Ash is in the kitchen, pouring shots. He waves me over, pours one for me, then clinks our glasses together.
“To Cap,” he says.
“To Cap,” I echo.
We down them, and the burn is sharp, but it’s better than the alternative.
O’Doul bellows from the living room, “Webb! Get your ass in here and lose me some money!”
I flop onto the couch next to Raz, who’s already lost his shirt and is down to a team-issued tank and what look like swim trunks.
Ash slides in on my other side, close enough that our knees bump. He smells like clean sweat and cinnamon, which I don’t understand but don’t question.
The game is bullshit. Everyone cheats, nobody cares.
The point is not to win, but to keep the noise level high enough to drown out the parts of our brains that want to think about what comes next.
Halfway through the first hand, there’s a knock at the door.
O’Doul gets up, muttering, “If this is another Jehovah’s Witness, I swear to god…”
But it’s not. It’s Caleb.
Cap's younger brother. The cops had cleared him early, phone records placed him at a study group in Pullman the whole night, backed up by one of his classmate who swore he never left.
He stands in the doorway, hands jammed in his pockets, hair matted under a Seahawks beanie, eyes rimmed in red.
For a second, nobody says a word. Then Ash, who’s always faster on the uptake, stands and says, “Hey, man. You want in?”
Caleb shrugs. “Never played.”
Raz, always the bleeding heart, waves him over. “Sit. We’ll teach you.”
He does, perching at the edge of the coffee table like he expects to be kicked out any second.
O’Doul deals him in. “You ever play Go Fish?”
Caleb cracks a smile. “Yeah.”
“Same concept, but with more drinking and less dignity.”
Ash gets up, brings a soda for Caleb, sets it down like a peace offering. He sits back down, but now there’s something different in his posture. He’s on, alert, ready to referee if the team gets too rough.
We play three hands. Caleb wins two, which Raz says is “beginner’s luck” but everyone knows is bullshit.
After a while, the jokes slow down, the energy dips, and the room gets heavy.
O’Doul tells a story about Cap’s first fight in juniors, how he took a punch to the face and spat blood on the ref’s shoe. Everyone laughs, but after the echo dies, nobody says anything for a long time.
Caleb looks at the floor. “He used to take me to the rink at night. Just us. He’d tell me, ‘If you can beat me at face-offs, you can have my car for a week.’”
I nod. “He was full of shit, you know.”
Caleb snorts. “He never let me win.”
“Me neither,” I say.
There’s a new silence, but it’s not bad. It’s a shared thing, like a blanket nobody wants to admit they need.
