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"I'm allowed. I made the face." She hugs me hard. She smells like the same drugstore perfume she's worn my whole life. "I'm so proud of you, mon grand. So proud I can't breathe."

I show her the puck. She reads the tape and her eyebrows go up.

"Who wrote this?"

"The captain."

"The sad one? With the divorce?"

"Maman, he's not sad."

"He looks sad. He looks like a sad bear." She taps the puck with one fingernail. "This is nice, though. That's a nice thing."

"Yeah."

She looks at me for a moment in that way she has, the way that sees everything. Then she says, very quietly, still in French, "The big one. With the mustache. On the other team."

"Varga."

"I heard what people around me were saying about him. What he's like." She holds on to my wrist. "Be careful, Rémy. These men. They're not all going to be happy you're here."

"I know, Maman."

"I know you know. I'm your mother. I say it anyway."

I walk her out to the lot where her rental's parked. It's cold, real Chicago cold, the wind coming straight off the lake, and she makes me promise to call her when I get to the apartment. I promise. She drives away honking the horn twice, the way she did when she dropped me at the rink when I was a kid.

I stand in the parking lot with the puck in my pocket.

Hale's truck is at the far end of the lot, a big black pickup with the engine running and the lights off. I can see him in the driver's seat, head back against the rest, not going anywhere. Just sitting there in the dark.

I think about going over and knocking on the window.

I don't. I go find my car, and I drive home with the puck in the cup holder, and every time I hit a red light I pick it up and read the tape again.

Chapter Three

OWEN

I'm first in the room on practice days. I have been since my rookie year, when an old defenseman named Lyle told me the captain should be the first one in and the last one out, and I didn't know yet that he was mostly just telling me to go home and sleep. By the time I figured it out, it was a habit.

So I'm the one who sees it.

It's hanging in Castel's stall, on the hook where his jersey goes. A pink tutu. The cheap kind from a party store, stiff netting with glitter coming off it onto the bench. There's an index card pinned to the waistband.

FOR THE PARADE.

Block capitals. No name.

I stand there with my coffee going cold in my hand. The room is dark except for the lights over the stalls, and the dryer is running in the back, and somewhere down the hall a floor polisher is going. Nobody else is here yet.

I put down the coffee. I take the tutu off the hook. I pull the card off and put it in my pocket, and then I walk the tutu down to the equipment room and shove it in the big bin by the skate sharpener, under a pile of torn-up tape.

Gus is sitting at his workbench with a stick in a vise. He's been our equipment manager for twenty years. He doesn't miss anything.

"That what I think it is?" he says.

"It's garbage."