“Apart from being your mom, I’m guessing.”
I laughed. “Apart from that. Or maybe including that. Shereallytalked Bribury up.”
“Was that her Bribury shirt you had on earlier?” he asked.
It touched me that he’d realized something that none of my roommates had. He had inside knowledge on that front, but still. “Yes. Your sausage stain scared me out of it.” We both laughed a little at that.
“Did she meet your dad here?”
I shook my head, and some of my curls landed on the sleeve of his sweatshirt that he’d donned after we ate. I went to scoop them off, but liked the look of it so stopped my motion. He didn’t flick the tresses away either.
“No. They met a few months after she finished. In Nebraska, where she was from originally. She always said that it was ironic that she’d left the Midwest to be on the East Coast, went to school here, loved it. Thought she’d end up in New York or D.C., then went home to Nebraska after graduation to just start sending out résumés, met my dad, and ended up back in the same place she started.”
“That’s kinda crazy,” Logan said.
“Right? She said sometimes she thought she just imagined Bribury. I thought that was funny at the time…”
“But now?” he asked, sensing the change of my opinion on that statement.
“Now? I don’t know. Sad, I guess. That the life she thought she’d have when she was at this school. In this dorm—which is crazy in its own right—was not at all the life she ended up with.”
“Sure. But that’s probably going to be true of most of us here, right?”
I leaned my head back against the wall. He was right, of course. “Yeah. True.”
“And that’s okay. I mean, what do you think your life is going to play out like? Sitting right here, today?”
“God, who knows. Does anybody really know?”
He reached across his body to his opposite arm, where my hair still rested on his sleeve. Wrapping a finger into the curls that lay there, he shook his head. “I don’t. That’s for sure. But people probably think that they do. Guys on the team do, but it always involves hockey, so most of them are probably being totally unrealistic.”
“Like going pro, you mean?”
“That, sure. Bribury has a good program, and we compete, but not many of our guys are at future NHL level. But, like, playing in the minors as long as they can. Coaching. Anything to stay in the game.”
“And do you think that about yourself?”
He pulled his finger out of my corkscrew curl and watched as it sprang back into formation. I had a love/hate relationship with my hair and at times would spend way too long trying to straighten it, but I was mesmerized watching Logan wind his finger through my curls only to release them and start again.
“So soft,” he said so quietly that I wasn’t sure I’d made out the words correctly. “I guess I did think hockey would be in my future in some way. Before, anyway,” he said.
“Before your brother got sick?” I asked. I didn’t know if he’d want his brother brought up, but since we were talking about my mom, it felt applicable.
“Yeah. We thought we had it figured out. Play at Bribury together for two years. James could try to get on a team in one of the minor leagues like the AHL or ECHL. Maybe even in Europe. Then I’d join J after I graduated.”
“His name was James? Or Jay?” I asked, although he’d just said as much.
“James. Yeah, sorry. James, but that’s also my dad’s name, so around family and close friends he was J, just his first initial.”
“Got it. Sounds like you had a good plan.” James. His brother was James, but they called him Mrs. And family called him J. It was important to remember the things that defined a person after they passed. To be a placeholder for them in some ways.
“Yeah. What’s that saying they trot out to people in mourning? ‘You make plans and God laughs’? Something like that?”
“Something like that,” I said.
We sat in silence for a moment, me watching as Logan played with my hair. He turned his arm that was next to me so that his hand was up, palm open. Waiting for mine. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to slip my hand into his, and he firmly, but gently, grasped it. The movement caused my hair to fall back into my space, but he brought a portion back to him and continued to wind it around his finger.
“In a way, J dying gives me a chance to, I don’t know, reset my idea of the future,” he said.
