Page 49 of Omega’s Forward

I pull the door shut.

I have another week left before my suspension hearing. I don’t want to be alone.

I call JP.

“You got plans tonight?” I ask.

“Now I do,” he says, and doesn’t ask a single question. That’s why it’s him I called.

He shows up with pizza and we drink the six-pack he brought over two weeks ago, the one he handed through the gap in the door. He clocks the label as I hand him one. He doesn’t say anything about that either.

We eat on the deck with the game on inside, sound off.

“He left the minute the Bureau cleared him,” I say, somewhere into the second beer. “Stripped the bed. No note. Nothing.”

JP looks at his bottle. “You want me to say he’s an asshole?”

“I don’t know what I want you to say.”

He points the neck of the bottle at me. “Thursday, you shave, you wear a good suit, and you don’t look wrecked. They’re deciding whether you’re a problem. Don’t walk in looking like a problem.”

He stays through the third period. It’s the best night I’ve had in two weeks, and it still isn’t a good one.

*

The week crawls past. Practice, gym, home. I check my phone more often than I’ll ever admit to anyone. Nothing from Everett. Not a text, not a call, not so much as a message passed through the club. Fourteen days in the same house, and now a silence so complete I could almost believe I invented him.

I shave properly for the first time in days, JP’s advice still in my head. Don’t look wrecked.

The eyebrow has healed down to a pink line. I wear my good suit, making sure that my tie is straight, making myself tie it twice to get it right.

I look in the mirror and try to look contrite.

That was the advice that my agent gave me over the phone last night. Show up early, look respectful, let the lawyer do the talking.

If I can sit in a chair for two hours without saying anything stupid, we can reduce the number.

Today matters, whatever I think of standing in front of a panel in a suit to apologize for the most honest thing I did all season.

I don’t know if Everett is going to be there. It’s a stupid thought, and it keeps coming back anyway, all through the shave and both tries at the tie. Gordie would have been. But as I have learned, the apple falls very far from the tree.

Gordie never missed a hearing. Not mine, not anybody’s. The man once flew out for the appeal of a guy he traded away two seasons ago.

I shrug into my suit jacket. Maybe Everett was right about that. Gordie was a little obsessed with hockey. It was his whole life.

Same as it’s my whole life.

At my first hearing, I was twenty-two and terrified, and he sat next to me in the waiting room in his silver-and-green tie, chatting to the panel’s assistant about her hometown rink. He bought me a steak afterward and told me the fine was cheap at the price.

The man had a lawyer on speed dial. Not the club’s lawyer. His own guy, kept warm all year for whenever the league looked at one of us sideways.

And I have no idea if his son is going to be there. Maybe we’ve got a history, but Everett still owns the club and technically, he’s still managing it, even if no one sees him.

Showing up is just the job. You can hate the game and still do the job.

*

The drive downtown takes forty minutes. Sports radio has my hearing as the second story, after the standings.