I wondered if they knew who I was. If they had seen the story. If their dad had explained it to them or changed the channel.

“You’ll land somewhere,” he said. The way people said things they hoped were true.

“Sure,” I said.

We shook hands again and went our separate ways. I walked home and poured a bourbon and sat at the kitchen table and did not think about his kids or the way he had smoothed his face over before he stuck out his hand.

I thought about it for three hours.

The weeks after that were quieter.

I told myself I would stop.

I told myself a lot of things that month.

The bottles accumulated on the counter. I stopped counting those too.

It was a Tuesday night, or maybe Wednesday morning, when I finally ran out.

Not just the bourbon. The bourbon I could have fixed with a car service and twenty minutes. I mean the particular energy it took to keep sitting at that table telling myself tomorrow was going to be different. The story had run its course. I had turned down both jobs. I had fired and rehired Dave. I had counted forty-seven articles and stopped counting. I had drunk more in six weeks than I had in the previous three years combined and I had nothing to show for it except a counter full of empty bottles and a body that ached in a way that had nothing to do with being forty years old.

I stood at the kitchen counter at two in the morning in the dark and looked at the bottles lined up there and felt, for the first time since the gala, something that wasn’t grief or anger or the specific numbness that came from drinking just enough to not feel either of those things.

I felt tired.

Not sleepy. Not the kind of tired a good night’s rest fixed. The kind that came from spending six weeks fighting a version of yourself you were losing to anyway.

I picked up the bottles one at a time and put them in the recycling. All of them. It took two trips.

Then I went to the counter by the window where I had been putting the mail I wasn’t opening and I picked up my phone. Victoria Caldwell’s number was still in my recent calls from three weeks ago, when she had called me out of nowhere on a Wednesday afternoon and I had let it go to voicemail. Then called her back twenty minutes later because something about the way she left a message made me think she was not the kind of woman who called twice. I took the phone to the table. Sat down in the dark. Pulled up the voicemail and played it properly for the first time, not the way I had been playing it, half listening and arguing with it and stopping it before she finished. Actually listened.

She wasn’t asking me to be grateful. She wasn’t offering me charity dressed up as opportunity. She was telling me she had a team that was ready and a city that was hungry and a job that needed doing, and she believed I was the man to do it. They had just come up from the minors, she said. Four years old. Still finding their footing. She needed someone who had actually won something to show them what winning looked like. No apology for the scandal. No acknowledgment of it at all, actually, which I had taken as an oversight the first time I heard it and understood now was completely intentional.

She didn’t care about the scandal. She cared about what I could do on the ice.

I set the phone down.

Sat there for a while longer in the dark.

Then I picked up my phone and called Dave.

He answered on the second ring, which meant I had woken him up but he had seen my name and answered anyway. That was the thing about Dave.

“Tell her yes,” I said.

A beat of silence. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call her in the morning.”

“Tonight.”

Another beat. “Colton, it’s two in the morning.”

“Tonight, Dave.”

He exhaled. “Yeah, okay. Tonight.”