I pick up the bag and walk out and shut the door behind me.
Stanley is in the kitchen doorway when I come down.
He has, between me going up and me coming down, gotten up and put on a shirt and poured himself a glass of water, and he’sstanding in the archway like a man who is going to ask me a question I do not want to answer.
“Whoa.”
I’m at the front door already. I have my hand on the handle.
“Whoa, whoa. Golding. Come here.” He walks over and squints at my neck. He tilts his head. “You got a hickey?”
“No.”
“Blue.”
I rub at the smudge with the heel of my hand. “No.”
He looks across the kitchen at Percy. Percy is still at the counter with his coffee. Percy doesn’t look up.
“Pers. What did I miss?”
Percy shrugs. He doesn’t look up.
Stanley looks back at me.
I’m already opening the door.
“Golding —”
I’m out. The cold morning hits me in the face. I pull the door shut behind me. He calls something through the door I don’t catch. I get in my truck. The cab is freezing. My breath fogs the windshield before the engine has turned over. I sit there for a second with my hands on the wheel and the keys in my fist, and I cannot for one full breath remember what I’m doing and where I’m going.
Right. The rink.
I turn the key and drive.
It takes me nine minutes to get there. Stanley’s key works on the first try. It’s dark, but the lights motion-sense on as I pass them, a chain of small fluorescent clicks following me down the cement, and I let myself into the locker room and dump my bag on a bench.
The room is colder than the hallway.
I lace my skates. I don’t allow myself to think of anything else but what’s in front of me. It’s worked for two years, and it’ll work today.
I push through the door from the locker room to the ice, and the cold of the rink hits me clean — the metallic flat cold that lives in this building seven days a week. I flip one bank of lights from the box by the boards. Just one. Half the rink lights up. The far end stays dark. I drop a basket of pucks on the bench, pull the gate, and step out.
The ice is fresh.
The Zamboni was here last night. I can smell it.
I skate one slow lap. Warm up. Loosen the legs. Get the blood going. I’m not going to be smart about the warm-up, but I’m at least going to skate a lap.
Then I dump the basket of pucks on the ice and start firing. The first one cracks against the boards loud enough to echo. The sound is bigger than it should be in a room this empty. The crack hits the rafters and comes back down, and I’m already at the next puck. I’m not aiming. I’m not looking at the net. I’m hitting. The puck goes where the puck goes. I am wristing them off the boards, off the glass, and at a corner of the empty net. Only one out of every three or four is going in, and I do not care which.
Crack.
She is never going to be mine.
Crack.
I have known this for two fucking years.
