He doesn't look at the paper. He never looks at the paper first. "Nautical?"
"It's always nautical on Wednesdays."
"That's not actually true."
"It's true enough. Seven across is 'starboard.'"
"You can't just tell me the answer."
"I can if you're going to take forty-five seconds to get there anyway."
"It could have been something else."
"It was starboard." I set the pen down on the bench between us, the way I've set it down a hundred times. How I didn't set it down for nine days because the paper stayed folded in my bag.Across the room Marchetti pulls a shirt over his head that isn't his shirt. "Marchetti's wearing Zay's shirt."
"He isn't."
"Inside out. But it's Zay's. The collar's stretched how Zay stretches collars."
"How do you know how Zay stretches collars."
"Same way you know everything in this room. I watch. You taught me to watch and now I can't stop. They think nobody sees it."
"Nobody does see it. Except us."
"Except us."
The routine runs forty-five minutes that night. Not forty-six. Not sixty-one. Forty-five, the number I built in Gwen's office learning where the walls actually are. The stressor that inflated the count was the carrying, and the carrying is done now. What brought the number back down isn't the man on the stool. It's the work I did in that office, week after week, until the floor I stand on became mine and not the disorder's. The floor and the ceiling met back up at the same wall after a month of the floor sitting alone in the basement, and the meeting happened because I did the work to find it again. Thompson clocks it from across the room because Thompson clocks everything.
"Forty-five," he says.
"Forty-five."
"On the nose?"
"On the nose."
"That's the first time in a month."
"First time in a month."
"You want me to make it weird and say a whole thing about it?"
"No."
"Cool. I won't. I'm thinking it very loud, though."
Lundy is on the stool at the end of the bench in the goalie room, the braced leg out straight, where he's parked himself every game since the leg went. Tonight he isn't handing me a scouting report across a cold six feet of floor. Tonight he's just talking, how he talks. Easy. The warmth back on top of the economy where it lives.
"Their goalie cheats on the first shot of the power play," he says. "Comes out too far on the first look. You saw it in Game 5."
"I saw it."
"I know you saw it. I'm saying it out loud so it's said. You don't need it."
"I'll take it anyway."
He looks up from the leg. "...yeah?"
