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I’ve been in this room for six years. I’ve listened to that man take a piece out of a twenty-two-year-old for a bad line change in front of everybody, and I’ve listened to him say nothing at all for a week to a guy who deserved it. He doesn’t defend people to be kind. He defends what he thinks is true.

That’s the worst thing anybody has ever done to me, and he did it out of decency.

Two of the young guys come by and knock my leg on the way to the shower. Beau leans over the divider with shaving cream on half his face and says he’s having people over on Sunday, six o’clock. I should come. His wife has stopped believing I exist. I tell him maybe. He says maybe is what I said in October, December, at his kid’s christening.

“Six years,” he says. “Six years, and you’ve never said the word yes to me.”

“I’ll come Sunday.”

He goes so quiet that I look up. He’s standing there in a towel with half a face of shaving cream and an expression I don’t know what to do with at all.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Right.” He hits the divider with the flat of his hand twice, hard, and goes off down the room announcing it to three men who couldn’t possibly care.

Emil is at my stall before I have my pads off.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you do it?” He sits down on the box beside me and puts his elbows on his knees. “The early one. Six minutes in, right, you get beat. The whole building does the noise. Then you have to go and play fifty-four more minutes. I’ve had that twice this year, and both times I was still thinking about it in the third. Both times. Like it was in my hands.”

I look at the floor of the stall. There’s tape on it, a water bottle, and a program somebody’s kid signed.

“You play the next shot,” I say.

“Yeah, but how, though? Everyone says that.”

“There’s no how. There’s one puck coming. You’re either watching it or watching the last one. The last one is gone.” I pull the strap on the leg pad. “It went in. It’s in the book. It doesn’t get any more in than it already is. So there’s nothing to hold. If you’re still holding it, you’re holding onto a play that’s over.”

He gets his phone out.

He types it in with his thumbs, both of them, fast, the way that generation does, and he reads it back under his breath. His lips move.

“That’s good,” he says. “That’s really good.”

“It’s not good; it’s just the job.”

“No, that’s, like…” He looks up at me with his whole face open. “That’s what I’ve been asking people for two years, man. Nobody’s ever said it like that. Everybody says compartmentalize, which means nothing. It’s just a word.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder on his way past.

He’s twenty-three years old. He wants my job. Eight feet away, he’s writing down a sentence I said about not holding on to a goal I put in my own net on purpose for three hundred thousand dollars.

I get the other pad off and sit there with it across my knees until the room is nearly empty.

The equipment guys come through with the laundry bins. Somebody kills the stereo. The trainer asks me from the doorway whether he’s putting anything in the log tonight, and I tell him no.

Then it’s just me on a bench in a room that smells of wet gear and menthol, in a building where I’ve never said out loud what I actually do for a living.

The garage at half eleven is concrete, sodium light, and six cars left.

I sit in the truck with my bag on the passenger seat. I take out my phone.

The account portal is Marek’s now, but the balance shows on the summary line of the app the bank still sends me.