Page 25 of The Pucking Date
There’s a pause, long enough to say everything. Her voice is tight. “It’s Dad. He’s worse.”
Six hours later,I’m stepping off the plane in Raleigh, grabbing a rental at the airport. The air hits different here, thick with humidity and the ghost of honeysuckle from Mrs. Henderson’s fence line. I can smell it even with the car windows up. The Bojangles sign still flickers the same dying neon, and there’s my old high school’s championship banner hanging from the same rusty light pole.
It’s early September, but the heat is still thick. The trees are full, green, but the light’s gone gold around the edges. Like even the air knows summer’s about to slip.
This town is soaked in nostalgia and sweat, where football’s gospel, front porches are confessionals, and nothing ever really changes.
The Vipers made me an offer. A big one. Come home, play for the city that raised me, let the press spin it as some poetic full-circle moment.
But I can’t do it.
Can’t lace up my skates two miles from the man who blew up the name I’ve been dragging out of the mud ever since I was seventeen. Can’t breathe the same air and pretend it doesn’t choke me.
Then there’s my sister Aoife. A walking contradiction, chaos and competence in one messy bun and a threadbare hoodie. Twenty-five, raising three-year-old twins solo without ever looking like she’s asking for help. Their dadbailed before the boys turned one. She never talks about it. Never lets it slow her down.
She freelances content strategy from her laptop, shoots reels between diaper changes, and somehow makes the rest of us feel like we’re the ones falling behind. I think about her sometimes when I’m taping my wrists, how hard she’s working to give those boys a name they don’t have to apologize for.
Same as me.
Being near her again would’ve been the only good reason to take that Raleigh contract. But some ghosts you don’t play in front of. You leave them behind.
The hospital’s familiar—sterile walls, low lighting, that hum of forced calm. I’ve done this walk before.
Room 208.
My father sits by the window in a recliner, hands folded neatly in his lap. He’s smiling. The same vacant smile he wore the last time I saw him. Like he knows he’s supposed to look happy to see me, even if he can’t remember why.
“Hi, Dad,” I say, keeping my tone gentle.
His head turns slowly, and for a moment, I hold my breath, waiting for recognition. His eyes land on mine, but they don’t light up, just stare through me like I’m a stranger wearing a familiar face.
“Finn,” he says, almost like a question, like he’s not sure if that’s really my name.
I nod, stepping in, keeping the expression polite. Easy. “Yeah. Just in town for a bit.”
“Good, good.” He smiles again, the blank sweetness I’ve come to dread. “That’s nice.”
He doesn’t ask about the team. Or the league. Or the nonprofit I’ve been pouring myself into, trying to scrub clean the damage he left behind.
He doesn’t remember the wreckage. Or maybe he does but is unable to say it.
Before the tumor, before everything cracked open, my father was a force. Big. Loud. Charismatic enough to charm every scout and sponsor in the room.
And when I was a kid, I wanted to be like him.
That all changed the summer I turned seventeen. The headlines hit just as I was packing for Canada to play major junior. Suddenly my last name meant scandal instead of promise, trouble instead of talent.
The league called him a liability. Sponsors pulled out. My ticket out got stamped with a scandal I had no part in.
And he didn’t explain or apologize. Just folded in on himself and let the world torch us both.
All he does now is smile.
I’m standing there, stuck between memory and ache, when I hear the familiar shuffle of heels on laminate and the soft slam of the door.
“Finn?”
My mother’s voice wraps around the space before she even appears, warm and already half laughing like she can’t believe I’m really here.
