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He clocked the book in my hands, and then the television, still on the postgame with the sound at four, and he said not one word about the book.

“You watched it.”

“I watched all of it. Not just the parts with you, which I am told is rude.”

“She said that.”

“She was emphatic.”

He crossed into the kitchen, got a glass down, filled it at the tap, and drank it off without stopping, head tipped back, throat working. I counted every swallow.

“How’s the face?” I said.

“Fine.”

“You went into the boards at six forty-one of the third and you were down for four seconds.”

He put the glass in the sink and leaned back against the counter and looked at me across his own living room, saying nothing, until I had to put my eyes back on the book.

“You counted,” he said.

“I have a very good sense of time.”

“Four seconds.”

“About four.”

He was quiet. When he spoke again his voice had dropped flatter.

“I got my edge caught. It wasn’t a hit, it was a bad step. It looked worse from where you were than it was from where I was.”

“That is a distinction I didn’t have available to me from where I was.”

“No,” he said. “I guess you didn’t.”

He walked over and picked up the remote off the arm of the couch. The move put him standing over me, and I got cold air off his jacket and the rink smell under it, rubber and ice and cedar. His hip was about four inches from my shoulder. My eyes never left the book and my entire left side took attendance. He turned the television off, and the room dropped into lamplight.

“Gerald predicted two,” I said. “Iris is going to want to know what you did instead.”

“Gerald’s ambitious.”

“Can I ask you something about the game?”

“Yeah.”

“Why does nobody pass to you?”

He turned his head and gave me every bit of his attention.

“I watched for an hour and you touched it maybe six times and nobody in the building made a single sound about anything you did. And then a man came up the right side and looked at you and turned around and went backward.”

Eli sat down.

He didn’t sit next to me. He took the other end of the couch, in the dent, as far from me as the furniture allowed, with his elbows on his knees. In all my weeks in the house I’d never once seen him sit down in the living room.

“That’s the job,” he said.

“Explain it to me.”