Page 26 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

I’ll tell Teddy at breakfast, and he’ll cheer with his whole body. I’ll tell Margot on the school run, and she’ll say “okay” and mean more than that. What I won’t tell anyone is that I heard the news before either of them, alone at the stove, smiling at a pot of sauce like an idiot.

There’s a second thing I’m not telling anyone, and it’s wearing a gym jacket. It’s nothing. I’ve decided it’s nothing. On my way up I check the back door twice anyway, and the lock holds both times, exactly like a lock that was never the problem.

Some things stay out of everyone’s report, including mine.

Gus

The kitchen light is on when I get home from the game, which it shouldn’t be, because the kids are at Carol’s until Sunday dinner.

No school Friday — some teachers’ training day — so Carol claimed the whole long weekend weeks ago, with forms to fill out, practically. The house should be dark and shut down. Instead, light spills into the hall, and the whole downstairs smells like pie. June is standing at the island with flour on one sleeve and a glass of red wine at her elbow, looking at three pies like they’ve disappointed her personally.

“Before you say anything,” she says, “Thanksgiving is in a week and your oven runs hot. I needed to know how it treats a crust before it matters.”

“There are three of them.”

“The first one was a test. The second one was a correction.” She turns the third pie a quarter turn, judging it. “This one’s right, and now I have to know if I can do it twice.”

“So there’ll be a fourth pie.”

“There may be a fourth pie.”

I put my keys in the bowl and my coat on the hook, and whatever has been sitting heavy on my chest since the second period finally lets go. We won. I shook a few hundred hands. It was also eighteen thousand people’s worth of noise, and this — a lit kitchen, a woman arguing with a pie — is the best part of the whole day.

She nods at the counter, where a case of wine sits with one bottle missing. “That arrived for you today. There’s a card from somebody named Griff with a lot of exclamation points.”

“Sponsor. They send a case every year.” I find a glass. “Is it any good?”

“It was free.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It tastes free,” she says, and fills my glass anyway.

We eat the correction pie standing up. It’s a good pie. She explains what was wrong with it the way she’d report a leak under the sink. I say “seems fine to me” three times, and she looks at me like I’ve failed an exam I didn’t know I was taking. We take the bottle to the island stools, because standing stopped making sense a while ago.

She’s a glass and a half in. I catch up. The house makes its noises. In the freezer, right on schedule, Brenda grinds, achieves nothing, and rests.

“She waited till you were home,” June says. “She performs better with an audience.”

Somewhere in the second glass, the talk goes soft and open the way it does at this hour, and June turns her wine by the stem without drinking it. I’ve learned to read her hands by now. When they’re busy, she’s comfortable. When they go still, something is wrong. They’ve been still for a minute and a half.

“Can I ask you something?” she says. “It’s been on my mind since the Brenda night.”

“Go ahead.”

“You said you used to have somebody to talk to. At three in the morning, in Calgary, wherever.” Her eyes stay on the glass. “You said she was real. And then you made a custody joke about my ice maker and we never went back to it.” She looks up. “Who was she?”

The glass is at my mouth, and I set it down instead. Here’s the thing I notice, in the second before I answer: I’m not deciding whether to tell her. I’m realizing I’ve already decided, some other night, without ever saying so, even to myself. Maybe on the stairs. Maybe at a drive-through window. The decision’s been sitting there waiting for the question.

“If I tell it, I have to tell all of it,” I say. “Halfway is worse than nothing.”

“I have all night. Carol has the kids.”

So I top up both glasses, and I tell June the thing I have never told a living soul.

“For the first year or two after Nora died, I didn’t sleep so much as run out of ways to stay awake. You know the shape of it — you’ve seen me at three a.m. It was that, every night, except the house had a toddler in it and a six-year-old who’d stopped talking. And a funeral’s worth of casseroles I kept throwing away at the two-week mark.” I turn my glass a quarter at a time, the way I do, and I let myself say it plainly. “Everyone I knew was somebody I had to be strong in front of. Mitch. Carol. The team. Twenty thousand people a night, some seasons. There was no one it was safe to be wrecked in front of. So at three in the morning I’d sit in that chair and let the silence get loud. One night I went looking for what every idiot goes looking for at three in the morning.”

I watch her to see if I need to dress it up. She’s turned on the stool to face me, wine in both hands, and her face is doing nothing but listening.