Page 62 of A Loser by Christmas
Thank fuck for losers.
After Calum’s frantic phone call, Dad makes a call of his own to someone he once gave the same label.
“Lancaster?” he booms, and for once I’m glad that his voice carries. It means that Harry booms straight back loudly enough I get to hear him solve a problem for me.
“Yes, skipper. Tell Valentin I’ve found his keys. I’ll get his boat back to the yard ASAP.”
An hour later, he keeps that promise by babying my boat all the way to Dad’s mooring. I have no doubt that more sabotage is the reason she’s lower in the water than ever. Harry is much more buoyant. He salutes my father. “One boat as promised.” He passes over everything important I left aboard her. “And yes, I’ll mind the yard for as long as you need me.”
Dad salutes him back from the cab of a vehicle loaded with a six-figure speedboat. For once, it’s me who insists on keeping him close. “Because if you drive, I can work on solving my puzzle, can’t I?”
Sharing this cab with him isn’t how I ever thought I’d stage a rescue mission, but right now I do need Dad’s determination. Hebullies his way around the outskirts of London. Lays his hand on the horn and doesn’t lift it until traffic on the M25 swerves out of his way, avoiding him like I used to. I regret that after he puts his foot to the floor for me, all while checking on a third passenger between us.
“Is it warm enough?”
“The egg? Oui.” I’m pretty sure the duckling it holds is much tougher than the shell it is wrapped in. I can’t say the same for me. I’m shattered like the contest entry that I’ve dismantled in the edit software on the laptop Harry also delivered. No matter how I rearrange A-roll and B-roll, my storyboard refuses to piece together.
Because I’m still missing something.
Dad must notice my struggle. “Talk to me, Valentin.”
“I . . . I still can’t see . . .”
He rumbles a quiet-for-him reminder. “Did you go back to the beginning?”
I try doing that again, earbuds in to listen, and my breath catches.
“What is it?” Dad speaks over some audio I recorded when Calum was still a stranger to me. “You found a missing piece?”
“Maybe.” I drag a slider back to the start and listen again to what Calum once told me across the street from Penny’s. This time, I pay closer attention to something he’d almost immediately retracted. And almost immediately, I’m uncertain. “Maybe not.”
I’m no closer to slotting the right story together. I’m also not much closer to Calum—a crash brings traffic to an almost standstill.
Like me, vehicles are stuck and going nowhere in a hurry.
Dad isn’t done trying to get me over the line. “What do you need?”
His help used to come with strings attached. Now I grab the lifeline he offers. “I need a faster internet connection.”
He finds that for me in a service station where he sips coffee and I start over, but even his patience wears thin. “What are you reading?”
“This.”
I add him poring over pages of hockey gossip to my list of things I didn’t anticipate this December. I couldn’t have predicted this concern either. “A player was refused the surgery he needed?” He meets my gaze across this service station table. “That doesn’t seem likely. Business owners know to protect their biggest assets.” He nods towards the car park where the boat transporter is right where he can see it. His gaze lands on me for even longer. “We’ll do anything to keep those safe.”
It’s a strange time to picture a disabled water pump. Everything Dad did to hold my boat hostage slides into a different focus. A parental one, which brings me back to hockey.
I pull up another article. “Apparently, that player’s teamdidvalue him. Because they didn’t completely say no.” I remember something else Calum told me. “Hockey is another kind of family. Feels like home, especially to kids far away from their own for the first time. Young players grow up having decisions made for them when they’re rookies. I guess that sometimes continues when it shouldn’t.”
“How?”
“Like when this player’s club okayed a different surgery than the procedure he wanted.”
Dad squints like he used to over our Christmas jigsaws. “Teams must have expert medics. Was it just a difference of opinion?”
I mentally replay the times Calum cut himself off midway through conversations. The most recent was outside a rink where he’d explored senses with a little girl who might loseone of hers soon. I scroll down to another snippet of hockey gossip. “It says here that the player got his own second opinion. And that’s what his club turned down.” I open another article detailing the differences.
Dad reads again. “So one of those surgical options could have provided a long-term fix but was experimental. The club’s choice of surgery would get him back on the ice faster, but was more of a short-term fix.” He looks up. “There were no guarantees that short-term fix option wouldn’t cut short his career, and the window for taking the longer-lasting option was closing?”
