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Her addingso muchat the end of that sentence soothed my bent feelings a bit. I reached over and rested my hand on her thigh, and our eyes met briefly for a silent smile before returning to the road.
“My dad would’ve liked you, though,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded. “He liked honest people who didn’t put up pretenses.”
“How did he wind up with your mom, then?”
“I’ve always wondered the same thing. But he loved her. I’d often see him watching her from a distance with a smile on his face. Like, she’d be in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee or whatever, and I’d find him leaning against the doorframe watching her when she wasn’t looking.”
I thought back to the way I’d watched Josie today, enjoying the moment. And how I’d watched her in the yard from the second floor, or stolen a few moments of her toiling in the kitchen through the front bay window on more than one occasion. But that was different, wasn’t it? At least that’s what I told myself.
“Anyway…” Josie shifted in her seat to face me. “I feel like I’m always talking about me. Tell me about you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. What was it like playing professional hockey? Did women wear your jerseys and ask for your autograph?”
“I loved playing, and women did.”
“But did you have groupies? Like women who wanted to be with you because you were a player?”
This was a line of questioning that a man played chess with. One answer could lead us down a path she might not want to go. So I moved a piece that kept my king from being checked. “Feels like a lifetime ago.”
She grinned. “So that’s a yes. Did you have a girlfriend the entire time you were playing?”
I shook my head. “Not until the last year.”
“What about in college?”
“I went out with someone for most of freshman year.”
“What happened with that?”
“She was three years older. She graduated and moved back home, and I got drafted into the league.”
“You went into the pros that early?”
“It’s not early for hockey. Most guys are in by nineteen.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Do you follow hockey?”
“I’ve never actually watched a game.”
I chuckled. “Average retirement age is twenty-nine. So if you’re not in early, you’re significantly cutting down your chance at seeing ice time. There are outliers. Gordie Howie and Chris Chelios played twenty-six seasons. But for every one of them, there are ten guys who don’t make it two years.”
“Retirement at twenty-nine. Wow. That’s so young.”
“It’s a physically demanding game. There’s a reason players are shifted in and out every minute or so.”
“They change players everyminute?”
I laughed. “You weren’t kidding around. You’ve never watched a hockey game, huh?”
“No. Never. A minute seems so short.”
