Page 4 of The Reckless Rookie

I should go straight to the truck.

I know the exact shape of the smart night from here. Drive home. Ice the knee. Text nobody. Wake up tomorrow with the loss a little smaller than it is right now.

I loop through the public lot instead.

Tell myself it’s the knee. Needs to keep moving, keep from seizing up on the drive. That’s a lie and I know it’s a lie the second it’s out, and I let it stand anyway, because the truth is I’m not ready to be alone in a quiet truck with a game I can still feel in my chest.

The loss is sitting where the want sat all night. Same spot. The two of them have kind of become the same thing.

Six, bored, skating away both times. The laugh from their bench I didn’t catch the words of. Ryan’s arm across me. The horn, and the scoreboard telling the truth we didn’t.

All of it, folded up small, in the place that’s already full.

“Hey! Forty-four!”

I keep walking.

My truck is about twenty yards away from me. I can see it. I count the steps in my head the way you count anything when you’re trying to keep your hands where they belong.

A nacho tray hits the pavement in front of me. Cheese and jalapeños going everywhere, bright orange under the lot lights. A beer bottle follows, shattering on the pavement at my feet.

Laughter.

Five of them by a lifted truck, all in Dallas jerseys, all deep into the case that makes men brave in a group they’d never be one-on-one.

“Game’s over,” I say. “Go home.”

I don’t stop walking. That’s the thing I want on the record, if anybody ever asks, which nobody with a camera will. I didn’t stop. With my feet heading to my truck and my voice calm, my presence conveyed a simple message: you won’t find it here; look elsewhere.

“That’s him.” The big one comes off the tailgate. “That’s the little guy. Six ate your lunch all night, forty-four.”

I keep walking.

“Skated away every time like a little bitch.”

And there it is.

The exact thing.

The thing everyone in that building saw all night and kept swallowing and calling discipline.

You took it and did nothing.

Some drunk in a parking lot, saying the one thing that’s been chasing me all night, and I feel the front come in. The pressure drop. The place in my chest with no room left in it.

I stop walking.

That’s the choice. Right there. Not the punch. The stopping. A man walking to his truck doesn’t turn around to hear a drunk finish a sentence, and I turn around, because I want to hear it, because I want the reason, because part of me has wanted a reason since the second period and here’s a man dumb enough to hand me one.

“Say that again.”

“Finn.” Not a name I know. One of them, farther back, smart.

“Come on, man, let it go. He’s just…”

“No, let him say it again.”

The big one grins. He’s got no idea what he’s holding. To him I’m a small guy in a bad mood he can poke for a story to tell at work. He doesn’t know about the front coming in. He doesn’t know I’ve been folding things up all night and ran out of room.