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“What’s that?”
“She’s not casual.”
“Of course she’s not. Have you met her?” I say, kicking some leaves out of the way of my ball and setting my stance.
“That’s true. That girl is a keeper.”
I feel a warm rush of certainty in my chest and rub at it. He waits for me to respond, but I’m not sure what to say without completely exposing myself. I barely know the guy. I had hoped to talk hockey, not girls. So I focus on my stance, my swing. When I biff, we both laugh twice as hard. I take another swing and get better purchase on it, watching it drop onto the putting green.
“Nice,” he says with an appreciative nod.
We make our way back to the greenway and he slows his pace.
“You know,” he says, pulling a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offering me one. I shake my head and he lights it, sucking it in deeply as we continue. “I had one of those when I was about your age.”
“One of what?”
“A keeper.”
“Yeah?” I ask, trying to remember anything I can about his personal life. But when he was that age, I would’ve been in diapers. “What’d you do?”
“Huh,” he half laughs, scratching at the side of his nose. “I married her.”
“Wow,” I say with a nod. “Congratulations.”
“Heh,” he says, flicking ashes on the greenway, which feels really wrong. But I’m not about to tell Rick “the Rocket” Ridgefeld what to do with his cancer stick.
“Not congratulations?”
He shakes his head and gets a half-cocked look on his face. “No, it was great for a while.”
“How long were you together?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Wow,” I say, surprised that it didn’t last longer. It seems like going that long would make it more likely to stick. “What happened?”
“I left the league.” There’s no humor in his voice.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“It was that cut and dry?”
He shakes his head and flicks the ashes again. “She said I changed. But I’ll tell you what changed: my paychecks.”
I frown and wait for him to continue.
“I didn’t think she was like that. Money didn’t matter to her. It was only ever about us. That’s what she said. But at the end of it, all she had to show for it was a moody former pro with a pension.”
“Moody?” I ask.
He shrugs and waves it off. “I’m being facetious. She complained about it, but if you think she wasn’t a different person for a week a month, you’re fooling yourself.”
I can’t bring myself to laugh at his shitty joke, so I keep my eyes on the grass as we approach the green. He stops, crushing his cigarette into the green with his heel.
“Look, I know I wasn’t the perfect husband,” he says, his voice lower and stripped of the bravado it held before. He squints into the tree line and pushes his fingers through his hair.
