Page 13 of Her Coach

We came out through the front doors into the desert night. The parking lot was mostly empty. The air hit different than New York at night, warm and dry and smelling like nothing I could name.

She was a different kind of owner than anything I had dealt with before. I had done my research before I got on the plane, financials, background, public record. Old family money. No prior sports ownership experience. On paper she looked like a grieving widow with deep pockets and sentimental reasons for staying in the game. In person she walked like someone who had never once needed a reason to be in any room she walked into. She had a clipboard. Not a tablet, not a phone. A clipboard with actual paper, covered in dense handwriting. She knew the lease terms on the scoreboard equipment and the name of the guy who maintained the Zamboni and the exact date the arena's HVAC system was last overhauled.

I had thought about owning a team once. Years ago, back when the money first started making itself clear. The trust, the portfolio, all of it sitting there doing nothing while I collected a coaching salary I didn't need. It made a certain kind of sense on paper. Buy in somewhere, have a seat at the table, stop answering to men who knew less about hockey than I did.

I never pulled the trigger on it. Took me a while to figure out why.

It was the ice. Always the ice. Owning a team meant conference rooms and cap negotiations and press releases and you were still forty feet from the game at all times. Coaching meant you were in it. You were the one making the call with thirty seconds left and everything on the line. You were the one who watched a kid find something in himself he didn't know was there and knew you had something to do with it.

I could buy a franchise tomorrow. I didn't want to own one. I wanted to coach one.

None of that was what I was actually thinking about.

She paused at the bottom of the steps and nodded toward the bar across the street. The Hideout. Sign lit up, handful of trucks in the lot, faint sound of music and voices carrying across two lanes.

"The boys wind down there after practice," she said. "It's become something of an institution." A beat. "Brynn tends bar there some nights. You can head over if you want to get to know her and the team a bit more before tomorrow."

I looked at the sign.

Owner's daughter. First day in a new city in a job I didn’t want to blow up.

"I might stop by," I said.

She nodded once. Turned and walked back inside.

I stood there for a second, jacket over one arm, the city humming somewhere beyond the arena walls.

Then I crossed the street anyway.

The bar was loud the way bars got loud when a group of athletes descended on them. The team was already there, same guys I’d met in the hallway an hour ago, now loud and loose in the way players got when nobody was watching them. Rhett had a pool cue. Jett was already too loud for nine-fifteen on a Tuesday. Moose was attempting to order what looked like an entire kitchen’s worth of food from a very patient server.

I found a stool at the end of the bar and sat down.

She was already moving when I got there, working the length of the bar with the kind of ease that came from doing something so long it stopped requiring thought. She clocked me without breaking stride.

“What can I get you?”

“Bourbon. Neat.”

She nodded once and reached for the bottle without looking, which told me she’d already catalogued where everything was. I watched her pour and set it down in front of me on a fresh napkin, clean and efficient, and then she was gone to the next person before I’d even picked it up.

I picked it up.

She looked completely different back here than she had in the hallway two hours ago. There, she’d been standing next to her mother in a bar shirt and glasses, arms crossed, deciding whether to approve of me. Here she was in her element, unhurried and easy in a way that people only got when they’d stopped performing and just existed somewhere.

I needed to stop looking at her.

I didn’t know why the hell them calling her ‘Bry’ grated on me so much.

“So, Coach,” Brynn said as she washed some glasses and dunked them in some sort of sanitation solution. “Where ya from?”

Ah. Casual conversation.

I didn’t lead a life that lended itself to the art.

“Grew up in New York.”

“State? Or city?”