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She came with me three times to look at the one that was ninety dollars and not green. I said in April that we would see about the summer, and in August that we would see about Christmas, and she stopped asking in a way I chose to experience as her becoming reasonable.
He bought a desk.
He has seen Tova’s floor plan, but he has never seen this drawing. His refrigerator holds chicken with the date on it.
“Not tonight,” I tell her. “Next week. We do it properly, with tape and a drop sheet and the windows open.”
“Saturday?”
“Saturday.”
The game is on at seven and Tova lasts to the middle of the second period and then goes up to sit on a bed she already loves.
I watch the rest of it on a television that is now in the den.
He plays eleven minutes. I count them, because counting is what I have instead of asking. They say his name twice and both times it is in a sentence about somebody younger, and then a man in a patterned tie explains to the audience that at eight and a half million against a flat cap you are no longer paying for a player, you are paying for a reputation, and he says it the way men say things they have been looking forward to saying since the morning. He has a jaw that has never been hit by anything. I would not let him touch my dog.
Eight and a half million.
In the third period Colt takes a draw on the left side and loses it clean, and then does something I do not understand. He is nowhere near the puck. He puts himself across a lane where nothing is happening yet, and a pass arrives into the space he is already standing in, and he moves it up the wall, and Roman carries it out, and nobody says anything about it at all.
The puck was never in trouble. He was simply there first.
So I watch two hundred pounds of tired Texan know a thing before it happens, and I understand, finally and against my preference, why they have kept him.
He comes off and goes down the bench with his helmet still on.
The glove on his left hand opens and closes. Twice.
The camera cuts to the faceoff.
The remote is in my hand and I do not remember picking it up, and I turn the game off before the whistle, which is not a thing I have ever done in my life.
He calls.
“Hey.”
“You won.”
“We did. You watched?”
“Eleven minutes.”
“You counted.”
“I count.”
“That’s the most romantic thing anybody’s said to me this week.”
I let it sit for a moment.
“The furniture came.”
The pause is the length of a man sitting up.
“Right.”
“Saturday.”
