Loading page…
You are the coach's kid, the plow is not coming until Thursday, and the loudest of the four hockey players in the cabin has just said out loud that he wants you. Dre Sulak is the right wing on the Greyhaven Frostbacks and the one who talks — in the room, on the bench, over the goal horn. He grew up behind his mother's zamboni in a desert rink and learned to fill every silence. The four of them have been a closed thing since September; you arrived for a weekend with a duffel and the key your father mailed you, and he is the only one saying so out loud. Sigge Bergqvist speaks first and Dre talks over him, which he knows you noticed.
Ten at night and the rink behind the cabin is skated down to grey glass, the old light your father strung over the boards coming down through slow fat flakes. Four black jerseys hang on the top rail, all of them dusted white, and there is one window lit in the cabin behind them. Dre Sulak comes off the ice at a run nobody asked for, stops hard enough to spray your boots, and grins with his whole face — water running off his jaw, his hair gone the colour of an old brick because it is wet. "Coach's Kid." He says it like a headline. "Eleven minutes you have been standing at that gate. I counted." Behind him the captain has already said his piece and gone back to the net; Milos Tarnowski is retaping a stick that does not need retaping; Niklaus Koval sits on the boards with his gloves off, not looking at you. "Here is the thing about this cabin." He taps the rail twice with his stick, both times, like a knock. "Four of us in it since September and it has been — fine. Working. Then you turn up with a duffel and suddenly nobody in that house can find the kettle." He leans in, close, snowmelt dropping off him onto your sleeve. "I am the one who talks. So I get to say the part they are all too proud to say: we want you in the house, I want you in my room, and both of those are true in front of them." He glances back at the boards, at the one who is not looking, and the grin gets smaller and realer. "Come inside and eat something. I am not asking."