Page 15 of Home Ice Advantage

Aronson, on the other hand, was a demon.

After the game, Ryan stood in the hallway, fist-bumping the guys as they came down the hall. Cook and Williams, the first and second stars of the night along with Davit Kancheli, came through last. Cook was beaming, his rosy cheeks a brilliant red, and Ryan hoped that this would be the start of getting the monkey off his back.

He didn’t have much to say in the locker room after the end, except to note that they had played a good game, and that they should keep the momentum going against tougher competition. It was getting easier to come up with the remarks on the fly, the same way he had read the lineups for the room during his later playoff series. The secret was just getting the rhythm of it.

There was a day between games, and the team didn’t have an on-ice practice. It was a gym and video day. Ryan took the time to go over tape with Laurent Martel, one of the veteran wingers who’d been underperforming last season and hadn’t shown any signs in the preseason or the first game of changing that. Martel was a little standoffish at first, his shoulders hunched.

“This isn’t a criticism,” Ryan said. “We’re here tocoach. We’re here to help you improve. I think if you work on a few specialized drills with the skills coach, you’ll start seeing an improvement.”

“I did those drills in juniors,” Martel mumbled.

“The thing is, you’re always learning. If you think you aren’t, then you’re stagnating. Like I said, this isn’t a knock on you. Just a few things we noticed. And I’m just asking you to keep an open mind.” He met Martel’s gaze and held it. Martel looked away first. “Good? Good.”

After he was done with the forwards, he dropped in on Lewis Segal’s session with Kancheli and their backup, Lucas Olsson. The goalie coach was a veteran himself, and he had a particular way of getting through to them that Ryan didn’t even bother trying to interpret.

Goaltending had always seemed a bit like magic to him, completely dependent on the whims of the stars and seasons, and the fact that Segal seemed to be able to break it down into a science was good enough for him. He stayed just long enough to make sure that Kancheli and Olsson seemed comfortable and engaged, and then moved on.

The worst part was knowing that after the practice, he’d have to go to his father’s house. There wasn’t a way to put it off any longer. It was a Friday night, the team was going on the road the next day, and he had promised that he would come home to see everyone before he was thrown back into the busy schedule of travel and games. Some of it wasn’t bad: Ryan was genuinely fond of his nieces and nephews, and there were a lot of them. But the rest of it...

It was with an impending sense of doom that Ryan took his car and drove from his hotel near the Spectrum to Southie, where his dad still lived in the big row home where the Sullivan crew had grown up. The blue shiplap house had been in the family for generations, and each son to inherit had put his own touches on it; if the house hadn’t been passed down that way it probably would have sold for well over a million dollars, because the neighborhood was changing as surely as his father hated that it was.

Dad hadn’t made substantive changes to the house itself, but years ago he had added fencing around the stoop to prevent people from sitting on the steps and smoking cigarettes or shooting up, and he’d hung hundreds of pictures of his sons playing hockey and their draft day portraits in the living room.

Ryan did not feature prominently in the gallery.

By the time he found street parking and walked briskly to the house, it looked like Mark Junior, Kevin, James, and Eddie were already there with their wives and kids. Ryan and Shannon had never had kids: there had been a few miscarriages, and then he’d been on the road so often that they had just sort of mutually agreed to stop trying. At one point, Shannon had been pretty broken up about it, but she’d eventually stopped asking him about a timeline to have a family. Even then, it had always made both of them feel out of place to come home to Ryan’s father’s house, surrounded by an entire horde of Sullivan children that Shannon would never have. Now it seemed almost like a relief that they hadn’t.

Ryan took a deep breath as he unhooked the gate to the steps and walked up, paused outside for a long second before he opened the door.

Inside, the house was chaos. Each of the Sullivan brothers had at least three kids, and when all of them were in the house together it got real loud, real fast. Ryan was immediately mobbed by tiny bodies, ranging in age from two to ten. The teenaged niblings hung back, probably dying to pick his brain about the team—they all played hockey, of course they all played hockey—but way too cool to want to look like that’s what they were doing. Ryan hugged everyone, patted some heads, greeted all of the kids in turn and tried to pick himself up from the foyer floor where they’d knocked him.

“Well, look who decided to take time out of his busy schedule and pay a visit,” Dad’s voice boomed from the living room.

“Hi, Dad,” Ryan said, trying not to sound too resigned. With a niece attached to each leg, he limped into the room to pay his respects.

The living room was set up exactly the way it had been when he’d left it, a rough horseshoe of overstuffed couches and his dad’s reclining chair in the middle like a throne. Next to him, on the closest couch, sat Chelsea, Ryan’s stepmother. It did feel strange calling her that, because she was three years younger than Ryan, but she had been in the picture since very shortly after his mom had passed away. He had been twenty-four and never really warmed up to her. She knew enough not to try actually mothering anyone, but her sudden presence at family events had been a shock. Right now, she turned a tired smile on him; he smiled back, but it wasn’t a real one at all.

Ryan’s older brothers and their wives were all arranged in varying configurations on the other couches. There was a hierarchy about who sat where, but it depended on whether you were in Dad’s favor or not. Ryan would have to take a few minutes getting the lay of the land before he sat anywhere himself. Based solely upon distance from the recliner, Eddie had done something to piss Dad off, and Jimmy had clawed his way back to his position as the golden child. The interfamilial politics were ruthless enough to make a Targaryen sweat.

“I had to find out from Christopher down the block,” Dad was telling Jimmy’s wife, Andrea. “He didn’t even call to tell us, can you believe it?”

Andrea shot Ryan a brief, sympathetic look and said, “I’m sure it all happened very fast, you know how those things can be—”

“Don’t be stupid, Andy,” Jimmy interrupted her, shaking his head. “Ryan’s always been like that. A secretive little shit, huh?”

“That’s right,” Dad agreed, taking a sip of his Sam Adams and replacing it in the cup holder. “Didn’t even tell us when he went running away to college. Broke his mother’s heart, he did.”

Ryan winced; Chelsea winced too but didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to call,” he lied. “I really didn’t have the time at all.”

“Hey,” Eddie said, suddenly. “Where’s Shannon?”

He had known it was coming, but he’d hoped it would have come a little later in the evening. Maybe after he had had a chance to have a beer himself. “Well. We’re actually getting divorced, so she didn’t come back to Boston with me.”

That shocked them all into silence, and everyone’s eyes turned slowly to him.

Finally, Dad said,“Divorced?”

Ryan wondered whether he could get away with not talking about it at all. He was still standing in the middle of the room like he was facing a judge and jury, arrayed in the half circle around his father. “She wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. It’s probably better this way.” As he said it, he was surprised to find that it was true: hehadn’tbeen happy, in god knew how long.

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