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“You want the actual version?”

“I want the actual version.”

So he explained it to me.

He leaned forward and did it with what was on the coffee table, the remote and a coaster. Then he reached across and took the book off my lap. His knuckles grazed my knee on the way. He didn’t apologize, and he talked more in one stretch than he had since I moved in.

“Guy comes up the right side with the puck.” He set the remote at the edge of the table. “He’s got three things he can do. Shoot, pass it across, or carry it wide.” He set the coaster in the middle and my book on the far side. “If I’m here,” he said, and put two fingers down on the wood between the remote and the coaster, “he can’t pass across. If my stick’s here, he can’t cut inside either. That leaves him one thing, and it’s the worst one, and he knows it before he gets there.”

His two fingers rested there on the wood, long and blunt against the grain of the table. There was a healed split across one knuckle, and I had thoughts about those fingers I wasn’t going to type into a text to Maren or anywhere else.

“So he gives it up.”

“Or dumps it in and changes. Or circles back and starts over.” He took his fingers off the table. “Either way the pass never happens. There’s nothing to see. Tape doesn’t show a pass that didn’t get made, and nobody’s ever invented a stat for a play a guy decided not to try.”

“Geography,” I said.

“That’s the whole game. Where you stand. The puck’s almost never the thing.”

“So nobody knows,” I said.

“Calloway knows. Ryan knows.” He turned his hands over and studied the palms. “It’s a job where if you do it perfectly for sixty minutes, the broadcast never says your name once.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No.” He let it sit, and then he said the rest more quietly. “It used to.”

He turned toward me on the couch.

“You did that for fourteen years,” he said.

“Did what?”

“Twenty-two of them at a time and none of them could read yet.” He wasn’t being funny. He put it on the table flat, next to the coaster, as if he’d done the thinking before tonight and had been waiting for a reason to say it. “Nobody writes that down either.”

I had an answer ready and couldn’t get it out of my mouth. I hadn’t expected him to have thought about my job at all, and I hadn’t known how much it would matter that he had.

“They put my name on a certificate at the end of the year,” I said.

“Did it have the year on it?”

“It had the year on it and my name spelled wrong.”

He let out one breath through his nose, hard, and that was as close as he got to laughing. His shoulders dropped when he did it.

I sat in the lamplight with my lap empty and my book across his coffee table, playing the part of the other team’s winger, and did the translation.

He hadn’t described hockey to me. He’d described the banana, cut into seven pieces because the shape had rules, and the index card that said Gerald gets a plate, printed in block letters so a stranger wouldn’t have to guess on her first morning, and a coffee machine set the night before by a man who’d never mentioned setting it. It was the same sentence in a different building.

He’d done it for years, and Katya had walked out of the middle of it and into a life where somebody clapped.

“That’s a terrible job,” I said.

His head snapped up.

“It’s a terrible job, Eli. You do the work, and the work is built so that it’s invisible, and then you go home and do the other one, and that’s built the same way. That’s not modest. That’s a bad deal, and you took it twice.”

He sat there with his elbows on his knees and didn’t answer right away.