Page 158

He's not in the truck. He's right there, where I can see him.

In the dressing room after, with the Cup on the table in the middle of the room and champagne on the ceiling and Moretti being carried around on Kowal's shoulders, a reporter finds me in my stall. The Tribune guy. Dan.

"Rémy." He holds out his phone to record. "Everybody saw what happened on the ice. I have to ask. Is Owen Hale your boyfriend?"

The room goes a little quieter around me.

I look across the room. Owen's sitting on a bench by the door in his ruined good suit, with his leg up on a chair and a bag of ice on his knee, and Webb on one side of him and Sorel on the other. He's watching me. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. It's mine to tell. He said so.

I think about the kid in the front row at the community center, with his too-long sleeves. I think about Maya Kowal and her poster. I think about my dad in his truck.

"Yes," I say. "He's my boyfriend. I'm crazy about him. He makes lists."

Dan laughs. He writes it down.

"Anything else?"

"Yeah," I say. "Tell the kids to play proud."

Across the room, Owen's smiling. The whole thing. All the way up to his eyes.

I got it on opening night. I've been getting it all year.

I'm going to keep getting it for a really long time.

EPILOGUE — OWEN

Section 112, row two, seat four.

It's not my seat. It's Josée's. She's in seat three, next to me, in a jersey with CASTEL across the back that's so big on her it hangs to her knees. My sister Karen's in seat five, visiting from Mesa, wearing a red foam finger she bought on the concourse and has already hit me in the face with twice. Jen Webb's in seat six, with her youngest on her lap. Maya Kowal's in seat seven, fifteen now, with a rainbow pin on the collar of a jersey that says 27.

I'm wearing one too.

It's too small in the shoulders. I bought it at the team store in August, standing in line behind a family of four, and the teenager at the register looked at me, and looked at the jersey, and looked at me again, and said, "Oh my God," and then, "Sorry. Sir. That'll be eighty dollars."

Saul's son was right. Nobody wants a grandpa jersey.

It's opening night. A year and nine days since the first one.

The knee's better. Not good. It'll never be good. Anand did the surgery on the Tuesday after game seven, and it took four hours, and when I woke up he was standing at the end of the bed with his arms crossed.

"You stood on it," he said. "On the ice. Don't lie to me. I watched the broadcast."

"I let go of one crutch."

"You stood on it for forty seconds and then you let a seventy-year-old equipment manager hold you up by your jacket."

"Gus is sixty-eight."

"Owen."

"It was worth it," I said.

He looked at me. Then he uncrossed his arms and patted my foot, the one on the good leg.

"Yeah," he said. "I watched the broadcast. It was worth it."

I walk with a cane now, some days. Not every day. I can do stairs if I take them slow. I can't skate the way I used to, and I never will, and Anand says if I'm careful I won't need the replacement for ten years, maybe fifteen.