On the Fly (40 page)

“
Yeah,” he said, sounding
angry. “Good night, Rachel.”

Then the door closed, and I couldn’t
hold back my tears anymore.

My stomach was
in knots the rest of the night and all morning the
next day.

Babs swore he didn’t know what might
have happened to get Rachel so worked up, and I had to believe him
about that. There wasn’t any good reason he would lie to me. He did
say that there was a stretch of a few minutes where Maddie had gone
off alone while they were at the arcade because her head hurt, but
she’d acted normally when she’d returned. My money was on something
having happened to her then, but I had no way of knowing what it
might have been.

Rachel had left for work before Babs
and I were ready this morning. She still wasn’t ready to talk. I’d
hoped that once she got a good night’s rest, she’d be willing to at
least let me in on whatever was tearing her up like that. But—no
dice.

This morning, I’d gone in for some
physical therapy and other treatments with the trainers. Nicky had
been there for the same thing at the same time as the rest of the
boys took part in the game-day skate. It looked like the two of us
were going to become best friends for a while, whether we wanted to
be or not. The team was heading out for a road trip after tonight’s
game, but we were going to have to stay behind and continue our
rehab. That meant we’d be spending an awful lot of time together in
the very near future.

It could be worse, I supposed. I could
be spending my days with one of the Russians who hardly spoke a
lick of English.

We grabbed a coffee together after our
treatments, but I wasn’t really in a talkative mood. He didn’t
push. Once we were done with that, I found out that Mom and Dana
were still shopping, so I went back to the practice facility to
pick up Dad. He’d been with Jim for a couple of hours, so I figured
he’d be ready to go soon, at least. I was hoping maybe I could snag
him for lunch. I’d never gone to him with girl problems before, but
Rachel wasn’t just some girl, and I needed advice.

Once I got into the building, I took
the stairs. This morning, Eddie had agreed to let me walk some
since I had been so diligent about wearing the boot. I didn’t like
taking elevators, mainly because it made me feel like I was older
and more broken down than I ought to be at this point.

I turned the corner and found Dad and
Jim sitting with Rachel. All three of them looked up.

“
There he is now,” Dad
said. It wasn’t surprising that they’d been talking about me. I was
the one thing all three of them had in common.

Rachel wouldn’t look at me. She stared
diligently at her computer monitor, suddenly focused on nothing but
her work. At least Dad and Jim were looking at me and not at her. I
didn’t want her to have to face any questions about what might be
wrong between us. I had a feeling that would only make things
worse.

“
No crutches,” Jim said—not
questioning, just observing. “Good, good. Soupy and I—I mean your
dad and I—were just talking about taking the two of you out for
lunch. Are you up for that?”

I was fine with it as long as Rachel
was. I craned my neck around until she looked up at me. Her eyes
were pained and slightly panicky. She looked like she might have
gotten even less sleep last night than I had, but she gave me a
brief nod.

I didn’t know if she was agreeing
because she wanted to be with me or just because she didn’t want
anything to seem out of the ordinary. “Yeah,” I said. “We’ll come.”
Maybe this way I could get her to talk to me. Probably not, but it
was worth a shot.

Martha showed up for her afternoon of
work a few minutes later, so I waited while Dad, Jim, and Rachel
got their coats on. Jim drove. I sat in the back of his SUV with
Rachel, but she kept herself to her side of the seat, folding her
arms over her stomach so I couldn’t hold her hand.

He took us to an upscale
restaurant in the Pearl District, one of the kinds that was run by
a celebrity chef and had won all sorts of prestigious awards. You
only heard about chefs like him or awards like those if you watched
a lot of
Food Network
and
Top Chef
or read
Food and Wine
magazine. I didn’t really do any of those things
very often, and the food looked a little frou-frou for me. I’d
always been more of a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy—much more
comfortable eating things that were familiar and recognizable than
whatever all this was.

At least it tasted good.

It didn’t take long into our meal
before Dad and Jim started telling Rachel and me all sorts of
stories about their playing days. I was just a baby when Jim joined
the Hartford Whalers as a rookie—the team Dad played more than half
his NHL career with. Jim had spent a few years there before getting
traded and going on to win a Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers.
He’d even lived with us like Babs had stayed with Zee last season
and with me this season, to settle into the league and get used to
the lifestyle a pro athlete had to live.

I didn’t remember much of Jim’s time
in Hartford. He was still with the Whalers when Dana was born, but
he’d moved on to get his own place by then.

Jim told us about some of the pranks
they’d pulled on him when he was a rookie: filling his gloves with
gum, slicing through the laces on his skates before a game,
dragging all of the furniture in his hotel room into the bathroom—a
stunt he swears Dad was behind, but which Dad fervently denies
having any part of to this day—and before long he and Dad were
laughing so hard they could hardly speak.

“
Do you guys do things like
that to each other?” Rachel asked me. It was a safe question for
her to ask—something she could use to take part in the conversation
so they wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss but which kept her
distant from me, still.

It killed me, but I played along. “Oh
yeah. You learn pretty quick when you’re around hockey players to
always stay on your toes. Monty is notorious for unscrewing the
lids to all the water bottles during practice so someone will get a
face full of water. And you never know what Burnzie or Homer is
going to do…”

“
You see a lot of it on the
long road trips,” Dad said to her. “Get the boys away from their
wives and kids for a while and they’ve got to find some way to pass
the time and keep themselves loose.”

Jim put his napkin on his plate and
sat back in his chair. “It’s those kinds of things I miss the most.
I still travel with the team, but it’s not the same when you’re the
GM. No one wants to pull a joke on you. They think they’ll get
traded. We’re still the same guys we always were, though. We
haven’t lost our senses of humor just because we play a different
role now.”

“
I’m sure I could help to
arrange for something next time you come out our way,” Dad said
with a wink at Rachel.

Jim chuckled. “I’m sure you could. But
then Rachel would have to deal with frantic calls from my players,
wondering if they’d crossed the line and if they were about to be
on their way out of town.”

“
That might be a little
more payback than you deserve,” Dad said. He took another sip of
his water and flicked his glance over to Rachel. “And I don’t
think
she’s
done
anything to deserve having to deal with that.”

“
You can take it out on me
all you want because I owe you, but leave my assistant out of it,”
Jim said. He was smiling when he said it, just like he always was
when he talked about how much my dad owed him.

I narrowed my eyes, glancing between
Jim and Dad for a hint. “You keep saying that—that you owe Dad.
That’s why you were so keen to let Dana tag along with the team
last season and why you wanted to give me a chance. But I don’t get
it. What the hell could you owe him for this many years
later?”

“
He doesn’t owe me
anything.”

“
I owe your dad
everything,” Jim corrected him, ignoring the way Dad was shaking
his head. “You were pretty much just a baby, so you wouldn’t
remember it. But there was a game in my second season when we were
playing the Oilers in Edmonton. I’d hit Gretzky along the boards,
and McSorley didn’t like it. In today’s game, I would have easily
been called for boarding or charging, something. Back then, they
just let a lot of those calls go. Anyway, McSorley came after me
with a flying elbow to my head, trying to instigate a fight with
me. Before I could even get up off the ice to protect myself, your
dad got in there. Soupy was the last guy we needed fighting an
enforcer like McSorley—he was one of the most skilled players on
the team. The rest of us were supposed to protect him, like
McSorley was out there to protect Gretzky.”

“
I did what anyone out
there would have done if they saw the hit I saw,” Dad
said.

“
And you ended up missing
almost half that season with a broken orbital bone, nose, and jaw,
and you could have lost your eye.”

Rachel set down her fork, her eyebrows
pinched together. “I’m sorry,” she said after a minute, “but you
think you owe him everything because he fought for you? I admit I
still don’t fully get why they allow fighting in hockey, but that
seems a little overboard, don’t you think?”

Jim didn’t even bat an eye. “It’s not
because he fought for me. It’s because of what he taught me about
life in the months that followed when he was trying to get back in
the game.” He turned his gaze to me, staring like he was trying to
impart some special wisdom to me with nothing more than his eyes.
“A lot of people thought he might have ended his career with that
fight, that his injuries might take him out. The eye injury,
especially, was a concern. But Soupy wouldn’t give in so easily. He
wasn’t ready to quit, and so he worked harder than anyone I’d ever
seen in order to not just come back to the game but to come back
better than he’d ever been before. Since I lived with you guys, I
saw more than pretty much anyone but your mom what all he went
through. It had a profound effect on me. Before that, I was just
coasting along through my career, not giving anything more than the
bare minimum to keep my spot. He helped me see that you can’t take
anything for granted, that you have to be willing to fight for what
you want or it’s not worth having.”

By the time he stopped talking, I was
staring at Rachel so hard I wondered how she didn’t break beneath
it. She was looking down at her plate, refusing to look up. Now I
got it—finally, really got it.

“
I saw the same willingness
to fight in Dana when she showed up here last season,” Jim said. “I
owe it to your dad to help in any way I can, but it’s easy to do
that when I can see those qualities in his kids. I see it in you,
too. He’s taught you two well, just like he taught me.”

“
Their mom had a little
something to do with that, too,” Dad said.

“
I don’t doubt that for a
second.” Jim took another sip from his glass of water. “So, who
wants dessert?” He waved our waiter over and changed the subject to
more stories about pranks from his and Dad’s playing
days.

Jim was right—Jim and Mom and Rachel.
I wanted her and her kids and a life with them, whatever that
entailed. That meant I had to fight for it, and it might even mean
I had to fight her for it. A fight like that wasn’t just about the
fight—it was about the aftermath.

I was ready to experience the
aftermath with her.