Page 53 of Home Ice

The corner of his mouth went up.

“Chet’s been calling Ironhawks games for twenty years. Everyone loves him,” Rafe said. “Varga did an impression of him that cost him fifty bucks. There’s a fine jar. Kieran runs it.”

He started moving again, drifting along the bench. “Wait, so you saw the shorthanded one, too. Tell me the truth. Did it look as stupid as it felt? Because there’s a moment when I’m past their point guy. The right play is behind me by sixty feet, and I remember thinking, well, now you have to score—“

“It looked,” I said, “like you knew.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I did. I don’t know how. That’s the part I can’t explain to anyone. Everyone wants me to walk them through it afterward, and there’s nothing to walk through. There’s no middle. There’s the door, and the next thing I know, I’m already through it.”

He leaned against the bench, and the energy finally calmed to a low idle.

“After the pass,” he said, “Varga yelled at me across the ice for a full minute. All of it in Hungarian. Heath says that’s how you know he means it. If he yells in English, he’s just filling space.” Rafe shook his head. “I’m going to hear about that goal until June.”

I’d never heard him talk so fast. Max talked fast because silence was empty space, and he couldn’t stand to leave it unused. Rafe talked fast because there was so much in him trying to get out.

“Have you eaten anything?” I asked.

“What?” He looked down at himself. “There was food at the rink. I had—“ He tried to remember what he’d had and failed. “No.”

I pointed at a stool.

There was half a baguette upstairs, and cheese, and the end of a dry sausage I’d been saving for a sandwich. I went up and came down with all of it on a cutting board.

Rafe looked at the food, and then at me. He started to say something and then decided against it.

He ate like he’d missed his last three meals. He made a small sandwich and started walking around the shop again.

My block plane was sitting where I’d left it, set down mid-thought at an angle. Rafe walked past it, still talking—something about Trier’s sister-in-law and a photograph. Without breaking a sentence, he reached out and squared the plane to the edge of the bench.

All of Rafe was there. There was nothing sanded off him.

”—and she drove up from Springfield wearing the other team’s jersey,“ he was saying, “into our building, which Trier says is a betrayal, but she got there two hours early to get the seat, so I think it’s the opposite.” He came back to the cutting board and cut off more bread. “You know what I mean?”

“Loyalty wearing the wrong jersey.”

“Yes.” He stopped chewing. “That’s it.”

I cut more sausage for him. The next question was in my mouth before I’d cleared it with anybody.

“The pass,” I said. “At the end.”

“Varga was open.” He didn’t have to think about it.

“Everyone there wanted the hat trick.”

“But we needed a goal.” He shrugged. “The right decision was to pass the puck to Varga.”

The broadcast spent five minutes examining that pass. It was a generous act by the nicest guy in hockey. On the internet, a few hundred thousand people were falling in love with a story about a farm kid too sweet to keep his own hat trick.

The actual man was standing at my bench with sausage in his hand, telling me the truth about it.

“I’m eating tomorrow’s lunch, right?” Rafe asked.

“More than half of it at this point.”

He winced.

“It’s fine,” I said, and cut the rest of the sausage. “I brought it to you.”