Page 22 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

He nods seriously, like we’re reviewing evidence. “And your backup theory?”

“A shrine. To one specific, beloved vacuum.”

“That’s the stronger theory,” he says. He tells me Margot’s counselor uses the phrase “big feelings,” and that he once watched Margot visibly decide not to say something cutting about it. He counts that as growth, hers and his. I tell him about the fourth family I worked for, whose garage-door opener was named Susan. He says, “So it’s true. There were others before Brenda.” I laugh into my tea so hard that some of it goes wrong. He gets up, pats my back twice, and sits back down. I can still feel those two pats an hour later.

Somewhere in the second hour, the talking slows down without ending, the way it does when it’s good. He sits there in the lamplight with his gray hair wrecked from the pillow he gave up on, mug empty, eyes half-shut. “This is the best insomnia I’ve had in years,” he says, in the exact voice he used to type in.

I know it’s the exact voice. That’s the problem. I have two months of evidence from this kitchen and fourteen months of evidence from before. All night they’ve been piling up together without my permission.

Oh no.

Not oh no, he’s kind. I’ve known he’s kind since the interview. Not oh no, he’s handsome, which has been a manageable fact since the first time I watched him roll up his sleeves to cook. This is worse. This is: it’s almost morning, and I don’t want to go to bed, because going to bed ends this. I can’t think of one thing in my life right now I’d trade for another hour in this kitchen.

I like him. Present tense. No mask on either of us, no subscription between us, no screen. The man I’m lying to every day is the same man I once talked to every night. Somewhere between the burnt pancakes and Brenda, the two of them turned into one person. I like the whole person, and I am in so much trouble.

“You’re doing the thing,” he says, half asleep in the chair.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you leave the room without moving. Your eyes go somewhere else and you start planning tomorrow.” He waves his mug at me gently. “Off duty. It’s almost five.”

“It’s almost five,” I agree, and take his mug, because they’re my dishes to do, and our fingers brush at the handoff. It’s nothing. A quarter of a second. I’ll be thinking about it at seven when I make his coffee.

At the bottom of the stairs he says, “Hey. June.” I turn around. He’s winding the lamp cord back behind the chair, not looking at me, doing a chore so the sentence doesn’t have to be a moment. “I sleep fine when I’m home now. Took me a while to notice. I figured out the difference is knowing everybody in the house is okay before I close my eyes. So. Thanks for being one of them.”

One of them. Everybody in the house. He counts me in the headcount now, whatever that means to him. I stand on the second stair — a woman who once got paid to be this man’s three a.m. — and I say, “Goodnight, Gus,” instead of any of the true things.

In my room I lie on top of the covers and watch the ceiling go gray. I run tomorrow’s list — swim bag, groceries, drop-off — because a list has always been able to put me to sleep. Not tonight. He still turns his mug when he’s deciding whether to say something. Calgary is still how he tells time. He misses her — misses me — with his whole quiet face, six months after I logged off forever. Tonight he sat four feet away from her for two hours and called it the best insomnia he’s had in years.

I could have been asleep hours ago. Given the same choice again, I’d pick the kitchen every time.

The birds start up. Somewhere below me, right on schedule, Brenda grinds, drops nothing, and grinds again. I put the pillow over my face, because there is officially nobody in this house sleeping less than me, and only one of us knows why.

Gus

Teddy made a sign. June helped with the letters — I know because the E’s are steady and nothing else is. GO CASCADES, it says, and then smaller, where the poster ran out: AND ALSO DAD. I haven’t skated for a living in years. Teddy considers that a technicality.

Game nights, I work. Two suites of sponsors, a ceremonial puck, three periods of being Augustus Vaughn in a good suit — that’s the job now, and I’m good at it. The kids are eleven rows up behind the bench, in the seats I’ve kept since Margot was born, and tonight is the first time June is in them too. I shouldn’t be able to find one gray sweater from a suite full of people shaking my hand. I find it all first period anyway, the way your tongue finds a sore tooth. Hair down. She’s listening to Teddy explain the game with her whole face, and whatever he’s telling her is wrong, and she’s nodding like it’s gospel.

Margot brought her book. She reads during play and watches during the stoppages, which is backward, and which is pure Margot.

Midway through the third, up one, I run out of patience before I run out of sponsors. I make my excuses, take the concrete stairs down two at a time, and slide into my own seat next to Teddy for the first time all season.

“You came!”

“Suite ran out of pretzels.”

Four minutes later our center tips one in at the far post, and the building stands up. Teddy is losing his mind, sign sideways. Margot is on her feet — on her feet — with the book hugged to her chest. And June isn’t watching the goal celebration like eighteen thousand other people. She’s looking at me. I look away first. That has not happened to me in this building in a very long time.

The family lounge after a win is all noise and sheet cake. Teddy reenacts the goal for anyone who slows down near him, playing all five skaters himself, plus me arriving late with pretzel news. June stands at the edge of it with his sign rolled under her arm like a diploma.

“I want it noted that I clapped at the right times,” she says. “Teddy told me when.”

“She called icing ‘the little whistle rule,’” Margot reports.

“It is a little rule. Nobody has explained it to me twice the same way.”

“That’s hockey,” I tell her. “You’re closer than most season-ticket holders.”