Epilogue
It was September, and the Ironhawks geared up for a new season.
Pratt's kitchen ran quieter than mine. The refrigerator didn't rattle, and the pipes didn't knock. Nothing announced itself. Everything just worked, which had taken some getting used to, because I'd spent most of my adult life in apartments that only partially functioned.
I still owned my place next door, but it was increasingly feeling like an annex, instead of a home.
Pratt came out of the bedroom wearing his arena suit, pulling his jacket straight at the collar. I handed him a mug of coffee.
"Ice okay yesterday?" I asked.
"Fine."
That was his entire review of a two-hour practice session. I'd learned to read the tone instead of the actual words. Fine-good was a flat delivery with no follow-up. Fine-actually-complicated had a half-second delay.
I thought about last spring's playoffs.
The Ironhawks won the first round in six. I watched most of those at Carver's
The second round was a seven-game affair, but we still won. In Game Six, I peered at the bar TV through a gap in my fingers like I was nine and the movie had gotten too real. Nora said, "Breathe." I offered a thumbs-up. She said, "That is not breathing, Sullivan."
In the quarterfinals, we took game seven in overtime.
I can't tell you what I did during the first overtime period. Tomasz said I reorganized the speed rail twice without breaking stride. That's possible. I don't remember it.
Kieran scored eleven minutes into the second overtime. I was on my side of the bar and said something I can't repeat because there were children present. Nora set her coffee down and put her arms around me from behind, and held on for about fifteen seconds without saying a word.
It was the best playoff run the franchise had managed in a decade. Pratt made the second team All-Playoffs.
Heath sent me a video of Pratt with Coach Markel in the handshake line. He leaned into Pratt and could just barely be heard above the noise. "You set a new standard."
Pratt held his helmet in his left hand, gear soaked through, looking at the coach like he'd said something only mildly interesting. "There'll be more."
Markel smiled.
I watched it eleven times. I'll never tell Pratt that.
"Back by noon," he said.
***
My therapy started in May. It was Tuesday afternoons, with a woman named Dr. Osei whose office was on the fourteenth floorof a building on Michigan Avenue. The waiting room played obscure jazz.
I'd found her through Tricia, who'd found her through a friend who described her as someone who didn't let you get away with anything but wasn't mean about it. That turned out to be accurate. For the first session, I arrived with three prepared deflections and a bit about the irony of a bartender in therapy that I'd workshopped on the walk over. She let me deliver all of it. Then she asked what I was most afraid of being asked, and I was so surprised, I answered honestly.
That was May. This was September. I hadn't missed a Tuesday.
I played the records. The self-titled album came out sometime in May. I listened without doing anything else at the same time.
I cried once, listening to "Rhiannon." It wasn't a collapse. The album kept going.
I wasn't ready forRumoursuntil July. I put it on Pratt's turntable, while he was at morning skate. Sipping my coffee, I got through the whole first side before he came back. When he returned, he drank a tall glass of water and came and sat beside me.
We listened to the second side together.
I wrote Cath a letter in June. It took three nights because I kept trying to find the perfect words.
The final version wasn't long or eloquent. It was honest.
