I slide into the car. The leather is cold but familiar now. “It was good. Went to church. Had lunch with Jessa. Worked on some business stuff.”
He gets in the driver’s seat. Starts the engine. “Church?”
“Yeah. My church does this thing where they go through books of the Bible slowly. We’re in 2 Corinthians right now.”
I’m rambling. I always ramble when I’m nervous.
And what’s there to be nervous about? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that this fancy little car smells just like him and there’s a very real possibility that it overrides my brain’s ability to be rational and I end up throwing myself at him over the middle console during the next red light, and now all I can seem to think about is just not doing that…Yeah, I think I’m nervous about that.
And so I keep going, boring him with details about the morning’s sermon. “Yesterday was about not losing heart. How God is at work in us even when we don’t understand what’s happening. When everything feels hard or confusing or like it’s falling apart.”
I stop.
That got way more personal than I intended.
“Sorry. You probably don’t care about?—”
“No, I—” He’s quiet for a moment. Pulls out into traffic. “Do you go to church? Regularly?”
“Most Sundays, yeah. Unless I have an event.” I glance at him. “Do you?”
“We did. When I was a kid. My mom had faith.”
His voice changes.
Softer. Quieter.
“It sort of died with her.”
The words hang in the air.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.”
But it’s not fine. I can hear it in his voice. The way he’s gripping the steering wheel a little tighter. The careful control.
“You know, she got me into hockey,” he continues. “My mom. She was sick most of my childhood. Cancer. That’s why we moved to Minneapolis, actually. Shorter commute to Mayo for her treatment. Anyway, hockey was the one thing that was just mine. She’d come to my games when she could. Sit in the stands wrapped in blankets, even when she was exhausted. She never missed a game if she could help it.”
The pale streetlights pour through the window, softening the hard lines of his face. My heart aches at that faraway look in his eyes. He’s back there now, with his mom.
“Hockey saved me,” he continues. “Gave me purpose. A future. A way out. After she died, my dad started drinking. A lot. Home was chaos. But hockey had rules. Structure. If I worked hard enough, played well enough, I could control the outcome.”
He pauses.
Glances at me.
“That’s why I can’t lose it. Hockey is everything. It’s all I have.”
It’s all I have.
The words sit heavy between us.
He doesn’t have people. Doesn’t have family he can count on. Doesn’t have anything except the game and the performance and the careful control he’s built to survive.
And now I’m taking twenty thousand dollars from him to help him keep the only thing he has left.
Great.
