Page 7 of Her Coach

I hung up. Put the phone down. Looked at the empty counter where the bottles had been.

Then I went to bed for the first time in six weeks and actually slept.

4

BRYNN

“Why did I get the feeling I’d find you in here?” I asked as I rested myself against the doorframe of Mom’s office at the Caldwell Arena.

Well, it wasn’t Mom’s office. Her office was at home. But it used to be Dad’s office, and ever since he died…

“You know the house gets too stuffy,” Mom muttered as she continued checking something with some paperwork before typing on the keyboard of the desktop she had yet to change or switch out.

You know, since it was the one my father used to always use.

“Mom,” I said as I walked inside the office and set a cup of coffee down in front of her, “have you even stopped to eat lunch yet?”

“I will at lunch time,” she said mindlessly, her fingers flying a million miles a second.

I pushed the coffee toward her a bit more. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

That made Mom pause before she peeked at the clock in the desktop corner. “Shit.” She shook her head. “I mean, shoot.”

I chuckled as I flopped down into the chair in front of the desk. Not her desk, though. I refused to call it that. It was Dad’s desk.

And she needed to unchain herself from it.

“I’m twenty-six, Mom,” I said with a giggle as I sipped my own afternoon pick-me-up. “You can cuss in front of me. My ears aren’t little anymore.”

She shot me a look. “You’re my daughter. I’ll always try and protect those ears.”

I grinned. “Is that what you tell yourself whenever you slam your elbow into the fridge?”

She grimaced. “Hey, funny-bones are no laughing matter. That shit hurts.”

I barked with laughter before I took another long pull of my coffee. “Mom.”

“Yes?”

“Drink.”

I sighed with a force before she stopped what she was doing, grabbing the coffee, and took a long pull. Which bled into another long pull. Which turned into her practically gulping the damn drink down before she reclined back into the leather chair she sat in, opened her snack drawer, and pulled out a bag of chips.

“Have you eaten at all today?” I asked.

She just shrugged as she opened up the chips, set them on her desk, and plucked them from the bag with her fingertips, one by one. There were a lot of people who wondered how the hell she and I were related. If we didn’t look like one another, someone would probably think I was adopted. Mom had always been self-made in the way that only women who already have money can be. She came from it, old family money that she never talked about and never leaned on any harder than she had to. She was stoic, barely ever cracked a smile, and was never caught dead outside without a pair of her infamous heels on. She bought the team for Dad when he retired from playing and wanted to coach, fought for the expansion slot herself while people in suits told her Las Vegas wasn’t a hockey market, and when Dad died, she just kept going. Kept his name on the building. Kept his office exactly the way he left it. Kept proving every single one of those suits wrong.

And then, there was me, the English Lit graduate who had somehow ended up running community relations for a hockey team she grew up watching from the nosebleeds.

“Mom,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said back mindlessly as she messed around with something on the desktop.

“Why don’t you take all of this stuff home? You know, work from the couch in your robe like you do sometimes.”

She shook her head as she plopped another chip in her mouth. “I’m waiting on something.”

I quirked an eyebrow. I’d heard these excuses before. ‘I’m waiting on something.’ ‘I’m waiting for someone.’ ‘I just need to get this last thing done.’ Anything to revel in the unhealthy shrine she had made of Dad’s office.