But I talk about the kid from Western anyway.
By the time my dad turns me loose, I’m eight minutes into a conversation I never planned to be eight minutes into, and I’ve stopped pretending I’m not watching her.
She’s moved in those eight minutes — Beth, then a woman I don’t know, then back to Aunt Lisa, then a pass through the kitchen where she leaned on the counter and traded three sentences with her mother, then two to her father’s assistants by the window. And in every one of those conversations, she’s the version of her I didn’t have access to this time yesterday.
She laughs once. I catch it from across the room — head back a quarter-inch, hand coming up to her own collarbone the way a woman’s hand comes up when something’s landed.
She doesn’t look at me.
Not at eight minutes. Not at ten. Not at twelve.
She doesn’t need me here. This would be happening all without me if it weren’t for Gavin Carroll.
As I watch her, I start to understand something. Every room I have ever stood in with this girl, she’s been on enemy ice. That quiet, contained, watching thing she does, that’s a woman holding a position she has to defend. This version of her is at her comfort level. I’m across the room watching it happen, and I wouldn’t interrupt it if I could.
“Stan.”
My mom.
“Yeah, Mom.”
She looks at me. Then she follows my eyes across the room, finds Aspen with the two assistants at the window, and she starts talking about something at home. I’m only half-listening.
Aspen doesn’t have a drink. I’ve caught it three separate times now. She set her glass down somewhere on the way to Beth and never picked another one up, and she’s fifteen minutes into this thing with her hands empty.
My mom has finally ended her story, so I say, “Excuse me a second.”
My parents look at me.
I say, “I’m going to get Aspen a drink.”
My dad blinks, looks across the room, and nods.
I go. I don’t cut through her circle. I don’t get her attention. I’m a man on an errand.
There’s a man at the bar I don’t know — mid-fifties, gray jacket, built like a refrigerator, pouring himself a fresh red. He looks up.
“Ermington.”
“Sir.”
“Stanley Ermington. Briggs.”
I know who Briggs is. He runs a Hartford program one rung below the league Coach runs, and he’s put six kids up the ladder in four years.
“Heard a lot about you. Forty-one in fifteen. Plus-seventeen. Corsi over sixty at five-on-five.” He levels a look at me. “You read your own analytics?”
“I read them, sir. My girlfriend wrote them.”
Briggs, who has not smiled once, smiles.
“Bart’s girl?”
“Yes, sir. Smarter than me by a distance.”
“Mm.” He pours a glass of red and holds it out without asking which one I want. “For her?”
“For her, sir.”
