Page 79 of Home Ice Advantage

Ryan should have just let it ring. He should have sent it straight to voice mail. He already felt like an exposed nerve, there was no way that any of it was going to go well.

“Ryan,” his dad said as soon as he picked up, “we need to fucking talk about the way you’ve been handling things.”

Ryan closed his eyes, rubbed his eyelid with his thumb. “Oh, we do, huh?”

“I’m not happy with you. At all. And neither is anyone else in the family. I know you have the day off. Youwillcome for lunch.”

He couldn’t help it: he laughed, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. He could almost hear his father vibrating with rage on the other line. “Is that an order, Dad?”

“Yes,” Mark Sullivan said, and hung up.

Ryan looked at his phone. He could do what he had always done, which was avoid the confrontation. What was his father really going to do if he just didn’t show up? Rage impotently at home. Or probably find some kind of a way to show up later, either at practice or the games, and make everything awful again.

The thing Ryan was learning, the older he got, was that some problems could be solved with kindness. Some problems could be solved with patience. But the really thorny ones, the really deep, long-standing ones...running away from them forever wasn’t going to fucking cut it. Especially because Eric wasn’t always going to be there to fight his battles for him.

Ryan took a deep breath and went to get ready for that goddamn lunch.

For such an unassuming house, it was funny how deep-seated the feeling of dread in his stomach always was when he started walking up the sidewalk to the front stoop. It was like somehow the front face of the home personified everything he hated about going home, the way the shutters and door looked like a leering face. Some indie director could probably make an excellent horror film about that house, Ryan thought, as he rang the doorbell.

“You’re in for it now,” Chelsea said, when she answered. She looked the way she always did when Dad was in a mood: harried and worried and drawn. For the first time in a long time, Ryan wondered whether she regretted marrying Mark Sr. so young. Whether she ever thought about trying to leave. She’d been barely out of college when they got married, and the career in fashion design she’d been trying to pursue had abruptly ended.

Ryan exhaled, suddenly feeling very tired. “Yeah, I got that impression from the phone call.”

“I tried to tell him how busy you are,” she said, as he followed her through the hall to the kitchen, “but you know how he gets when he’s in a mood.”

“Yes, I do,” Ryan agreed. “What’s for lunch, Chels?”

“Subs from Olympic. I’m sorry. I tried to tell him you like that one specific grinder, but...”

“He’s making a point. Don’t worry, I won’t be staying long.”

“Oh, god. Ryan, please, don’t...”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t think that this is going to go very well. You know.”

“Shit,” Chelsea muttered.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, again.

She sighed. “It’s fine. I should have expected this when he was going on about inviting you. The two of you have always been oil and water.”

Ryan had always thought this was an interesting way of saying that his father was an asshole and Ryan had done his best to avoid him, but he supposed that when you were living in a house like his father’s, you had to tell yourself stories to make it tolerable. Ryan had certainly done enough of it before he had been able to escape to college.

Even though the lunch was already set up in the kitchen—Chelsea always made a point of arranging meals on the actual plates and setting a table, even if it was the kind of casual takeout that you could eat straight from the wrapper—Dad was still where he always was, holding court in the living room in his recliner. At least none of Ryan’s brothers were over today; he wasn’t sure whether he’d have the spine to say the things he had to say if they were all there watching him. As it was, his stomach was doing nervous little flip-flops, the same way it had before each of the drafts he’d attended and never been chosen.

“Ryan,” Dad said, when he saw Ryan enter the room. “Sit down, boy. We’re going to have a little talk about the way you’ve been treating your family.”

“How have I been treating the family?” Ryan asked. Even now, it was easy to keep the emotion out of the words. His father wasn’t interested in what Ryan had to say, he was only interested in the setup for the diatribe, which Ryan had clearly provided him.

And he wentoff.

It was the kind of rant that had spittle flecking his lips, face brilliant red like the thin capillaries running beneath the skin were in danger of bursting. Ryan let it wash over him like a tsunami, or an explosion. A shock wave.

Ryan barely even heard most of it, tuned in and out as Dad kept talking. “—and I put the fucking time and money into your training even though you were always a fucking runt, even though you had no chance at making it anywhere,Ibelieved in you and pushed you to be better when no one else would—”

At this point in his life, Ryan wasn’t even offended at the revisionist history: Dad hadn’t ever actually supported him. He’d paid for the gear, sure. Driven Ryan to practices. Screamed at him whenever he hadn’t backchecked hard enough or put the puck in the back of the net often enough. Ryan had learned the hard way how to be better than everyone else: it was partially to compensate for his size, but partially to get his dad off of his back. Dad would never see it that way. He would never have let Ryan quit, but he wanted the credit for the rest of it, too.

In past years, Ryan would have waited until Dad was finished ranting. He was half considering doing that, now, too, until his father’s meandering train of thought had shifted from Ryan’s failings to the way that the league itself was going down the shitter. He was working himself up more and more, and Ryan wiped his sleeve across his face to clear away the droplets of spit. Dad was standing now, looming over Ryan and ranting about Morin and Sato with the Constitution and Campbell and Walker with the Liberty, awful shit about how affirmative action was harming the quality of play and—

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