“Mamma—”
“You will turn the computer,” Gitta told her son. “I would like to see the man who is feeding you while your arm is broken. Turn it.”
And Theo, the immovable iceberg, the man who took orders from no one, sighed the same sigh Shane had heard from himself a hundred times, the sigh of a son with no defense against his mother, and turned the laptop, and Shane found himself waving a wooden spoon at a woman in Gothenburg with sauce on his apron, going, “Hi. Hi, Mrs. Lindgren. I’m Shane.”
“Birgitta. Gitta.” She studied him with the same total stillness Theo used, the family inventory, and then she smiled, and it transformed her, and Shane understood, right then, why Theo had said everyone likes her, it is annoying. “You play hockey with my Theodor. You are the one he fights with.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“He talks about you.” Gitta’s eyes glinted. “For two years. Novak this, Novak that, Novak is reckless, Novak does not respect the system. I thought, this Novak, my son is in love or he wants to kill him, with Theodor it is hard to know the difference—”
“Mamma.”
“—and now I see he is married to him and Novak is making him dinner, so.” Gitta spread her hands. “I have my answer.”
Shane laughed, and Theo put his good hand over his face, and Gitta laughed too, and for twenty minutes Shane stood in a sixty-three-degree kitchen in Rockford, Illinois, talking toa woman across an ocean who had switched into her second language just so she could tease him, who asked about his mother’s treatment, Theo had told her, of course Theo had told her, with a gentleness that made Shane’s throat close, who said, near the end, her voice dropping, the laughter gone, “Theodor was always afraid no one would keep him. Even as a boy. He thought he had to be useful or we would not — " she shook her head. “I am his mother. He never had to be useful. But the head believes what it believes.” She looked at Shane through the screen, through ninety miles and four thousand more. “You see him. I can tell. Keep seeing him.”
After they hung up, the kitchen was very quiet.
Theo was looking at the dark laptop screen. Shane stood at the stove with the spoon in his hand, the three words backed up behind his teeth, and he wanted to say them so badly it hurt.
“She likes you,” Theo said, to the screen. “She does not like anyone that fast. It took her a year to like my billet family. You, twenty minutes.”
“Theo.”
“Do not.” Theo’s voice was rough. “Do not say it. If you say it I cannot — there is a call-up coming, Shane, and a divorce in the deal, and your mother’s treatment depends on you getting to Chicago, and if you say it and then we have to lose it anyway, I will not — please. Do not say it. Let me keep pretending it is a folder. I am better at folders.”
And Shane, who wanted, for the first time in his life, to be selfish, to say it and let it cost what it cost, looked at the man he’d married hunched in a sling at a kitchen table begging him not to make it real because real was the only thing Theo Lindgren had never learned to survive, and he loved him too much to say he loved him.
“Okay,” Shane said. “It’s a folder.”
“Thank you.”
“Dinner’s almost ready.” Shane turned back to the stove so Theo wouldn’t see his face. “Sit. You can’t do anything one-handed anyway, you menace.”
And they ate dinner, standing up at the counter, as they always did. Just a folder. Just a folder. And they had never been more married, and outside the season ran down toward the wall they were both pretending not to see.
Chapter 10
The rumor landed in the room like a grenade on a Tuesday, sideways, from a guy who knew a guy.
“Reuben’s done,” Wozniak, the Blaze’s chirpy fourth-liner, said, loud across the room while pulling on his gear. “Chicago. Reuben blew his knee out in warmups last night, did you see it? Non-contact, just went down. He’s out for the year.” Wozniak let it hang, because everyone in an AHL room knew what an NHL injury meant. “That’s a hole on their blue line. Somebody’s getting a call.”
The room went quiet, twenty-three men all doing the same math at once. A hole on the Fury blue line. A call-up. And Mercer, everyone knew this, it was the open secret of the whole arrangement, got to recommend. The Fury didn’t have to take his guy, but they listened. One name, from this room, ninety miles down the highway, to the show.
Shane felt Theo go still two stalls down. He didn’t look. They’d gotten good at not looking.
The candidates were obvious, and everyone knew them, and nobody said them out loud. There was Theo, when healthy the best defensive defenseman in the division, a coach’s dream, a penalty-kill anchor, the stay-at-home insurance a playoff team wanted for a stretch run; except Theo had a sling coming off in a week and a shoulder the org thought was chronic-nothing and would un-recommend in a heartbeat if they knew was recurrent.There was Shane, younger, the power-play quarterback, the offensive upside, the guy whose ceiling was higher and whose floor was a heart attack; the guy the Fury’s analytics department probably liked and whose own coach didn’t fully trust to defend a lead. And there was Tripp.
Tripp Vandenberg was twenty-one and a first-round pick and the only one of the three the organization actually owned a future in, and he played like he knew it. He was good. That was the infuriating fact. He had the easy entitled excellence of a kid who’d been the best player on every team since he was nine, and he wanted the call-up openly, hungrily, without the years of being ground down that taught you to hide it.
“Big week, boys,” Tripp said, to the room, to no one, grinning, and his eyes went to Shane, and then, Shane caught it, to Theo, and then back to Shane, slow, and the kid’s face sharpened, and Shane’s stomach dropped, because Tripp Vandenberg was entitled and arrogant and not, unfortunately, stupid.
* * *
Sloane Bauer came to Rockford on a Wednesday, and the fact that an assistant general manager had driven ninety miles to watch a practice was not lost on anyone. She was in her forties, dark coat, a tablet, and the unsentimental stillness of a person who decided other people’s lives for a living. She watched the entire skate from the bench without expression. Afterward, the room cleared slowly, guys lingering, antenna up, watching who she approached.
She went to Theo. Not Shane, not Tripp. Theo.
