Mateo arrived in Stockholm a few months after I did, immediately after his graduation.
The showcase had gone better than he expected.
He’d called me from outside the showcase venue, two hours before it started.
“Remember the stairwell in Ridgewood?” I said.
A pause.
“Dancing Queen?”
“Obviously”.
He laughed, and I heard him exhale, and then he went in and skated.
He called after.
“Well?” I asked.
“I think,” he said, very carefully, “that it went okay.”
It went significantly better than okay.
Djurgårdens offered him a rookie contract three days later. Developmental, conditional, lower salary than he deserved, but it was a legitimate deal. He signed it on a Tuesday morning and called me from outside the office.
“It’s not the NHL…” he’d said.
“Not yet.”
The rookie season was hard in different ways from my hard.
A new city, new language, new teammates who had their own ways of doing things and weren’t particularly interested in adjusting them for a twenty-two-year-old from Minnesota who’d been a captain of a mediocre team. He called me some nights frustrated in a way that reminded me of the first sessions in Blackwood. He’s someone who is good and knows he’s good but sometimes can’t quite make the gap close between good and good enough for this level.
I told him what Brita told me.
“That’s another one done. Just keep going.”
He kept going.
Soon he was getting regular ice time. And then suddenly Djurgårdens were talking about him in press releases. Reading how they talked about him made me smile.
By the end of the season a Swedish sports magazine had named him as a rising star to watch.
I left it open on my laptop and didn’t mention it.
He saw it and didn’t mention it either.
But then he showed up that evening with food from the Thai place on my street and sat on my sofa with an expression of someone trying very hard not to look overly pleased with themselves and failing.
“Rising star,” I said.
“Don’t.”
“One to watch.”
“Elida.”
I smiled at my food.
