But it’s not the whole thing, and I can feel the parts that don’t sit flush. People don’t crater like that because of their dad’s disappointment. So the other thought comes up, the uglier one, the one I keep circling — maybe it’s me. Maybe I moved too fast. The trip, the night, the window, all of it inside a week. Maybe Icrowded a person afraid of love, went all in the second she let me through the door, and her dad was just the crack the rest of it poured through.
I cycle between the two and can’t land on either. The not-knowing is torture for a guy whose entire gift is knowing early. I keep reaching for the read that resolves it, and my hand keeps closing on air.
I end up in my truck and take the ten minutes home on muscle memory, and then I can’t make myself go inside — the house is full of boys riding the win, music through the walls, Rowan’s pie, the whole loud filthy thing I turned down the NHL to keep — and I cannot walk into a celebration tonight. So I sit in my truck on Hawthorne Street with the engine off.
Three doors down, her windows are dark.
She was supposed to come over tonight. No party, just you. I keep looking at the dark window and think about the version of this night where she’s in my passenger seat right now giving me grief about the wink, and instead she’s three doors down, having decided she’s a thing I need saving from.
My phone lights up.
Dad.
Worst possible timing, but I answer it anyway.
“There he is!” Robert, big and warm, riding high. “Caught the third on the stream — Cup, that kill after Golding went off, that shorthanded shift, that was men’s-league poise, you hear me? I about put my foot through the coffee table. Your mother had to talk me down off it.”
“Thanks, Dad.” It comes out flat. I try to put something on it and can’t.
He goes a minute more, proud, replaying my own game back to me, and I let him, because I’ve got nothing for the gaps. And then he arrives at the place he’s probably been running through his mind over and over since I broke the news to him.
“Listen, I won’t harp. But the spring thing. You know the door’s open, yeah? They’d take you the second you said the word. I just — a window like this doesn’t stay open forever, and I’d hate to watch you talk yourself out of it because the timing felt noble.” A warm pause. “Keep your eye on the main thing right now. Don’t let anything pull your focus. This is the window, Cup.”
Don’t let anything pull your focus.
He means it kindly. He’s not wrong about hockey, and he isn’t being cruel.
“Dad,” I say, and then I don’t have the rest of the sentence.
He hears it. “How’s Aspen?”
I can’t answer that. I open my mouth, and there’s nothing in it. The silence runs too long, and that’s the whole answer.
“Hang on,” he says. “Let me put your mother on.”
A shuffle, a muffled handoff, and then my mom’s voice, clear and dry the way it always is.
“Stanley.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“You played beautifully, and you sound like someone died. So.” A pause, and I can see her exactly, leaning on the kitchen counter with her glasses pushed up into her hair, the way she’s stood for every important conversation of my life. “Tell me, or don’t.”
And maybe it’s that I’m wrecked, or that it’s her, or that she’s the one person alive who has never once needed me to do the bit — but it comes out. Not the fake relationship. I’m not handing her that part. But that something happened with Aspen. That she ended it. That she’s decided I’m throwing my career away over her and can’t carry it, and she walked, and I don’t know how to fix it because I don’t fully understand what broke.
My mother is quiet for a moment.
“Can I tell you something I have never said to you?” she says. “And I want you to really hear it. Not wave it off as your mother being dramatic.”
“Okay.”
“I have been married to your father for thirty-one years. I love him. He’s a good man. And he chose hockey over this family more times than I could count, and every single time, he will tell you he didn’t have a choice. That’s the part I need to land for you. He’s not lying when he says it. He believes it. The men in this family — your father, your grandfather, all of them — only ever learned the one way to do it. Game first. Game over everything. And because it’s the only way they were ever taught, they will look you dead in the eye and swear to you on their lives it’s the only way there is.” Her voice doesn’t climb. “And it’s not. I’ve watched a lot of good men break their own hearts certain that it was.”
I don’t say anything. I’m strangling the wheel of a parked truck in the dark.
“So when your father tells you not to let anything pull your focus,” she says, “hear it for what it is. It isn’t wisdom. It’s a man handing you the only map he was ever given, and the map is missing half the world.”
“Mom—”
