Page 14 of Omega’s Forward

Sun beams and writes it all down. “I’ll have the amended contracts sent to you by this evening.”

Callahan is looking at me with an expression that I don’t know how to read. He looks like he’s thinking. The brute thinks. That’s a surprise. Half of those guys have been hit in the head so many times I’m not certain there’s anything going on in their brains.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. Guess I’ll see you Monday.”

He gets to his feet, surprisingly graceful despite his size.

At the door he stops, half turned. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’m sorry about your father. I didn’t get it said last time.”

“Thank you,” I say, to a point slightly to the left of him. He waits one more second. Then he goes, and the door closes behind him.

Sun looks at me and beams. “That went well.”

The man is mad. I raise my eyebrows.

“Oh, you should see some of the other matches I get,” he says with a chuckle.

I give him a polite smile and show him out gratefully.

Then I am finally alone. The hotel room smells like both of us. I stand in the middle of it with my arms folded.

I should open the windows. I walk toward them and do not arrive.

The armchair. He was in it for less than half an hour, one arm along the rest, too big for it the entire time.

I stand over it. Then I go back and check the door, actually check the lock, and I come back and bend down and press my face into the wing of the chair where his neck rested, and breathe in.

My knees loosen. I breathe in again. A third time, longer, and a sound comes out of me, low and wanting, that I have not made once in thirty-four years.

I stay there, bent over a hotel armchair, breathing him in.

I straighten up. Nobody saw, and nobody will ever know, and neither fact helps in the slightest.

My father would have loved this. That is the part I keep arriving at, standing in a room that smells like his captain. His son and his hockey player, wired together at the cellular level. I am grateful, in the ugliest way a son can be grateful, that he is not alive to see it.

5. Brody

Monday practice is supposed to be light. Drill, drill, drill baby and then home by early afternoon. Except Saturday we gave up two power-play goals in four minutes, so Sacco has us running until somebody cries.

I blow my third pass in ten minutes. It isn’t even close. The puck skips six feet behind our winger and rings off the boards, and the drill dies, and five guys coast to a stop and look at me.

“Any time you want to join us, Callahan,” Sacco calls from the half wall.

“Yep. Sorry.”

We run it again. I hit it this time because I’ve done the same drill a thousand times and I can do it when I pay attention. My body knows the movements. The rest of me is somewhere I can’t tell a single person in this building about.

JP catches me at the water break. He flips his mask up on top of his head, which means a conversation is happening whether I want one or not.

“Okay,” he says. “What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“You missed three passes a peewee makes. You,” he pokes me in the chest pad, “are chewing on something.”

I could tell him. For one second, I actually think about it: JP, the owner is my prime match, and he moves into my house tonight. I picture his brain melting out his ears, and the second passes.