“I’m tired,” I groaned when Kate said she wanted to just go one more place after waffles. “Can we go later? I need a nap.”
Kate glanced too quickly at me and chewed at a hangnail on her thumb. She never bit her nails anymore.
“Kate?” I asked, suspicious.
She let out a frustrated exhale and dropped her shouldersbefore getting in the turn lane that would take us to our neighborhood.
“I need you to not be mad,” she said, and suddenly I wasverynervous.
“What did you do?” I asked. A question so rarely turned to Kate, as she so rarely did things without telling me.
“I didn’t! Well, I sort of did. Crime by omission.”
“Kate.”
“Okay! Okay.”
I turned off the radio and faced her, waiting.
“It’s just that Barry can be very persuasive,” Kate said, already wincing. “And he wanted to do something nice for you.”
I blinked, trying to parse just what the hell she was talking about. I didn’t even have to ask, though, because as soon as we turned the corner onto my street, I saw it: a long line of cars, a rented dumpster in the driveway, a row of men filing in and out of the front door.
“What the fuck?” I muttered. As soon as she pulled to a stop on the sidewalk behind a number of expensive cars, I got out of the van and rushed toward my house.
The people filing out of the house weren’t just anyone, they werehockey players, all of whom greeted me with a joyful chorus of “Hi Hannah” and “Morning Hannah,” most of them obviously sweating from the work of carrying out pieces of my kitchen cabinets or buckets of cracked tile.
They were carrying out pieces of myhouse. Pieces that were not broken when I left at four this morning.
As I was about to squeeze past into the front door, I was made to wait as a group of them team-lifted my literal bathtub, cut in half, through the front door.
“I’m going to kill him,” I muttered.
“Kill who? We need Wright for playoffs,” Kozlov, the goalie, said as he passed.
“Learn how to play without him,” I called back, and rushed inside to find the source of this chaos.
There were no less than fifteen people moving through the house, some in the kitchen, others in the bathroom. The furniture in the living room was covered with plastic tarps, other belongings packed into large totes. I even saw Jeremy in the kitchen, working harder than I’d ever seen him work on a project I needed his help with, beaming all the while. Everyone had on safety glasses, and one of the defensemen handed me a pair before I could ask where Barry was.
I could hear my dad outside too, bossing everyone around and probably having the time of his freaking life. Traitors, the whole lot of them.
“Jer?” I called. He was using a crowbar to take out the old backsplash my grandma always hated but never replaced. I had the pink tile in boxes in the garage to replace it—Grandma would have fucking loved them, but I thought I was over a year away from being able to install them.
“Oh! Hannah.” A few more tiles fell at Jeremy’s feet, and he came over to give me a dusty side hug. “Isn’t this great? Barry got the whole team to come over on their day off.”
“Just great,” I agreed sarcastically, still overwhelmed by the chaos unfolding around me. I was nowhere near ready to start on the kitchen—I didn’t have the money, for one thing, and also didn’t have the time or the energy to build a kitchen from scratch when I could barely lift heavy things without people telling me to take it easy. I had most of the items for the bathroom, but not a new bathtub—how much was that even going to run me?
“Have you seen him, by the way?”
“Come on, Han, don’t be mad at him,” Jeremy pleaded, a peacemaker all of a sudden. Sure.
“Who is Hannah mad at?” O’Neil—Barry’s team best friend, by all accounts—asked as he came into the kitchen with a hammer and chisel in hand. I liked O’Neil. He always said hi to me at the training center when our paths crossed and asked how I was doing growing the baby. He was a good captain.
Which is good, because the team was about to be out a star defenseman. They needed good leadership.
“Where is Barry?” I asked again.
O’Neil and Jeremy shared a look, but before they had to rat out their fearless leader, he walked through the back door wearing a flannel, a Columbus baseball hat, and safety glasses. He halted when he saw me, looking afraid but not nearly as scared as he ought.
