I took up my position to broom for him, and still, he didn’t look at me. Once he’d delivered and was yelling down the ice for us to curl, my disappointment curdled to annoyance as I strained to hear Alan’s calls over Evan’s.
The stone, thrown with a bit too little weight, curled too far, so it peeked from behind its guard, making it an easy target for a takeout. In a game, that could catapult us into a blank end and the opposite team keeping the hammer, if they had it, or any number of ways opponents could take advantage of the mistake.
“Should have laid off brooming sooner, like I called,” Alan said as I passed him. “I have perspective from here you don’t when you’re following the stone down the ice. You know this.”
“I couldn’t hear you over Evan.” I didn’t wait for his reply as I slid back to take my turn.
“Almost,” Evan said. “Maybe broomed a bit too long.”
“Would have been perfect, if I could have heard our Skip, but you were too loud. Try and not do that during a game. It’s his job to call the shot, not yours.” Again, I didn’t wait for a response. I was annoyed at being the one called out for the error by both of them.
To prove my point, I shot my rocks in near silence, only acknowledging Alan’s suggested strategies, and delivering where he told me to.
When I was done and it was his turn to deliver, he stopped as we passed each other on the way to change ends. “You don’t have to take my play just because. If you have a better shot, speak up. That last one might have been easier if we’d done a peel and stick.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But I couldn’t see it from down here.”
“Then come up and talk to me. We’re a team.”
“You’re the Skip.”
“But you’re a Skip too. You know how to do this. We picked you for what you can do out here, in all your capacities. Don’t play half your game. We won’t stay on top that way.”
“Sure.”
“Perry, this is a team sport. We all need to act like it.”
“I’m fine. Maybe talk to him and remind him what he’s supposed to be doing. He doesn’t seem to want to listen to me, but you? He eats up everything you say.”
“Perry.”
I pushed off and slid my way to the far end to pick a shot for him. I knew what he was good at, and I knew what he needed to practice, so I found the shot I thought would be most difficult for him to make. Since the lines I normally depended on were faint and flickering, I asked Robbie if he saw it too. He studied the field, commented that it wasn’t an easy shot, but it was there, and so I called it.
Alan’s delivery was light, as Evan’s had been, because the ice was sticky so I called a hurry. “Hard clean, hard clean! No curl, no curl! Clean! Clean! Ev!”
Robbie tapped Evan’s shoulder to get his attention and adjust his brooming, but by then, it was too late and the stone over-curled, taking out the guard instead of peeling away the one behind it.
“Evan,” I called, but he’d already turned and distanced himself back down the ice.
“Never mind.” Robbie patted my shoulder. “I’m sure he knows.”
I had no idea if he did, though he stopped to talk to Alan on his way back and the two of them chatted, heads together, Alan’s hand on Evan’s forearm.
“Are we curling, or aren’t we?” Michael asked me while I was trying to decide if I should go over there and talk about what went wrong, or play Evan’s cold-shoulder game. Michael’stone came across calm as always, his hand on my shoulder firm, but gentle. “Because it feels like you’re here to glare at your boyfriend and snarl at your Skip.”
I nodded, lips clamped tight. I was doing both those things, and I hated it.
“Walk with me?” he asked.
I glanced to Robbie, who waved me off. “I got this,” he assured me. “Take a minute.”
“Sure.” I headed for the closest bumper and stepped off the ice.
We left the others practicing on our rented sheet and wandered over to a booth at the back of the bar area. This club had a much nicer off-ice space than my home club did and the booth offered us a pocket of privacy once the server had left a pitcher of water and two glasses for us.
“What are we talking about?” I asked.
“Your tension, for starters. I know we’ve talked about how you see the lines and decide on the shots. Frankly, Alan is pretty impressed with your shot calling. So am I.”
