“It’s deconstructed.”
“You dropped it.”
“I plated it with intention.” Baz passes out forks. “Eat before you judge. House rule. Judge with your mouth full.”
We eat. It is, against the odds and Tikh’s face, good.
“Huh,” Soucy says, looking at his fork.
“Huh good or huh bad.”
“Huh, it’s good.”
“HE SAID IT’S GOOD.” Baz points the spoon at the ceiling like he’s thanking somebody up there. “Tikh, mark it down. April. Soucy liked the project.”
“I will remember it,” Tikh says. “It will not happen again.”
The game runs. The room settles. A bad no-call on a crease scramble, and Tikh sits forward. “That is interference.”
“It’s not,” Soucy says. “Their own D pushed the guy into the crease. You can’t whistle a team for its own push.”
“It should be.”
“Should be and is are different rules. Lundy. Back me up.”
“He’s right,” I say. “Own-team contact, no whistle. Garbage rule, but it’s the rule.”
“Everything’s a garbage rule until the night it helps you,” Baz says around a mouthful of project.
“They’re going to lose this series,” Soucy says, eyes on the screen. It’s more words in a row than he’s spent all night, so the room turns toward him a little. “Not tonight. But they lose it. Their goalie’s fine, the glove tell doesn’t matter, you can win with a tell if your team protects you. Watch their breakout instead. They ice it or they cough it up. Three times this period. They built a whole system on one pass. The other bench solved it in game one.”
“That is a lot of words,” Baz says, delighted.
“You told him to come more,” Tikh says. “This is what more is.”
“I love it. Who else loses?”
“Everybody, eventually. That’s the playoffs.”
And he goes quiet again. I sit there watching a room that isn’t the locker room get the loose, unspooled version of him. The one I’ve had to myself this season in a car and a goalie corner. I like watching it get more air than I give it.
“Seconds on the project?” Baz asks. “It develops as it sits, I think.”
“It congeals,” Tikh says.
“It develops.”
“I’ll have more,” Soucy says, and Baz nearly comes out of his chair.
The cats arrive the way cats do, without crossing the space in between. Mishka, the gray one, lands on the back of the couch and surveys the room like a customs official. Bug goes straight for the stranger. Bug has never once read a room. She scales the side of Soucy’s chair and stands on his thigh and stares up into his face with her entire heart.
Soucy looks down at her.
I’ve watched Soucy’s hands all season without deciding to. The pattern, thumb to each finger and back. The speed of it tells me the rest of him before his face will. Quick means something’s wrong. Slow means the routine’s holding. Fully stopped, I’ve seen one place. The crease. His whole brain goes somewhere clean and the rest of us quit existing for him. I’ve never once seen it somewhere a person could reach.
Bug climbs into his lap and turns around twice. Folds herself down.
Mishka, deciding the stranger has cleared customs, pours off the couch into the same lap. Soucy’s hands come to rest on warm fur and stop.
