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“Eventually.”
“I was afraid of that.”
They do it at the door.
When we leave, the team is lined up on both sides of the doorway in their good suits, and every one of them is holding a stick. Somebody brought twenty hockey sticks to a wedding. Mack is studying the ceiling, so I do not have to ask who.
They lift them blade to blade and make a roof.
On the floor beside my piano, Colt told me that a room full of these men was the only family he had ever had.
They have brought their sticks.
“Did you know?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I take his hand. The left one. We go under.
Brick. Roman. McKinney. Kowalski. Finn, still in the hat. Mack, who will not look at Colt, and Colt, who will not look at Mack.
Ryan is at the end of the line with the last stick. He does not say anything. When we pass him he nods once at Colt, and Colt nods back.
My husband smiles all the way to the car.
Epilogue
Astrid
The room they gave me is on the second floor at the end of a corridor, with a door that does not have the team logo on it and a window somebody has painted shut. The plate beside the door has my name on it and nothing else.
It took four months, two lawyers, one rewritten escalation protocol, and a conversation with Maren that neither of us enjoyed. Silas gave me the room anyway, which I believe he did largely to find out whether I would take it.
I took it.
The first week nobody came.
The second week a defenseman put his head around the door, asked what this was, listened to the whole answer, said “okay,” and left. He has been back twice since.
Today it is Finn.
He used to tell me about his head in a room on the other side of the city, with a coffee he never brought me one of. Today he came up two flights of stairs in the building he works in.
He sits without being asked, because he has done this in one room or another for years.
“How many this month?”
“One.”
“Same as before?”
“Less. One word, gone mid-sentence. It came back before Catt noticed.”
I write it down. He watches me do it, the way he always has, checking that it goes on the page.
That is the entire proposal. Five tabs, two lawyers, four months of protocol, and what it comes to is a man not having to get into a car.
