Grounded

The association's man came in at ten-forty, which was the dead part of the morning — skate done, tape peeled, the room in that half-hour where nobody has decided yet whether the day is going to be a day. Ike had his elbows on his knees and one skate off and he did not look up, because he had known since the schedule went out on Monday that this was Thursday, and he had spent four days arranging his face for it and then, in the event, simply not using the face at all.

Deb Yun brought him in and said his name once, flat, the way she said everything.

"Anson Doucette, Seattle. He's association, not press. Twenty minutes."

Nobody groaned, which told Ike how thoroughly the room had already filed this. A guy in a quarter-zip with a folder in one hand was a Thursday. Théo Roussel had one pad off and would have the other one off sometime before the spring, and he waved the folder in like weather. Sandeen sat forward with his elbows on his knees, ready to be interested, because Sandeen was twenty-two and still thought meetings contained information. Wade Lasko didn't move at all from the far corner, which was Wade agreeing to attend.

"Morning," Doucette said, and stopped there, and let the room finish arriving.

He was standing in the middle of the floor with his back to the logo, and he was heavier than he looked on video — thick through the chest and the hips, six-two, built like a man who had never once decided at the last second to go around something. Ash-brown hair going grey over the ears. A scatter of freckles across the nose that made him look, at thirty-three, faintly and permanently sunburned in a state where nobody got sunburned. There was a nick on his jaw from that morning's razor, in the exact place, Ike thought, where there had been a nick on his jaw the last time Ike had been close enough to see it.

Ike got his other skate off. He set both of them under the bench, heel to heel, square, the way he had done it since he was nine.

"Escrow," Doucette said. "That's the whole visit. I'll go slow and then I'll take anything."

And then he did it: twenty minutes, standing, no slides, one folder he never opened. The hold-back had come down to six percent for this year and would be reconciled in October, and the reconciliation was the part everybody got wrong, because it wasn't a rebate, it was arithmetic on revenue that hadn't finished happening yet. Anybody in the room in the last year of a deal should look at the reconciliation calendar before they let an agent tell them what a number meant. He said all of it plainly, in the fewest words the sentences would take, and then he stopped and let the silence sit there until somebody used it.

Ike sat in stall four with sweater seventeen hanging behind his head and said nothing at all.

There was a thing that was supposed to happen. He had assumed for two years that if he were ever in a room with this man it would announce itself somehow — the room would go careful, or somebody would clear his throat, or Doucette would find him with his eyes and there would be a half second of the two of them holding a thing between them that only they were carrying. Ike had honestly expected that. He had thought about it in physio in the summer of 2025, lying on his side while a woman named Kath moved his head four degrees at a time and told him to say when the ceiling started sliding.

What happened instead was that Théo asked a question about the escrow on signing bonuses, and Doucette answered it, and Sandeen asked whether the number could go up, and Doucette said yes, and told him under what conditions, and did not soften it. Twice Ike looked up and found that the man was looking somewhere else entirely. Once, he was looking at Ike, and it was for about as long as he looked at anybody, and then he went back to Théo.

Nobody in the room remembered. That was the thing. It wasn't cruelty and it wasn't tact, it was just that eleven February 2025 had been a Tuesday in Seattle two years ago, and there had been no penalty and no hearing and nothing to talk about on the plane home, and a room shrugs, because a room shrugs. Half of these guys hadn't been on this roster. The ones who had been remembered that Ashbrook got hurt, the way you remember weather.

"Last one," Doucette said, at nineteen minutes. "If you're on a one-year, don't sign anything in July because of a number you saw in June. Come to me. That's what I'm for."

"He's on a one-year," Théo said, and pointed a glove at stall four without any malice whatsoever.

"Yeah," Ike said.

It was the only word he said for the whole twenty minutes, and Doucette took it the way he took everything, which was without any visible reaction at all, and then said, "Then come to me," and that was the end of the visit.

He was out of the room five minutes later. Ike heard him in the corridor telling somebody he was on the six-fifteen in and the eighteen-ten out, one carry-on, and that no, he didn't need the car past the airport run, and thank you.

Fourteen hundred miles, Ike thought, standing at the sink with the water running over his wrists, because Seattle was on its bye and there was no game and no charter and no block of rooms and no team at all, and the man had come up here alone on the only day in his whole January he owned, to stand in a room and explain arithmetic to people who mostly weren't listening.

That was the thing he could not put anywhere. If it had been a road trip he could have had the hate clean.

Ike dried his hands and touched, without deciding to, the two inches of white scar inside his hairline behind the left ear, which was not from the hit and never had been, and which he had never explained to anybody in this building, mostly because the one time somebody asked he had understood halfway through the first sentence that the man was going to assume it was, and had let him.

His hands were fine. That was the joke of the whole thing. Everything that had made him worth top-six minutes still worked exactly as well as it ever had; his hands had come back off the injured list before he did. What hadn't come back was whatever it is in a man that lets him put his head down and go into a corner two seconds behind a puck he isn't going to get, and there was no scan for that, and no timeline, and nobody had ever once said it to him out loud.

The snow started as the kind that doesn't look like anything. Ike went up to the fourth floor at ten past three to sign the appearance sheet for a school thing in February, because Colleen would chase him for eight days rather than send it up unsigned, and he was standing at her counter with the pen still in his hand when the outer office started to turn.

He heard the whole mechanism assemble, and he did not have to work to hear it, because the fourth-floor outer office had two monitors, a paper diary, glass on two sides and no doors that anybody ever closed.

Fifteen-forty: Ted Stevens went to zero. Colleen said it out loud in the tone of somebody reading a delay and then heard herself. "That's not a delay. That's cancelled through Sunday morning." Departures gone. Four other airplanes' worth of people were going to come back out of that terminal and go downtown, and Colleen was already on the phone to the Sheraton by twenty to four, and then to two more, and by four o'clock she was doing the thing she did with her mouth when the answer was no.

Deb came out of her office with her coat over her arm, not putting it on.

"Where's the association's guy?"

"Contingency room they booked him, downtown."

"Fine. That's fine." Deb looked at the window, where the parking lot had gone the colour of the sky. "Put him on the list anyway. We won't need it."

Ike stood there with the pen.

He could have said it in eight words. He had the eight words. He had had them for two years, and they were available to him right there at that counter, in a warm room with a woman who liked him and who would simply have crossed a name off a page and never asked him a single question about why, because Colleen did not ask people why, and it would have cost him nothing at all.

He put the pen in the cup and said, "Have a good night, Colleen," and went down the stairs.

The feeder went at seven-twenty.

He knew the time because he was watching the news out of the corner of his eye with a plate on his knee, and the anchor was mid-sentence and then the studio lights did a small stumble and came back on generator, and then the map came up: downtown, Fairview, most of Government Hill, out. Wet snow on the lines, the weight of it, a load nobody designs for because it happens twice a decade.

At the end of Ike's street the lights of Merrill Field went on burning through the snow in their orderly rows, blue and white, because Airport Heights sat on the Merrill feeder off a different substation, and had since before his house was built in 1954, and would go on doing it all night. His furnace hummed. The kitchen was warm. He had a whole 1950s house with two bedrooms in it and nobody in the second one and nobody to mind.

The phone went at seven twenty-nine.

"It's Colleen." A pause with typing in it. "I'm not calling you."

"Okay."

"Deb's going to call you in about ten minutes. Power, spare bed, nobody home to mind — that's the three filters, that's all it's ever been, and on a Thursday night in January you're the only name on this roster that clears all three." More typing. "I wrote it on a sticky and put it in the diary. I'm telling you so it's not a surprise when the phone goes, because I hate that for people."

"Okay," Ike said.

"It's three nights, probably. He can't fly and he can't heat that room and the club doesn't leave a league guest sitting in the dark, we do this every winter, we did it for two officials and a camera truck last February." She stopped. "If it doesn't work for you, tell her. She'll go down the list. It's a list, Ike, it's not a verdict."

There it was again. Handed to him twice in one day, by the same woman, on a plate.

"Thanks, Colleen," he said.

He put the phone face down on the counter and stood in his own kitchen with his hands flat on the edge of it.

He's the man who ended my season. That was it. That was the sentence. Eight words, one phone call, and Colleen would say oh — genuinely, kindly, appalled at the building and not at him — and cross it out, and the fourth floor would find some other bed, and Ike Ashbrook would go on living in the house at the end of the runway lights with the thing intact.

The thing. The account. The one where a man did it to him.

He stood there and did not pick the phone up, and the furnace cut out, and the fridge came on, and outside the snow went sideways across the blue rows of Merrill Field, and he understood with perfect clarity that he was not going to make the call, and he did not let himself past that into why.

Deb called at seven-forty.

"Ashbrook. Doucette's stuck, downtown's dark, hotels are full. You've got power and a spare room. Three nights, likely two. Club pays whatever it costs you and I'll have somebody take him off you the second the grid's back." A short pause, entirely administrative. "Is that a problem?"

The furnace came back on.

Twelve minutes had gone by since Colleen, and he had spent all twelve of them within reach of the sentence, and the sentence was still sitting there in the middle of his chest like a swallowed stone, and it had a second half he had never let it have, which was: and he didn't do anything wrong.

"No," Ike said, at seven forty-eight. "That's fine. I'll get him."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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