Page 46 of Home Ice Advantage

But the fact was, Ryan was the only one who hadmadeit.

It didn’t matter if he had. Ryan might have been a Hall of Famer with the kind of illustrious career his brothers could only dream of, but listening to his family talk, you’d have thought he was some kind of draft bust. He never said anything when they chirped him. It was just like fighting with Dad—not only were you outnumbered, it left you feeling dirty afterward.

Ryan tried to spend as much of his time playing with his little nieces and nephews and talking hockey with the older ones as he could. Eddie’s oldest daughter was trying out for her high school team and wanted his opinion on whether she should consider switching out her curve to try to get a little more power on her shot. Mark’s middle son wanted his advice about which colleges he should be considering if he really wanted to push for the major leagues one day.

He even spent some time in the kitchen with Andrea and the other wives while they were helping to get the dinner ready. They were all perfectly pleasant women, even if they had almost nothing to talk about.

But he couldn’t avoid his father forever. Dad had made his way out of the lounger and into the kitchen, where he immediately began his reign of terror, poking his nose around to see the progress on the various parts of the meal while Chelsea tried to run interference. Dad saw Ryan right around that time, and his eyes narrowed.

“You’re too good to say hello when you come into my home now?”

“I was catching up with everyone,” Ryan said, lamely.

“You come in and greet yourfatherbefore you run to hide in the kitchen.”

“Mark—” Chelsea started, but fell silent when Dad whipped his head around to glare at her.

That was how these things always went: fighting with him just got him angrier. There wasn’t an easy way to win without going nuclear, and no one was willing to see how far it would take to get there. And now that Ryan had already pissed him off, there wasn’t going to be an easy recovery.

It was funny: he had been so fucking competitive on the ice, never backing down from a challenge no matter how much bigger the other player was, but when it came to his dad, he always felt like he was five years old again, listening to him screaming in the car on the way home from a mites game where Ryan hadn’t backchecked hard enough, and the puck had ended up in the net.

He hated feeling small. And the only place he ever felt small was at home.

By the time dinner rolled around, Ryan had already fielded questions and critiques from his brothers and from Dad, eaten some food that didn’t have much taste and had probably far too much to drink. It didn’t help that at Dad’s house people were always shoving beers into your hands, and it also didn’t help that that was one of the only ways to make the evening tolerable.

He sat silently at his place, wedged in between Andrea and Madison, and pushed his food around on the plate with a fork. Suddenly, he wasn’t very hungry. At the head of the table, Dad was ranting on about how soft the league was nowadays, particularly this whole Railers lawsuit business. Inhisday, players were men, and they handled that shit themselves. And probably that guy was lying anyway, just looking for a payout, like all of those other—

Ryan pushed his chair back. He stood up. Dad yelled after him, “Where the hell do you think you’re going, son?”

But Ryan, walking faster and faster and faster toward the door, wasn’t listening anymore.

When he had lived at home, Eric’s family always celebrated what his dad had jokingly called “Jewish Christmas,” which consisted of Chinese takeout and watching a movie at home. He’d always enjoyed those evenings, even though his and his father’s taste in movies couldn’t have been more different.

Specifically, because Eric didn’t like movies very much and it didn’t matter whether it was an art house film or a blockbuster, he had a hard time sitting through them. Joseph Aronson, on the other hand, had owned an insanely large Criterion collection that grew every year. Those were the movies they watched together. It had become kind of a tradition that Eric would pretend he didn’t understand what was going on with the plot, while his father got increasingly frustrated every time until he realized that Eric was winding him up.

His father had been dead for a few years now, and Eric worked such crazy hours, even on the holidays, that he couldn’t always go home to his mom. But he still made the sacrifice and watched some boring old movie while eating takeout, and he thought about Dad and all of the time they’d had together and the time they wouldn’t be able to have together anymore.

It was kind of a weird comfort, knowing that Dad had had a happy life, that he had been in love with Mom up until the end. But it also still nagged at him, in the back of his head, that there were things about Eric he hadn’t ever been able to know before his death.

Aronson, Sully texted him.

Eric frowned at his phone.Isn’t this like your big holiday?

Yeah, and it sucks.

Well, it’s only like eight o’clock. You have a lot of time to go.

Sort of yes, sort of no. I’m outside your apartment building.

You’re what?

I’m outside your apartment building and I’m freezing my balls off. Can you let me in?

Eric set the phone down. This was not what he had expected. Sure, they had been fucking around for a little while now and he had even stayed over Sully’s apartment a few times, but this was...well, Christmas was a big fucking deal. And he didn’t know why Sully wouldn’t have been with his family, why he would have ended up onEric’sdoorstep of all places.

He said,I’ll be right down, paused the TV and got up.

Sully was, indeed, outside the apartment building. He wore a too-thin coat, the kind of coat that you grabbed if you were driving somewhere and weren’t planning to be outside very long. He looked a little drunk and his eyes were red like he’d been rubbing at them. He was shivering and Eric wondered whether he’d walked there. Where he’d walked from. Basically, he looked fuckingmiserable.

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