“Frederica!” She doesn’t like when I take the Lord’s name in vain, even though I know she couldn’t tell me the last time she went to church, let alone her favorite Bible verse. Catholic-inspired horror flicks are the closest I get to Jesus these days, so I shrug.
“They think he’s involved?” I ask. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I’ve had a front-row seat to my father’s wheeling and dealing my whole life, and while I’ve never seen him do anything overtly illegal, I know how he operates—mercilessly. Simultaneously without morals and completely within the bounds of the law. An admirable businessman.
“He’s not involved,” she says curtly, thenturns on the local news.
A picture of my uncle’s mugshot fills the screen, alongside a talking head blabbering about the hockey team and its impending demise. Truth be told, my father couldn’t give two shits about what happens to the LA Monarchs. He’s always been more of a baseball guy, only buying into the hockey franchise because he loves his little brother, who couldn’t afford it alone, and my father wanted something to share with him. It’s not like LA is a hockey town anyway. Everyone knows the team is failing.
“Mateo is coming over in an hour,” mother says.
Mateo is our family attorney. While he’s gotten us out of a few scrapes, like the time my father accidentally ran over the neighbor’s cat, he mostly just provides counsel. Luckily in a town full of more interesting celebrities, we’re not really targets for gossip, but few things are as important to my family as upholding a classy, reputable image.
“He’s spoken with Dad?”
“He’s been at the station with him.”
I take an unladylike gulp of my wine, wondering how all of this bad publicity will affect my hireability. Producers don’t like bad press. One of the quickest ways to sink a project is to attach a disreputable name to it, and I’m not naive enough to think I can fly under the radar for long. My father’s company’s name is on the arena, after all: Spacelytics Center, and with my trust inaccessible, I’ve got nothing to sell besides my name and shining personality.
For the first time since the news broke, it occurs to me that my father might not be the only casualty of my uncle’s mistakes.
Chapter 4
Mattias
Birthdays make my skin crawl, at least when it’s my own. But these days I actually have the finances to spoil my little brother, Micke, so I do—not that the Lefebvre jersey was much of an expense. Two hundred dollars for the jersey, plus the shipping cost and a guarantee I’d get the Pioneers’ goaltender a reservation at Birds of Paradise next time he’s in Los Angeles was an easy price for an autograph. I don’t give a shit about private members clubs, but as a professional athlete my name apparently carries weight with guest lists, and Birds of Paradise is the place to be these days—or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know. I don’t go out.
Charles Lefebvre is my brother’s favorite player, which I find offensive since the Pioneers are our biggest rival, but Micke is a former goaltender and there’s no denying Lefebvre is damn near impossible to get past. Still, it’s a stupid team name with ugly-as-shit colors and you’d never catch me dead in one of their jerseys. I always tell Micke he’s taken too many pucks to the head.Takes a brain injury to know a brain injury, he always says back, referring to the TBI I received when I was seven.
He’s proud of me, but I know he hates that I still play hockey. It stresses him out, especially since it goes against my doctor’s recommendation. The injury is long-healed now, but there’s always the risk that a bad hit could aggravate or compound its effects. Quitting isn’t an option for me, though. Quitting without a championship means our father’s dreams died with him.
I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, knowing how much he wanted this for me, only for it to amount to nothing.
Micke doesn’t look at it that way, but we’ve never seen eye to eye about the accident, and we usually just end up arguing when it comes up. At some point, we just stopped talking about it. I still maintain Micke could have played in the NHL if he’d wanted to, but he landed an electrician job at eighteen and never looked back. Sometimes I wonder if the pressure our mother put on me to succeed scared him away from it, but he prefers a simple, small-town life anyway. It’s probably for the best, because our mother needs someone in our small village of Rimbo to look after her, and that person was never going to be me.
It's not that I don't miss Sweden. I do. There just isn't a life for me there anymore. Not while I'm playing hockey, at least.
Driving in LA is the stuff of nightmares. I preemptively think I’ve made it to the post office in one piece when a red convertible coup cuts me off, making me slam on the brakes. Coffee splashes into my lap, burning me through my trousers, and I suck in a sharp breath.
“Helvete,” I swear, barely refraining from laying on the horn. I have told myself I will never become an LA horn-laying madman, but I can feel my resolve eroding.
The coup douche has the nerve to pull into the parking area ahead of me, taking the last available space in the too-small lot. I have to sit and queue another five minutes until a space for my Volvo 240becomes available, and in that time the asshole doesn’t even get out of their car—which I’m not surprised to see is generously dinged up with dents and scratches. The vindictive part of me wants to sit and wait, just to see who it is, maybe even stick a passive aggressive note on their window—I keep sticky notes in my glovebox for this exact reason—but I glance at my watch and realize it’s already almost nine. Poirier is meeting me for training at half ten. I snatch up my carefully packaged box and head inside.
There is another queue waiting for me, of course. Someone far too old to be applying for their first passport is yelling at a clerk, and a woman two spaces ahead of me is keeping an overly energetic dog in a chokehold to keep it from jumping on the man ahead of her. At least I don’t have to worry about being assaulted for autographs in LA. Nobody gives a shit about hockey here. I've worn a hat anyway, just in case.
“Hey, could you grab me that roll of tape?”
The man near the dog looks at me, and I’m silently relieved to find no recognition in his eyes.
“Yeah, just that blue one, there.” He points at the wall of packing accessories to our right. I suppose he doesn’t want to walk past the dog to retrieve it himself, but he doesn’t even offer a please or thank you.
I step out of queue anyway, because I was raised in a society with manners.
“This one?” I say.
“No, the smaller one next to it.”
It’s high on the wall, but that’s not a problem for me at 189 centimeters. I grab it and hand it to him, stretching an arm out over the panting dog. Its owner mouths asorryto me, which I ignore. I resent the way people here bring dogs that aren’t service animals into businesses, something the general populous of LA would readilydisagree with me about. I find I have a lot of disagreements with this place.
“Thanks, man,” the guy says, and with a nod I return to my place in the queue.
