Page 48 of The Blame Game

“Ahh,” Dom said. “Yeah, that makes sense. It’s easy to get up in your head after an injury.”

“Exactly. And I’d been through all that,” Shea said. “Well, I never even made it to the pro level, but …”

“You would have,” Dom said when he trailed off. “You would have gone in the first round at the draft.”

“Yeah.” Shea glanced out the window of the moving SUV. “Probably. My dad thought it would be top ten overall. I kept telling him he was fucking delusional. Top twenty-five or thirty, maybe. But he’s good at ignoring the facts.”

“How so?”

Shea huffed. He hadn’t meant to bring it up but his parents had called this morning to wish him a happy birthday and it had been lingering in the back of his head all day.

Well, to be more accurate, his mom had called. His dad had gotten on for about sixty seconds of stilted conversation.

“My dad, he, uh, didn’t want to accept that my career was over,” Shea said, shifting in his seat to get a better look at Dom. “He was convinced that if I kept working at it, my knee would improve. If we found the right doctor, if I did more rehab. He wouldn’t listen to the surgeons. Or me.”

“You had problems with the growth plate, right? On top of the injuries?”

“Yeah,” Shea said. “The growth plate issue was part of it for sure. I was a little bit of a late bloomer. Undersized for a hockey player but fast. Good hands. Good grasp of the game. My growth plates hadn’t fused yet though. My dad was so intent on me making it to the NHL, he had tunnel vision. He had me training way too fucking hard and I was already struggling with issues in both knees before the first injury.”

“That was the meniscus tear, right?”

“Yeah,” Shea said. “When they did the repair on the tendon, they found bony growths in my knee. They cleaned up as much as they could and I battled through that recovery but …”

“Then you had the second injury.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

Shea had taken an ill-timed puck to the side of the knee that fractured the patella into tiny little pieces.

“They replaced the patella and found more bony growths. Both knees were a fucking mess. I was having a ton of instability too and it—it wasn’t going to get better. I’d keep having problems. If I pursued a pro career, I’d be signing up for surgery after surgery, issue after issue. I was eighteen and had already had three knee surgeries or procedures by that point and I was watching my future career slip away.”

“Fuck,” Dom whispered.

“My dad kept pushing me though and I worked my ass off at my rehab but I kept having these setbacks. I was injured the first time at seventeen and I was nineteen before I finally admitted that I wasn’t ever going to be NHL ready. And even if I did somehow, miraculously get there, I’d be signing up for a career riddled with injuries and I probably wouldn’t be able to walk by the time I was forty. But my dad, he couldn’t accept it.”

“Shit I’m sorry,” Dom said softly, reaching out to touch his thigh. “That sucks.”

“Yeah.” Shea gave him a lopsided smile. “So when I decided to go to university to become a physiotherapist, he lost it. The fights between us got so bad that I finally moved out. I was a late start at university and I went part-time for a while, working every job I could find to pay for school.”

“That sounds rough.”

Shrugging, Shea glanced out the window. “It was hard but I got through it. I knew I couldn’t do multiple side gigs like that while I got my master’s though so when Audra asked if I’d want to work as a stylist, I jumped on it immediately.”

“What about your family?”

“Oh, we didn’t speak for years. My mom kept trying though and, eventually, we reconciled. It was slower with my dad and, to be honest, it’s still awkward. Still a struggle sometimes. I’m not sure that even now he truly believes that my NHL career was over before it even started. I think he still thinks that I could’ve made it happen if I’d wanted it.”

Shea sighed, then continued. “Which, maybe he’s right? Maybe I could have played for a little bit in between surgeries and rehab. But I guess we’ll never know. Last year, he did finally apologize for some of the things he did and said then and, you know, making progress on the relationship, however small, feels good.”

“Man, I had no idea,” Dom said, reaching out to touch his thigh again. “You’ve been through a lot.”

Shea looked out the window again. “I guess. I always figure most of us are carrying around a lot of stuff like that. We just don’t talk about it.”

“True.”

They fell silent until the SUV pulled up at Shea’s building. He asked, “You still want to come up and meet Audra?”

Dom shook his head. “Maybe you can introduce me another time. I think I’ll head home. I have the game tomorrow and I’m starting to crash.”

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