“You’re not wrong. What about the guys from the Sault?”
“No idea. Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury don’t keep the kind of stats that would help me. Which is why I have a plan.”
Michael sagged. “Tell me.” He sounded more resigned than interested, but I laid it out anyway.
“I looked up their house schedules. Sault Ste. Marie’s club night is Tuesday, and Sudbury’s is Friday. We could go watch them and see how they play. In person.”
“You know how long it takes to drive from the Sault to Sudbury, right?”
“Road trip. We can stop in North Bay and visit your folks. They’ll love that.”
“You need to study a map. North Bay is not remotely between those other two cities.”
“Well, no, but it’s only ninety minutes from Sudbury, so we could stay over at your place. Save some hotel fees.”
He snorted. “Jason and Cameron will love that.”
“They can suck it up. Team bonding. We need this. If they can do it and we don’t want to kill them by the end of it, we might have some hope.”
“I don’t love inflicting them on my parents, but I would love to see them on the farm.” He grinned, and it was downright mean. “Can you imagine?”
I really, really could not imagine the twinky twins in their designer everything picking their way through horse crap, but I, too, liked the idea of it.
“Plus Carol loves it there, and he could use the chance to decompress and commune with the horses.” He downed the end of his beer. “I’ll do it for him.”
He got up, took my empty bottle and his own to the kitchen.
“You’d do anything for him,” I whispered to myself. Maybe it was not super wonderful of me to use that fact in my favour to get Michael to agree to my plan, but it was a net positive. It would do Carol some good to relax where he was comfortable, with people he’d already bonded with. It would be helpful for our strategy to see some of the other teams play in person. A road trip would give us the necessary bonding experience as a team, or solidify my conviction that we needed someone new.
As predicted, the twins hated the idea, and refused to travel with us in Michael’s old SUV, so we let them do their thing in their uncle’s town car, with their uncle’s chauffeur. Michael, Carol, and I took my truck since it was newer and would be lessimpacted by the number of kilometres we were going to put on it.
Between the three of us, the drive from Renfrew to Thunder Bay wasn’t terrible. We had fun, even. Too bad the twins refused to join us.
Strike one against my desired net positive effect.
The Thunder Bay club welcomed us with the kind of fanfare the twins enjoyed, so that was helpful on that front. It distracted the teams from playing their best game, though, so that made it difficult to decide if any of them would be good enough.
“Not if they are distracted by this tiny amount of fuss,” Carol pointed out from where we were sitting in a booth above the sheets to watch. “All of the championships and bonspiels for qualifying are televised. They’d never survive under that kind of pressure.”
If anyone would know, Carol would.
“Technically, none of that matters, because we’re already qualified for the Trials,” I reminded him.
Michael exchanged a look with him, but said nothing.
“What?”
“Watch the game,” Michael said.
A few days later, while Michael and I were relaxing on his parents’ porch under a propane heater, sipping hot chocolate, and Carol was literally communing with the horses, Michael turned his phone to face me.
“Check this out.”
“What is it?” I took the phone and looked at the image. “Who’s this?”
“The Sudbury team. They did this charity thing, teaching kids to curl, having a mini-tournament with them, and raising money for the local clubs for their children’s programs.”
“They sound like real princes,” Jason said, plopping down in the chair next to mine and yanking it forward until he’d blocked me from most of the heat. “It’s fucking frigid out here.”
