Page 5 of Her Coach

By the end of that first week, Lydia Hargrove’s name had appeared in forty-seven separate articles. None of which she had agreed to. I knew because I counted. It was a stupid thing to do and I did it anyway, same way I kept checking the score of a game I already knew I had lost. I thought about calling her. Picked up the phone twice. Put it back down both times. There was nothing I could say that would take her name out of a single one of those articles, and calling would only give someone something new to photograph.

I poured a bourbon instead. Told myself it was the last one for the day.

It wasn’t.

The job offers came around week two. Two of them, from franchises I would have laughed at taking six months ago. The first meeting was in a glass office in Midtown with a general manager who had a firm handshake and a lot of enthusiasm and hadn’t won a playoff series in four years. He talked about culture. He talked about rebuilding. He slid a contract across the table with a number on it that was decent and a title that was not and looked at me like I should be grateful.

I looked at the number. I looked at him. I thanked him for his time and left.

The second meeting was worse. A conference call, three men on the other end who kept talking over each other, a franchise that had changed head coaches four times in six years. They used the words fresh start eleven times. I counted that too.

I turned them both down. Dave told me I was losing my mind.

“You have no leverage,” he said. “You understand that, right? Zero. You cannot afford to be selective right now.”

“I turned down two jobs, Dave. That’s not selective, that’s having standards.”

“Colton.” His voice dropped into the particular register he used when he was genuinely worried rather than just frustrated. “You have been sitting in that apartment for two weeks. You are not sleeping. You are drinking too much and I know you are because you answer my calls differently when you’ve had a few and you’ve had a few every time I’ve called in the last ten days.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Let me take a meeting,” he said. “There’s a guy in —”

“What meeting?”

“It’s nothing yet, just exploratory —”

“Dave. What meeting.”

He told me. It was with a franchise I had specifically told him three weeks ago I had no interest in. He had set it up anyway, quietly, without telling me, because he had decided I needed to be managed right now and managing me meant making decisions on my behalf and presenting them as a done deal.

“You’re fired,” I said.

“Colton —”

“Good night, Dave.”

I hung up. I turned my phone face down. I poured a bourbon and sat at the kitchen table in the dark and did not answer his calls for four days.

On day four I answered because I had seventeen voicemails from numbers I didn’t recognize and the league office had called twice and I was running out of patience for doing it myself. Dave answered on the first ring like he always did.

“You’re rehired,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll call the league back.”

Neither of us mentioned the firing. That was the thing about Dave. Fifteen years. He knew which parts of a conversation were worth having.

The weeks after that were quieter. Which sounds like it should be better. It wasn’t.

I developed a routine. That was the word I used for it. Routine. Up at seven because my body still ran on a coach’s schedule even when there was nothing to coach. Coffee. Shower. Sit at the kitchen table and look at the phone. Go for a walk that took me past the arena without meaning to, or meaning to and not admitting it. Come back. Pour a bourbon somewhere between two and four, depending on how the walk went. Eat something, usually not enough. Sit at the table until it got dark. Go to bed. Do it again.

On a Thursday in week three I walked past a newsstand and saw my own face on a back page. Not the scandal story, that had already cycled out. This was a column. Some writer I’d never heard of with an opinion about the state of coaching in professional hockey. My name appeared in the third paragraph, between a reference to a coach who’d been fired for throwing a clipboard and a broader point about accountability. I was an example now. A cautionary tale in somebody’s weekly column.

I bought the paper. Read the whole column standing on the sidewalk. Folded it up. Dropped it in the next trash can I passed.

Poured a bourbon at noon that day. Told myself it was a one-time thing.

On a Saturday in week four I ran into a guy I used to play with. We had come up through juniors together, roomed on the road in our first two seasons, lost touch the way you lost touch in this league when someone got traded and time moved faster than either of you expected. He was out with his kids. Two of them, a boy and a girl, maybe eight and ten. He saw me first and something crossed his face before he smoothed it over and stuck out his hand.