Chapter fifteen
Pratt
The text had come in at 12:47 am.
Sully:Ha. Yeah.
I was at the counter with my morning coffee when I read it. They were two words responding to the Varga waffle iron story I'd sent the night before. My setup was four lines, and I'd sent it knowing the response would be better than my text. His responses usually were.
I scrolled back three days.
Sully was still there in the exchange, starting sometimes and picking up what I sent. He was present, but somewhere in the last seventy-two hours the depth had changed.
It was the same sideways delivery. What was missing was the follow-up that kept the line open past its natural end, making clear the conversation wasn't over.
I put the phone face down on the counter.
I'd called a two-game variance a tendency once in my third season, deciding a coverage gap in the left circle was a structural problem, and I adjusted my positioning accordingly. The gap didn't materialize in the next game.
One data point required a second before it qualified as anything. Sully worked the late shift three of the last four nights. His schedule ran irregularly at the best of times. Two words at twelve forty-eight am was a timestamp, not a pattern.
I rinsed my mug and picked up my bag.
***
Nashville had closed to within one point of us. I'd looked at the standings first thing. The margin was razor-thin.
The locker room had already metabolized the information by the time I arrived. Varga was laying out the historical rationale for our playoff hopes to Rook, who had his headphones on. Varga moved one ear cup.
"I'm not saying it's a slam dunk," he said. "I'm saying the numbers don't argue against it."
Rook replaced the ear cup.
Cross was at the center of the room, eating a protein bar. He was the picture of patience. He'd played with this pressure many times before.
I dressed and skated onto the ice.
For the first drill, forwards drove hard toward the net. Rook held his position and trusted the ice to bring the attackers to him.
The forwards came wide. The shot arrived elevated from the left side. I had it tracked before it left the stick and got my blocker up. It caromed off into the corner.
Holt collected it without looking at his skates.
For the second rotation, Holt closed his lane before I had to build in an adjustment. On the third, he held the forward wide on his own, and the pass option never formed. By the fifth rep, the half-second buffer I'd been allocating to his positioning for eight weeks was entirely gone.
When we finished up, I tapped the posts, left and then right, with the heel of the stick. I skated off.
In the locker room, I picked up my phone.
It had a blank screen. There was nothing from Sully. I put it face down on my stall's shelf and finished removing my pads.
***
I met Heath for lunch at a Korean place on Dearborn that had only twelve seats. He was already there when I arrived, fiddling with a cloth napkin. He looked up when I came in.
"Rook said something today after the skate. It was a complete sentence."
"What'd he say?"
