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“Remind me there's something I have to talk to you about before you leave,” Cam said.

“Can't even get a goddamn bourbon in this place,” said Cam's father, who looked like he'd had it with the white wine. “Let's hit the Slapshot. Got to talk to you guys,” he said, tossing a half-full glass of alleged Chablis into a plastic-lined trash barrel.

“You go ahead. We'll see you there,” Cam said. “I've got to talk to JP for a minute.” Cam led Faith and me to a table behind the plaque listing the names of the donors.

“I need you to make a decision,” Cam said. With that he lifted a small white towel that covered a strip of oak paneling, the strip that I'd thought had come unglued and fallen from the main plaque. “I took this down because I didn't know if you'd want it up there,” Cam said, showing me the small wood panel carved with the name
Rogatien J. Lachine
. My father. “He pledged fifty thou,” Cam said. “You want him on or off the plaque?”

“If he's off do we still get the dough?” I asked.

“Already got it. No strings attached.”

“Then he's gone. Archives,” I said.

“OK. Just needed a decision,” Cam said.

“Wait a minute, Cam.” The voice came from behind me. It was my mother. She put an arm around me and rested her hand on my left shoulder. “It's time to let it go, Jean Pierre. Past time. Let it go for your own sake,” she said.

Cam stared at my mother and me. Faith stood by silently. Denny stayed in the background. “Put it up, Cam. It's all right,” my mother said in little more than a whisper.

“JP?” Cam said.

I nodded. “It's all right,” I said, and reached for Faith's hand. The anger receded and all I felt was tired.

*   *   *

It was like old times at the Slapshot, where Cam and Tamara, Cam's parents, my mother, Denny, and Faith and I crowded around a wooden table in a back corner of the old college sports bar. “Open a tab and keep an eye on us,” Cam's father told the waiter, slipping him two twenties and ordering a round of drinks.

Before the drinks arrived, Cam's dad leaned forward in his chair and said, “It's a done deal. I bought the goddamn team.”

“There go another forty-two nights a year,” Diana said.

“More than that because we're going deep in the playoffs,” Cam's father said. “Whole deal didn't take but ten minutes.” We laughed as Cam's father told us how when he walked into Gabe Vogel's office and Gabe said any discussion would be “preliminary to give you time to set up your financing.”

“Already got the goddamn financing,” Cam's father said, reaching into his suit jacket pocket and throwing a cashier's check for 225 million onto Gabe's desk. “I told Gabe he could have the check and the cable TV rights. Take it or leave it. He took it so fast I was back on the Lear before they had it refueled. Landed in Boston in time for the Sox game. Ahhh, that's all life is anyway. Get up in the morning and do what you have to do, then come home and do what you goddamn want to do.”

The drinks arrived.

“You boys are going to have to get yourselves a new agent,” Cam's dad explained. “Denny will be running the team, and I don't want any conflicts of goddamn interest.”

“Mom's representing me,” Cam said. I think he was joking. Then he told us that he was going to play another two seasons. “Harvard B School will still be there,” he said.

“You're a free agent July first,” Cam's dad said, looking at me. “We're spending to the cap and we're signing you. We'll top whatever Montreal offers. I can't watch any more of that Higgins kid jumping all around in there. Goosing goddamn ghosts is what he looks like he's doing. We're going to sign that Evanston kid as a free agent. Probably start him as the number two in Providence. But he'll be in camp with us next year. I want you to work with him.”

“My pleasure,” I said, relieved to know for certain I'd be going back to Boston.

“Hey, now who's taking a job that will keep us apart?” Faith asked.

“Only for two seasons,” I said. “We can work it out.”

“Seems like we just had this conversation,” she said, laughing.

“Life's a busted play, hon,” I said.

“But that doesn't mean you can't win,” she said, squeezing my arm with one hand and with the other making a circular motion signaling the waiter for another round of drinks.

When the second round arrived, Cam's dad raised his glass of Jack Daniel's in Faith's direction. “Lady, you're a goddamn franchise,” he said.

“And here's to winning the Cup again next season,” Cam said.

*   *   *

We
should
have won it that next season. But we didn't.

Coda

“That's it, guys, time for dinner,” I yelled as I walked down the plywood ramp leading from the mudroom door to our backyard rink. It was a few minutes after sunset and I could see the constellation Orion rising in the southeast sky looking like a cosmic goalie clomping out of his dressing room for the next period.

“One more shot,” Luc said to Jackie, who was crouched in front of the official NHL goal, one of the gifts the Bruins gave me when I retired eight years ago.

“One shot for the championship of the universe,” Jackie said. “Dad, watch this.”

Luc was six years old and Jackie eight. It was February school vacation. They'd been playing all afternoon on the sixty-five-by-thirty-five-foot rink I'd made out of plywood boards on a flat patch of ground behind our house in Vermont. In December I'd put a plastic liner in the rink and flooded it with a garden hose. We could skate from about Christmas into early March as long as I kept the rink free of snow.

“Here he comes!” yelled Luc, stickhandling the puck and picking up speed as he skated counterclockwise in front of me before wheeling up ice and skating full bore on Jackie. In the tradition of kids everywhere Luc had to do the play-by-play: “Savard sweeping behind his own goal … breaks down the right wing … past one defenseman … he's in alone…”

Jackie stood at what would have been the top of the crease, giving Luc not much more than the five hole and a sliver of space in the top left corner.

“He cuts for the net … goes high … and he…” but as Luc started to yell “SCOOOORES,” Jackie's blocker flashed up to tip the puck over the goal and into the garden fencing I'd nailed above the boards to keep pucks in play. Luc retrieved the puck as it came off the fencing, held it behind the net for a second, faked coming out to his right just long enough to move Jackie to that post; then Luc cut to the opposite post and tucked the puck into the net. “He SCOOOORES … on the wrap-around!” Luc yelled lifting his stick in the air and dancing on his skates.

“We said ONE shot, you moron. That was TWO shots!” Jackie yelled.

“I still scored. Look at it, it's in the net,” Luc said, pointing to the puck. That's when Jackie threw the goalie gloves on the ice and ripped off the goalie mask, letting her long auburn hair fall onto her padded shoulders. “I'm going to kill you, Luc,” she said, grabbing her brother by the V-neck of his hockey shirt with her left hand and hauling back her right for what might've been a pretty good shot to Luc's helmeted head.

“HEY!” I yelled, freezing Jackie's would-be punch at the top of her windup. “Don't hit a guy wearing a helmet and visor. You'll hurt your hand.”

“Ah, now there's good fatherly advice to a daughter,” said a voice behind me. Faith had just gotten home from work.

“Mom. They said I didn't score but I did. It's still in the net. Look at it,” said Luc, skating backward away from his sister and pointing at the puck.

“We said ONE shot. That was TWO shots,” Jackie said, holding up two fingers.

“Picked up some Chinese for dinner,” said Faith, switching to a subject that had everyone's approval.

“You guys have so much energy, grab a shovel and help me clean the ice. I'm going to resurface.”

Faith headed for the house while Jackie, Luc, and I tilted the heavy metal goal over the low boards and off of the ice; then we each grabbed one of the three plastic snow shovels I keep near the rink and began scraping the ice and flipping the shovels full of snow over the boards. When we finished, the kids walked up the plywood runway to the mudroom to take off their skates and hockey equipment in the warmth of the house. I opened the metal bulkhead doors to the cellar, grabbed a bottle of Molson Canadian from the cellar fridge, then hauled up the garden hose and screwed it onto the water faucet protruding from the basement wall. I had to pour a pitcher of warm water over the faucet to thaw it out. The hose hissed and shuddered like a snake as water surged through it. Setting the brass nozzle on a hard spray and stepping over the boards, I walked to the far end of the rink and
—
a beer in one hand, the hose in the other
—
began sending a spray of water over the ice. Resurfacing is a healing act, like forgiveness. The water rushes into the cracks and skate cuts, melting what ice chips escaped the shovels and producing a perfect uncut surface. It makes the ice new again.

Cam, Tamara, Lindsey, and Caitlin would be visiting for the weekend and I wanted the ice to be as good as it could be. Cam is a senior partner of Carter & Peabody and an alternate governor of the Bruins, which his father still owns. When Cam joined the company he founded the Sports & Gaming Fund, a mutual fund investing in the stocks of sports equipment makers, publicly traded European soccer teams, and casinos. It returned 33 percent in its first year and has earned double digits every year since, pleasantly shocking his father. “If you'd have asked me I would've said Cam was just keeping the goddamn chair warm for Lindsey,” Cam's dad said.

I signed on as a volunteer goalie coach for Vermont. I go to most afternoon practices but I'm home in time for dinner. It's a nice life.

“Dad, dinner in twenty minutes,” Jackie yelled from the mudroom door.

“OK,” I said.

It took me about fifteen minutes to finish the ice and the beer. I coiled the hose, threw it down the bulkhead stairs, and dragged it onto the floor of the unfinished portion of our basement. About a pint of water gushed from the hose over the basement floor, where it would quickly dry in the heat from the furnace. I closed the bulkhead doors, left my boots near the hose, and took the empty beer bottle into the finished portion of the basement
—
“the Man Room” as Faith calls it
—
to store it in a case of other empty bottles.

That Man Room was my idea. It has a wet bar, a half bath, a hundred-bottle wine rack, a working fireplace, a plasma TV equipped for hi-def, and some great framed hockey photos. There's a print of Bill Barilko scoring in overtime to win the 1951 Stanley Cup for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the picture of an airborne Bobby Orr after he scored the goal that won the 1970 Cup for Boston. There are shots of Cam and me from our playing days with the Bruins including a great shot of Cam knocking Serge “the Weasel” Balon through the door to our team's bench in my first year back in Boston. We could've won the Cup that year. But we didn't. Cam missed seven weeks with a broken foot; I missed twenty games with a groin I kept pulling; Taki missed the whole season with his knee injury; and Rinky Higgins wrote his ticket to Providence by going 4
–
16 and three times being replaced by Rudy Evanston. The next season, my last, was better.

“It's on the table, hon,” Faith called down the stairs. I started toward the staircase but couldn't stop looking at the pictures. There were photos of Rudy and I working together at practice … Cam on his special night when the team gave him the seat from the penalty box after he'd racked up 211 minutes in penalties in his final year … Kevin Quigley on one knee giving a fist pump after he'd scored the goal that eliminated Ottawa in the quarterfinals.

Then I stared at the photo I always stare at, the one over the fireplace. It was a hurry-up thing our team photographer put together on the night Cam and I played our final game. We were in various stages of undress when the photographer called for us to get together in the middle of the room. Players only. There was no posing. Some guys stood, some knelt, a few sat on the floor. There was Quigley, bare-chested, his hockey pants held up by an old-fashioned suspender looped over his right shoulder; Flipside Palmer still dripping from the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist; Taki, who'd come back after missing a year, still in uniform and smoking a cigar; Cam sitting on the floor staring straight at the camera, exhausted. And, beside Cam, me, in my long underwear, hair sweat-matted onto my forehead, and grinning ear to floppy ear, my skinny welted arms wrapped around that big silver Cup.

I closed the door and went upstairs.

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