“IKEA trip!It can be our first roommate bonding activity.”
Breezy bounced over to the free weights, apparently intent on getting through his workout so they could get started.
Bonding activity?Mazetti mouthed at Phil.His big, expressive eyes widened, and the corners of his mouth turned down.
Phil shrugged and shot him an encouraging smile.
He gave them a week as roommates.Then Mazetti would be renting his own place, ELC or no ELC.
After Breezy and Mazetti, Hayes and Vanderbilt stopped by and did a few halfhearted cooldown reps while complaining about Trout.Bitching about the coaches was practically their team tradition, but now Phil couldn’t help but wonder where Morris figured in all their complaints.Sure, they’d been groaning about Trout for years, and Ben had only started in August.But it was November.Ben could have used those three months to change things.
When they were gone, Elijah called.
Phil answered on speaker phone, the weight room once again empty and quiet save for the repetitive clang of Phil’s barbell hitting the floor.
“What’s up?”
Elijah groaned.“Susan from next door saw about your knee on some cable sports channel, and now Mom and Dad know it’s a lot worse than what you told them.”
“Ah, shit.”Phil downplayed the seriousness of his injuries to his parents as a matter of course in the same way he downplayed the violence of hockey as a sport.Since they had stopped driving him to games and buying his equipment, they seemed to have miraculously forgotten the dangers inherent in the sport, and he liked to keep it that way.He had zero desire to debate some scholarly article about CTE during his one allotted week at home in the summer.
“Mom wants to know if you’re okay or if you need her to fly out and take care of you.”
“I cannot think of anything I want less,” Phil said.His mom, a deeply anxious person, would hover relentlessly, questioning the intensity of his rehab program, cooking meals that didn’t contain anywhere near enough macros, and guilt-tripping him if he didn’t eat them.
“Then you’ve gotta prove to her you aren’t dying.She already went into a whole thing about how you should have never dumped Camille.”
Phil bit back a grunt of frustration.His parents loved Camille.When he told them they’d gotten divorced—on the last evening of his obligatory summer trip so the fallout would be contained—his mom cried.“Camille deserves to do things with her life besides taking care of me and my stupid knee.”
There was a long pause on the other end, then, “Are you okay though?”
“Yeah, Eli.I’m fine.My coach is staying with me right now to help me with the stairs and stuff, and rehab’s going well.”
“Good.”
Fine covered all manner of sins.Fine included “considering retirement.”Fine included “developing wacky conspiracy theories about the coach living in my spare room.”To keep Eli distracted, Phil asked him about his new job, an adjunct position at a small college in upstate New York that happened to become vacant just as Eli finished his postdoc in behavioral psychology.The topic kept them occupied until enough time had elapsed and Phil felt okay hanging up.
He was glad no one else came in afterward.His desire to be sociable had waned.
Ben picked him up from the weight room half an hour later.Phil had debated texting Tom to ask if he wanted to meet up instead of waiting around to be driven home, but he was a little salty that Tom had moved on to a new best friend so fast that even Breezy had noticed.
Instead, Phil stowed his crutches in the back of Ben’s surprisingly modest car, a mid-range older Ford model.He clung to Ben’s deceptively strong shoulders as he maneuvered his way into the passenger seat, and then Ben drove them to the hardware store.
“What are we doing here?”
“I’m going to be in Canada for ten days pretty soon,” Ben said.“I’m assuming you don’t want me to send a live-in nurse—”
“Absolutely not.”
“And I don’t want you sleeping on the couch for ten days.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Making your stairs easier to use.”
Ben offered to take care of everything while Phil waited in the car, but Phil wasn’t about to miss a prime opportunity to find out more about his coach.
“Besides,” he told Ben.“As soon as you leave me alone, I have to call my mom, and I’m trying to put it off.”
