Not Practice

Joey Ruggiero could have told you exactly how Duncan MacNeil taped a stick, and he'd never thought that was strange.

They won four to two, which meant the room was loud before the last guy was even off the ice.

Somebody had the speaker on the shelf above the coaches' door turned up past where it rattled, and the bass came through the concrete floor and up into Joey's heels while he sat in his stall with his skates still on and his head against the Frost-blue plywood behind him. Tape balls were going across the room in both directions. Two of the young guys were singing a chorus they had the words to about half right, and the half they had wrong was worse than just humming it. The place smelled like wet gear and the orange stuff the trainers sprayed on everything, and under that the good tired smell of a building where nobody had lost.

Joey had the secondary assist on the third goal. He was going to be insufferable about it for at least a day, and he'd told three people already.

"Roo." A tape ball hit him in the chest, dead center, and dropped into his lap. Okafor was standing in the middle of the room in his shower slides and a towel and his whole grin, which was the only way Okafor ever greeted anybody. "Roo. Look at me. Say yes."

"No."

"You haven't heard the question."

"It's the same question." Joey threw the ball back. Okafor caught it one-handed without looking, which was annoying. "It's been the same question since Thursday."

"It's a better question every time I ask it. It's matured." Okafor pointed the tape ball at him like a microphone. "Scottsdale. Five days. Sun. Grass that somebody else mows. Cart girl named Brittany who remembers your drink."

"I don't golf."

"Nobody golfs. Half the guys going can't golf. Somebody drives a cart into the water every year and pays for the cart and it's the best part of the trip." Okafor turned to the room. "Tell him."

Six guys told him, all at once, at different volumes. Somebody said ninety-one degrees. Somebody said the resort did a steak you could cut with a spoon. One of the young guys, still half in his pads, said with total sincerity that the pool had a swim-up bar and he'd never been to one, and the whole room turned on him for that and forgot about Joey for about ten seconds, which Joey appreciated.

He started on his laces. His hands knew the job and did it without him.

The thing was, it was a nice offer. It had been a nice offer on Thursday and a nice offer on Saturday on the plane back from Seattle, and it was a nice offer now, from a guy who meant it and would have bought his first three drinks and not told anybody he'd done it. That was the problem. For five seasons the All-Star break had been the Cabo week. Meghan booked it in October every year, the same resort, the same room if they could get it, and Joey used to fly out the morning after the last game with his legs dead and sleep the whole flight and wake up to her already on the balcony in a ridiculous hat, reading something with a woman in a red dress on the cover. Everybody in this room knew that. Half of them had seen the pictures.

So Scottsdale this year wasn't Scottsdale. It was the seat on the cart they'd saved for the divorced guy. He could feel the shape of it every time Okafor asked — the kindness, and under the kindness a little bit of care about how he was doing, which was fair, which was friendly, and which he did not want to sit in the sun for five days wearing.

And that wasn't the reason. That was the reason he'd have given, if anybody had pushed.

The reason was sitting next to him, unlacing his skates in total silence.

Duncan MacNeil's stall had been beside Joey's for two seasons, ever since the equipment guys had reshuffled the nameplates after a trade and put the six-four defenseman from Cape Breton between Joey and the showers. Joey had complained about it at the time, mostly for the bit. The guy took up a stall and a half. His gloves dried on Joey's hook half the time. He said about nine words a day, and four of them were yep.

He hadn't said any of them tonight. He was bent forward with his elbows on his knees and his big hands working the laces loose in long, even pulls, like he had all night, like there was no bass and no tape balls and no nineteen-year-old trying to sing. His hair was wet at the temples and flattened from the helmet. He'd had a quiet, good game — the kind of game nobody on the broadcast noticed and every forward on the other bench did — and he'd blocked a shot in the third with the side of his knee that Joey had heard from the bench. He wasn't limping. He never limped where anybody could see it.

"MacNeil," Okafor said, rounding on him, because Okafor never gave up on a man, he just changed targets. "Big Dunc. The Inverness County Tourism Board. You coming?"

"No," Duncan said.

"Why not?"

"I'm staying."

That was the whole answer. That was always the whole answer. Okafor looked at him for a second, then put a hand on his heart like he'd been shot, and moved on, and nobody in the room even turned around, because everybody knew Duncan stayed. Duncan stayed every break. Christmas when they had three days, the bye week, All-Star. He had a house in South Addition and skis and a truck he talked about the way other men talked about a dog, and when the room emptied he just stayed in Anchorage, in the dark and the cold, and seemed to like it. The guys had tried to get him out of it for a season and then quit, the way the room eventually quit anything that didn't cost it money.

Joey pulled his left skate off and set it down. He didn't look over.

"You too, Roo?" somebody said from across the room.

"I'm staying," Joey said.

It came out easy. It came out like a guy who had plans he wasn't going to explain, and a couple of people went ooh in the voice you used when a guy had plans he wasn't going to explain, and Okafor said, "Is it a woman? Tell me it's a woman," and Joey said, "It's my couch, Oke, I'm seeing my couch," and got a laugh, and that was that.

Beside him, Duncan's hands had stopped on his laces for exactly as long as it took to notice. Then they started again.

Here was the thing about this room, and Joey had known it for five seasons, and it still sometimes surprised him how simple it was.

It clocked everything. A guy got a haircut, the room knew. A guy's car was still in the lot at seven in the morning, the room knew whose driveway it hadn't been in. A guy got quiet on a road trip, a guy started taking phone calls in the tunnel, a guy came back from the summer with a tan line where a ring used to be — the room saw all of it, and said something about all of it, usually out loud, usually on the bus. And then Sandeen opened a line on it.

Sandeen was over in the corner right now in his slides with his phone out, probably logging who'd bet on the third goal. He kept the book like a church kept records. Lines were numbered and dated, and he had a column in gray for where a thing had come from, and he'd tell you with a straight face that you couldn't take money out of a settled line, like that was a law of physics. The room bet on who'd get engaged and who'd get traded and whose kid would walk first, and it would bet on anything you gave it.

And that was all it did. That was the part people outside never believed. It noticed, and it put a price on it, and then it shrugged and went to get food. The room already had out guys in it. It had guys who'd married each other and brought the casserole to the team thing like anybody's husband. The first time Joey had seen that, his first year up here, he'd waited for somebody to make it weird, and nobody had, and after a while he'd stopped waiting. Nobody here was going to throw anything at anybody. The worst thing that would happen, if Joey Ruggiero turned out to want a man, was that somebody would lose twenty bucks.

So it wasn't the room. He wasn't scared of the room. He'd gone through it in his head, carefully, a lot of nights since August, and he was pretty sure that was true.

What he was scared of was being wrong about one guy. Wrong about what he'd seen, or wrong about what he wanted, or — this was the one that got him at three in the morning — right about both, and it still not mattering, because the guy was a guy who said yep and meant no.

"You icing that?" Joey said.

Duncan glanced at him. It was a short look, the one he used when Joey talked, which was most of the time. "What?"

"Your knee. From the Duncan-sized hole in the shooting lane."

"It's fine."

"It sounded not fine. I heard it on the bench. The backup goalie heard it. He flinched, and he doesn't flinch, he's got the emotional range of a toaster."

The corner of Duncan's mouth moved. Not a smile. Duncan didn't really smile in the room; he did this, the half-second where his beard shifted and you could tell something had landed, and then he put it away. Joey had been collecting those for longer than he'd been willing to call it collecting.

"I'll ice it," Duncan said.

"You will not."

"I'll ice it at home."

"In your snowbank."

"In my freezer," Duncan said, "like a person," and reached behind him for his stick.

He had a roll of white tape in his lap. He always redid a blade the night of a game, even the night before a break, when he wasn't going to touch it for five days — he said he liked it done when he came back to it. Joey had watched him do it from the next stall, in the reflection in the TV screen, from across the room on a road trip in Columbus with the lights half off. It was nothing. It was a guy taping a stick.

Duncan had pushed his sleeves up to do it. He'd pulled on a gray long-sleeve over his base layer, the soft kind that had gone thin at the elbows from washing, and it was shoved up to just under the elbow on both arms, and it stayed there because his forearms were too thick for it to fall. His arms were pale — he was a Nova Scotia guy in February in Alaska, he had no color left anywhere — and there was black hair along them, and the long muscle along the top moved every time he turned the blade. He did it slow. He held the heel of the stick against his thigh with one big hand and wound with the other, each turn overlapping the last by exactly the same amount, and pressed each one flat with his thumb before he did the next. His wrist turned over and back. A vein stood up along the inside of it and went down again.

Joey watched the thumb. He watched it press the tape flat, and smooth it, and go on, and he thought, very clearly, the way you'd think I left the stove on: I want that hand on me.

It wasn't the first time he'd thought it. That was the honest part.

He'd thought it at thirty-one games into last season, at the end of a practice, and he'd filed it, because he was married, and a married man with a pulse thought all kinds of things in passing and put them in a drawer and went home. He'd filed a lot of things over the years. A guy in a bar in Providence when he was nineteen. A trainer in juniors. Things that happened in his chest and got put away, noise, the regular noise of being alive and married and not looking. He'd never lied to Meghan about any of it, because there had never been anything to lie about. It was a drawer. He'd kept it shut.

Then in August he'd signed a piece of paper in a lawyer's office in Warwick, with Meghan beside him wearing her hair up in the clip she always wore, both of them sad and decent about it, and afterward they'd gone and got lunch like normal people, and she'd hugged him in the parking lot and said, Be happy, Joe, okay? I mean it. And he'd flown back to Anchorage for camp. And somewhere in those first weeks back he'd noticed that the drawer was open, and he didn't have a reason anymore to shut it. There was no marriage for it to be noise against. There was just him, and what was in there, which turned out to be a lot, and most of it looked like the guy in the next stall.

He wasn't confused about it. He'd expected to be. He'd expected at some point to have a crisis, and he'd kind of been waiting for it, like a bad shift you know is coming. It never showed up. What showed up instead was this: two hundred nights of watching a man tape a stick, and finally letting himself know why.

Duncan finished the toe, tore the tape with his fingers instead of his teeth, and ran his thumb down the whole blade once, heel to toe, checking it. Then he looked up, and caught Joey looking.

For a second neither of them did anything.

"What," Duncan said.

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

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