"It's yours."
"I'm offering."
"And I'm declining."
He ate the spring roll. No further negotiation.
I shifted my weight, and something on the side table caught my peripheral vision. I'd been in his apartment three times now. I knew the placement of the few decorative items. This was new.
Next to a half-empty glass of water and a phone charger with a fraying cord stood a figure made of red pipe cleaners.
I set down my chopsticks.
It was approximately six inches tall. A hockey player, body twisted mid-stride, stick extended. The hockey stick was a black pipe cleaner. The helmet was a coil of red. And pasted onto the head, a little off-center, was a cutout photograph of Heath's face. Grinning.
A Post-it note was stuck to the figure's torso with handwriting that looked like it had been produced during a minor earthquake.
Takes up space. Hard to knock over. — Pickle
"When did that arrive?" I asked.
Heath's eyes opened wider.
"Yesterday. He mailed it priority. The tracking number came with a six-paragraph text about postal infrastructure in northern Ontario and a conspiracy theory about how Canada Post is secretly run by geese."
I leaned closer. The pipe cleaner legs were slightly uneven, giving the figure a forward lean. Aggressive. Like it was driving the net.
"Somebody made this?"
"Yeah, my friend, Pickle. He gets ideas the way other people get colds. They arrive without warning, take over his entire system, and produce results—like this."
I looked at the uneven legs and the helmet coil. Whoever Pickle was, he'd built it fast.
"Two weeks ago he decided he was going to learn to whittle. Bought a knife and a block of wood. Within an hour he'd nicked himself, bled on Hog's dog, and produced something he insisted was a salmon."
"Hog's dog?"
"Biscuit. Rescue mutt. Looks like someone used spare parts to put a dog together." Heath gestured at the pipe cleaner figure. "This is one of Pickle's better efforts. He was on a pipe cleaner run last month. He told me he made one for everyone on the team. Hog's had a tiny knitted scarf, because Hog knits, and Pickle thought that was—" He searched for the word and then spoke in a dramatic, deep-throated tone. "Thematically appropriate."
"A special phrase?"
"Oh, Pickle's a true-crime fan, and he tries to sound like his favorite crime podcasters when he's wanting to italicize with his voice."
I looked at the Post-it again. The handwriting slanted upward and to the right, like the words were trying to leave the note behind.
Takes up space. Hard to knock over.
Heath set down his container. Wiped his hands on a napkin.
"Pickle's the reason I'm here."
"In Chicago?"
"In hockey." He paused. "Not like—he didn't teach me to skate or get me drafted. But Thunder Bay was where I figured out what kind of player I could be. And Pickle was the reason it worked for me."
I waited for him to continue.
"In Thunder Bay, mistakes were loud. You fucked up, and everyone saw it. But everything was forgivable, too."
