Page 21 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“Goodnight, Margot.”

I close her door to the width she likes and stand in the hallway. A suspension, a skinned knuckle, sixteen silent minutes in a parked car, and one question through a door that wasn’t all the way shut. It’s the best day this house has had in a long time, and there’s no one I could explain that to except the woman downstairs, who wouldn’t need it explained.

June

Some nights sleep just doesn’t show up. You can lie there waiting for it, or you can get up and do something useful with your hands.

The house is dark and settled. Gus got back from the Calgary trip after dinner, dead on his feet, and went up early. I go down without the hall light — after two months I could walk this house blind — and I’m halfway into the kitchen when the ice maker starts grinding.

“Brenda,” I say quietly, opening the fridge for the milk, “it’s three in the morning. Nobody needs ice. Nobody has ever needed ice at three in the morning. Look at your life.”

“Who’s Brenda?”

I do not scream, and I deserve a medal for it: a man speaks out of a pitch-dark kitchen at three a.m., and I keep it to a full-body flinch, because two kids are asleep upstairs and waking them is worse than dying. I put down the milk with extreme care and hold on to the counter.

The lamp by the reading chair clicks on. There he is in the corner in a T-shirt and flannel pants, a mug on the armrest. He looks like he’s been there a while and is now having the best night of his month.

“Brenda,” he says again. “Who is she?”

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“Long enough to hear you tell somebody named Brenda to look at her life.” He is trying not to smile, and the trying shows. “We don’t know anybody named Brenda.”

There’s no way out of this but through. “The ice maker,” I say, with all the dignity available to me. “The ice maker is named Brenda. She grinds every half hour and produces nothing, and sometimes I address her about it. Every house has an appliance like her. I name them. It’s a system. I’ve never once told another living person about the system, so I’ll be upstairs packing.”

Gus puts his hand over his mouth, which does nothing. The laugh comes out through his shoulders instead — silent, wheezing, a laugh that won’t wake his children. It goes on so long I have to lean against the counter and wait it out.

“Brenda,” he finally manages, wiping his eyes. “It’s — no. It’s exactly right. That’s exactly what she is. That machine has been broken for two years, and I’ve had a guy out twice, and both times she behaved perfectly while he was standing there.”

“Because she’s Brenda.”

“Because she’s Brenda,” he agrees, like I’ve handed him a missing puzzle piece. And that’s the moment the night goes off its rails, because instead of taking my mortified self upstairs, I make tea. He stays in the chair. We start talking.

We talk about nothing. That has to be understood about the next two hours: nothing happens in them. No confessions, no accidents, nobody’s hand brushing anybody’s hand. Two adults in a dark kitchen with a lamp on, talking about nothing at all, and it is somehow the most dangerous night of my whole careful life.

He asks why I’m up. I tell him the truth — some nights sleep doesn’t show up, always been that way. He says he’s the same, that he’s been the same for years, that hotels make it worse. “Three a.m. in Calgary is the loneliest place in professional sports,” he says, like it’s a documented fact. I laugh, and he looks pleased with himself in the lamplight.

I ask what he actually does at three a.m. in Calgary. He turns his mug around on the armrest before he answers. His thumb crosses the scar, and my whole body goes quiet.

“Used to have somebody to talk to,” he says. “Time zones don’t matter at three a.m. Now mostly I read game film I’ve already seen.”

He used to have somebody to talk to. I am the somebody. I sat in a studio in Greenwood at three in the morning, typing back and forth with this man. Hotel pillows. Road food. Whether anyone ever really sleeps in Calgary. He doesn’t know he just told me about myself.

“That’s the trouble with three a.m. friends,” I say, which is as close to the edge as I have ever walked. “They’re only real at three a.m.”

“She was real,” he says. Not sharp. Just certain, the way he’s certain about the kids’ bedtimes. Then he seems to hear himself, and he course-corrects with a mug lift: “Anyway. Now I’ve got Brenda.”

“You can’t have Brenda. Brenda’s mine.”

“Split custody,” he says. “Weekends and road trips,” and we’re safe again, back on the surface, and we deliberately stay there for two more hours.

Here’s what nothing looks like. He tells me about the worst hotel in the league, in twenty-one years of hotels, and about a rookie-year roommate who ironed his jeans. I tell him about the vacuum repair shop under my old studio.

“Ten years,” I say. “Allegedly a vacuum repair shop. Never once open. My theory is it’s a front.”

“For what?”

“Unclear. Vacuum crimes.”