"You think I'm going to take coaching from the other team's goalie."
"I think you already noticed and you're testing whether I noticed."
He laughs, the big one, the one that filled the rink in Chicago when I was small enough to think the noise was for me. "Mom says hi. She's got your jersey and my jersey both. She switches at the second intermission. Says it keeps her neutral."
"Mom can have both jerseys. You get nothing until this is over."
"I'm not asking for your power play."
"You're absolutely asking for my power play. You called the night before a game, which you only do when you want me relaxed."
"Maybe I want my son relaxed."
"Maybe you want my five-hole reads soft. How's the room over there."
"Loud. Confident. That worries me more than scared would. You remember the bantam final, you let in the soft one in the first and then stood on your head."
"I remember you didn't say a word the whole drive home."
"I didn't have a word. I was too proud to talk. I'm telling you now. That's the word, eighteen years late." He lets it sit, the way he taught me to let things sit. "Your backup. He played the third in that Round 1 blowout. Quiet glove. Calm. Where'd you find him."
"Don't scout my backup, Dad."
"I scout everybody. It's the job. I'm asking as your father, not as the bench."
"You can't turn it off that fast and we both know it."
"No. No, I probably can't." A pause, and in the pause is the both-of-it, the man who taught me to answer a hostile press scrum and the man whose forecheck gets drawn up tonight to break the breakout keeping us alive. "You okay, Soren."
He asks it the way he asked the night Seattle left me unprotected. Two words, the weight all underneath.
And I want to tell him. That's the strange part. I want to tell my father, who's coaching the team trying to end my season, that there's a person two stalls down whose hands I know the pattern of. That we aren't talking. That I built something this year I can no longer find the edges of, and I think I broke it by trying to hold it too well.
"I'm good, Dad. Knee's fine. Just maintenance."
"I didn't ask about the knee."
"I know you didn't. I'm good. Go design your forecheck. I'll see you Thursday."
"Love you, kid. Play well. Not too well."
He hangs up and I sit with the phone a beat longer than I need to. Nothing surprises him. He likely knew there was a someone before I had a word for it, and that's either a gift or the whole problem. I've never once been able to decide which.
Tikh drops onto the bench beside me without asking and starts unlacing skates he changed out of twenty minutes ago.
"Good win."
"Good win."
He works the lace. He isn't here for the win. Tikh sits down next to you when there's a thing and waits, and the waiting is the question. I taught him the economy. He uses it on me now, which is its own justice.
"Crossword," he says.
"What about it?"
"You're not doing it."
"It's the Finals. There's a lot going on."
