Ryan pulled out his phone and checked it for the first time since the game started. Diane had forwarded him an email from Erika Orrick, and appended her own message:
Hi Ryan,
Nico is looking into selling the house, so there’ll be an inspector and an agent coming through in the next couple weeks. With your permission, I’ll send them your number so they can coordinate times with you.
The more formal email from Orrick to Diane followed, laying out the agencies’ names and contact info.
So that was it, then. It felt final in a way that Nico’s trade hadn’t. Ryan sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes and rolled the king’s pawn against the board. He and Nico would never sit here for another game. Whatever his future held, wherever it took him, he couldn’t go back.
After a minute he got up. He pulled the stupid overfull garbage he kept forgetting to empty from under the sink, tied it off, and got a new bag. Then he opened the cupboard where he kept the contraband snacks full of sugar and carbs, and emptied it into the bin.
When he’d finished cleaning out the cupboard, he did the same to the fridge. Anything with too much sugar and not enough nutritional value went in the bag, except the jar of jam Nico put in his tea. Ryan never touched that anyway.
He tied off the second garbage bag and lugged everything out to the curb, for once actually remembering it was garbage day tomorrow.
There were three bottles of beer left in the case. Ryan opened them and dumped them in the sink, rinsed the residue down the drain, and set the empties in the case to be recycled.
Then he took his phone out one more time and dialed a number from the business card he’d stuck to the fridge back in October. It was almost midnight, so he got the answering service, but it was easier to do it when he didn’t have to speak to a live person anyway.
“Hi, Barb. This is Ryan Wright.” He exhaled. “I’m just wondering if you have any availability this week. Call me back. Thanks.”
A DAYafterthat, Ryan got a text from Yorkie.Captain’s practice. 11am. Be there.
But when Ryan showed up at the rink, it was just Yorkie and a woman Ryan had never met talking at center ice. Yorkie skated over while Ryan was setting his water bottle on the boards.
He sensed an ambush.
“So hey,” Yorkie said. “Thanks for coming.”
Uh-huh. “What’s going on?”
Yorkie nudged him over on the bench and sat beside him. “Listen… you’ve been really great with Chenner this year. I haven’t been as available as I should’ve been. Not for them… but not for you either.”
Ryan let out a long breath. There was a but coming. “So… tell me what I’m doing here.”
“You’ve got a decent shot. No problems seeing the play. You’re good at faceoffs.”
Ryan heard what he didn’t say.You can’t keep up.“I’m here to see a skating coach?” he guessed.
“She’s a new hire,” Yorkie confirmed. “You’re the guinea pig. But it worked in Tampa.”
Finally Ryan nodded. He’d spent too much of his life coasting by, thinking that was better than expending a lot of effort trying to get what he wanted, only to fall short. It hadn’t made it hurt any less when he’d been traded to Indianapolis, or when he and Nico broke up.
“Okay,” he said, shaking his head in surrender. “You gonna introduce me?”
He might as well try something new.
That attitude persisted until long after the practice, which left his muscles sore in strange places and the rest of him feeling like a limp noodle—physically. But his brain was wide-awake, turning over this new philosophy. He could already feel a difference in the power of his stride, and he felt both stupid for not getting extra help sooner and resentful that none of his previous coaches had deemed it worthwhile. It would take weeks, if not months or years, for new habits to become muscle memory, but the work would pay off.
How did that book go? Chop wood, carry water?
So once he’d chugged a keg’s worth of Gatorade and showered off half his body weight in sweaty hockey gear stench, he sucked it up and dialed Kitty.
Kitty didn’t beat around the bush. “You ready to pull head from ass?”
Ryan graciously bit back his sarcastic response. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”
“You’re cooking.” Ryan thought that was only fair.