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  I have one customer that day, several blocks away, so I take care of that and place the money in my drawer. I’ve got more than four hundred dollars! It makes me feel good seeing that money in there. I feel like I’m helping to protect my family: my dad and Sinbad and me and even my aunt—you never know when someone might need four hundred dollars!

  When Dad gets home later, he takes me to four-on-four. I think about trying to talk to him in the car, then wuss out and decide to do it on the way home instead.

  When we get to the rink, I’m surprised to see Owen Karnataka there. He’s the guy I mentioned who went to play hockey in Finland last season. He’s kind of a legend, cause his 16U AAA midget team won the national championship seven years ago. My dad never won nationals. There are three levels of midget: 15U, 16U, and 18U. Owen’s team won when they were almost all fifteen-year-olds, which is beyond beast. His dad is from Southern India but immigrated here before Owen was born. I’ve seen his dad around the rink—he’s the Roaster in Chief, but then again he’s not. Like Owen was playing a game in one of the rinks, and my dad and I stopped to watch for a period. And Mr. Karnataka was yelling out stuff like, “That was not good! Not good! I know you don’t have so much talent, but please don’t embarrass me!” But then after roasting Owen for about ten solid minutes, he suddenly turned to my dad and said, “I honestly think he is one of the best hockey players in America. Really the best.”

  Owen, in a sleeveless T-shirt, strides through the freezing rink carrying a hockey bag. He must be twenty-two or -three now, and he basically looks like he’s at the peak of his peak, buff like I can only hope to be someday. He nods at me when he walks by—he was a coach on an in-house team I played on once. “Owen!” I call out as he passes.

  He turns around. “Hey . . . Conor, right?”

  “Yeah, thanks for remembering. What’s Finland like?”

  “It’s cold, man. But I love it. It’s an adventure. It’s as much fun as I had in bantam and midget.”

  “Cool. What’s the hockey like?”

  “It’s high level. We had a guy on our team make the NHL. He managed to stick with his NHL team the whole season, and hopefully he’ll stick next season as well.”

  “Wow!”

  “How about you?” Owen asks.

  “I made peewee AAA for the next season.”

  “Great, man, congratulations! I knew you had it in you, seriously. You had the best all-around game I’ve seen in a young kid. But are you getting any lower?” He looks at my dad and nods. “Is he getting any lower?”

  “He’s doing better, but we’ve still got work to do on that.”

  “He’ll get it.” He winks at me. “Maybe you’ll end up in Finland one day. Bring a warm coat.” Then he gives a quick wave and walks off.

  I go change in a locker room, psyched. I love talking to these older guys, just about where they go with their careers. There are a lot of options. I mean, I know I’m not the kind of kid who’s going to grow up and get a PhD. I’m the kind of kid who could go to college and still not get a good job. Like, what I don’t understand is, everybody says if you go to college, you’ll get a better job. But what if everyone went to college? If there are only a certain number of good jobs, then the same percentage of people are still going to end up with a good job, and a lot of people with college degrees are not going to get good jobs. It all depends on how many good jobs there are, not on how many people go to college. Right? I’ve been trying to figure this out. Basically, I just gotta understand what all the options are. Why can’t we have jobs for all kinds of people, including people like me? How does that work? Sometimes, thinking about it, I just don’t want to grow up at all.

  But then I go out there, get on the ice, and I’m pushing off on my skates, and it feels even greater than it did last time. There’s so much open ice in four-on-four—it’s just constant flying up and down while skating your fastest, passing, and scoring. I score five goals, and we win 21–17. Makes me wonder if I’d like to switch to playing forward someday. I love playing defense, but I know Dad wonders if I have the killer instinct you need for it. I have a killer instinct, but maybe it’s not the D type of killer instinct. I mean, in bantam some guys have the attitude like they wanna check five players a game just to make their day worthwhile. Plus, playing defense is a lot of pressure, ’cause if someone scores it can be all your fault, and then you have to feel like crap for the rest of the day if it was an important game. On the other hand, playing forward is constant movement, constant puck-handling. You feel pressure, but it’s a different kind of pressure.

  But maybe that’s just four-on-four. Dad believes in letting the coach put you where he feels is best for the team. He says, “In hockey the best players integrate fully with the team,” whatever that means. Or, “The coach is in the best position to see the team as a whole.” I’ll do anything my coach asks, especially ’cause I’m not really sure what I’m best at. On my team last year, the six defensive players were the six fastest skaters on the team and blew the offensive guys out of the water when it comes to skating backward. I was actually the worst backward skater of the six of us. The offensive guys last year had better hands and were more agile. We had one center who couldn’t skate that great and didn’t score that much, but he had this superpower of being able to win every single face-off. There was a guy who stuck in the NHL for years just ’cause he had that same superpower. This is the kind of stuff you have to spend half your time thinking about if you play hockey. Like should I work harder on my backward skating, or should I work more on my hands and hope to make the move to offense at some point? Basically, I try to work on everything.

  But today, once I’m out of the locker room, I switch back to thinking about my dad, ’cause it’s so important. I don’t see him around, so I go to the car, but he’s not there. Some guy starts walking across the lot, waving his arms wildly and spinning and talking to himself. He’s between me and the rink door, so I just stand there. When he starts moving toward me, I drop my bag but hold on to my stick. Then he spits out “HOCKEY!” and moves on.

  A young girl has spotted him and suddenly screams “Mommy!” and runs across the lot toward a woman. I look around, and the guy is already across the lot and almost out the gate. I sit on the ground next to my bag, look up Finland on my phone. Ice hockey is the biggest sport there, and they have one of the best hockey teams in the world. They’re the most stable of all 178 countries, according to some organization. Not sure what “stable” means, though.

  I look around at the parking lot, surrounded by its huge, black, metal security gate. Dad’s walking toward the car, so I get up and heave my bag off the ground.

  “How’d you get past me?” he asks. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I didn’t see you, so I just came out.”

  We get inside the car, and he immediately flicks on the radio and turns it up loud. So I’m not sure if he feels like talking.

  I start by asking, “Did you ever think of playing in Finland?”

  He turns down the radio right away. “Well, I started out pretty cocky. I was sure I was going to make the NHL, so, no, I didn’t think of leaving the country. That might have been fun, though, to see the world. My parents spent so much on my hockey, we didn’t really have the money to travel. And I guess we didn’t really want to travel either. I just wanted to play hockey, and my parents just wanted to watch me play hockey. I feel sorry for my sister, though. She kind of got dragged along all the time.”

  “Have you ever been out of the country?”

  “Once. I never told you? Your mom and I went to Japan for our honeymoon. It was your grandparents’ wedding present to us.”

  “Do they play hockey there?”

  “Yeah, but they’re honestly not that into it. I think there was a promising kid whose family apparently decided to move him to Canada. Not sure what became of him.”

  “I kinda worry that there aren’t that many players with Japanese blood who ever made it in the NHL. Do
you think I’m going to fail?”

  “There are some making their way up the ranks now. At least two will probably be first-round draft picks. One is very small, but his skating is off the charts for a teenager. And you have to look at the greatest guy who did have Japanese blood—have you heard of Paul Kariya? Really high-skill player. If it weren’t for all those concussions, who knows what his stat line would look like. I actually played his team once, but we were never on the ice at the same time.”

  Like a lot of the guys on my team, I don’t watch many professional hockey games. Those guys are so far beyond us that Jae-won and I just don’t like to watch them. I’d much rather see a good bantam game than go see the Kings or something. I did see a YouTube video of Kariya, but I only watched that one video of him, where he got creamed by a blindside elbow. Seeing that illegal hit on him, then seeing him lying on the ice afterward, I couldn’t watch more. I guess you just gotta grow up tough in this life . . . whether you play hockey or not, probably.

  I look at Dad, frowning at some guy weaving way fast on the freeway. Dad’s kind of the ultimate in tough, or so I’ve always thought. So this crying business is definitely a problem. I gotta ask him.

  So I say, “Dad, did you hear that story about the cop who shot that unarmed seventeen-year-old guy up near Redding? The one with the toy gun?”

  “It was a pellet gun, not a toy gun. The news called it a toy gun, but its real name is a pellet gun. It’s very realistic-looking.”

  “So you heard about it. . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, but Dad, that officer, the one who shot the kid—he was going through a bad divorce. He wasn’t his best self out there. You know, like how you always tell me to be my best self out there on the ice.”

  He doesn’t answer for a moment, and I think he might be offended that I don’t think he can do his job. Then he says, “I’ve actually thought about this, Conor, but I think I’m okay out there in the streets.”

  “But Dad, maybe that guy thought he was okay out there. I mean, what if you’re not the best judge of that, you know?”

  He glances at me and says, “And who would be the best judge?”

  “Well, me. I mean, I know I’m only a kid, but I know you, right?”

  “You know me as a dad, not as a cop. All good cops learn to separate their personal lives from their jobs. Compartmentalize. If you can’t do that, it’s the wrong job for you. But I tell you what, I’ll think about what you’ve said.” He makes a face like he ate something sour. “Hand me a gum wrapper, Con.” I hand him an old gum wrapper that’s sitting in the cup holder. He spits his gum into the wrapper. “I think I’m finally sick of cinnamon gum.”

  He just seems really tired and old right now, so I let it go. I suddenly get that feeling I mentioned before, like when I can sense the bad stuff from his job, the bad things he’s seen, welling up in him and kind of making a cloud around him. And it makes me feel bad when I feel this way, but I really need to get away from this cloud. So I look out the window. I asked him once why he didn’t get a bodyguard job, or maybe work some kind of private security. He said he had a friend who got a job doing security for a rich guy who was good friends with a politician. Some of the politicians this friend met, he liked, and some he thought were pure evil, even though they seemed nice when you saw them on TV. That was something Dad didn’t want to deal with. And he doesn’t want to do security for some rich person. That really doesn’t motivate him. He wants to be a cop. So sometimes he’s just going to have this cloud.

  I think about that window Dad has talked about, where you have 1.5 seconds to make your decision to shoot. Wrong decision, you die. “Right” decision, someone else may die. That there is what you would call a tragic decision, either way. But you gotta make the decision to live. I would. And that’s why I would never want to be a cop.

  Jenny wanted Dad to quit being a cop as well, but maybe for different reasons. She started to get pretty ambitious about the kind of life she thought we should be living. She wanted him to go to college, and he had no interest. I would say all together, if you added up the good days we had together, out of all the years they were married, we had maybe three months or so of times that were really nice.

  I remember the one road trip we took with Jenny when I was six, right before I started skating. We stopped on an empty highway, just the three of us, and took pictures of the horizon, the empty blacktop stretching into nowhere. Jenny said, “Wow, sometimes nowhere is the best place to be.” She suddenly picked me up and kissed my face and said, “I love you SO MUCH.” That was the first, last, and only time she ever told me she loved me. But I kind of don’t mind, ’cause that’s honest of her.

  And . . . so, yeah, to me, Hockey = Divorce. “Why do you have to push him so hard?” Jenny screamed during one argument.

  “I’m not pushing him!” Dad yelled back. “He wants to do it. Ask him!”

  “He doesn’t know what he wants! He’s ten years old!”

  “He wants to play hockey! I repeat: ask him!”

  And I did want it, even when I was ten. I wanted it more than anything, more than I wanted my parents to stop fighting. I would lie there hoping my dad would win the argument, and I could keep playing.

  CHAPTER 26

  * * *

  WHEN I HIT five hundred dollars, Dad suggests I start taking lessons again. “We’ve got the Sinbad thing under control. Now let’s get you ready for the season.”

  So Sunday at five a.m., there I am at the rink to skate with Shu. He looks surprised when I slide onto the ice. “What happen you? I thought you quit hockey!”

  “Nah, just took a break.”

  “Break okay. Kid need break.” Then he swings his stopwatch at me so that it clanks on my helmet cage. I flinch. “You skate fast today or I make you go home.”

  He times us one by one, around the ice. I’m a full second over my usual time.

  He shakes his head sadly, doesn’t even bother to pinch me. “Lazy today. No NHL for lazy kid.”

  “I think I’m rusty. I’m having a bad day.”

  “Nick never have bad day.”

  Nick is nineteen and plays major junior hockey like a lot of NHL players did at one time. He’s one of the best players I’ve ever personally known, after my father and Owen. Nobody who skates with Shu at five in the morning can touch Nick, and there are some darn good players who skate with Shu at five in the morning.

  When Nick tapes the shaft of his stick, he leaves a little piece of tape hanging, so for a few weeks I did that too. Aleksei thought it looked unprofessional and sometimes pulled it off and yelled at me, “Why you do that?! I don’t like!” But I kept doing it again, ’cause I wanted to be like Nick. Then I decided the tape hanging there distracted me, so I stopped taping that way. You gotta try different stuff to find your style.

  During the scrimmage portion of Shu’s workout, I fall down and go headfirst into the boards. You’re supposed to get right up from a fall when you’re at peewee level. If you don’t, you have to sit out two shifts. I don’t know if that’s national, but it’s the way the Grizzlies do it. But my bell’s rung, and I lie there for a minute. Shu ignores me. If Aleksei were here, he would poke me with his stick and say, “Get up! This is hockey!” Then skate away.

  A couple of players lean over me and ask if I’m okay. I don’t know why, but I just have trouble getting up after a fall. When I’m hurting or dazed, it feels so good to lie there on the ice. Like, I don’t even struggle to get up like the tough kids do. I just can’t push through a hurting. So after maybe a minute and a half, I pull myself up. I don’t look over at my dad, ’cause I’m kind of embarrassed, since I’m basically fine.

  After I get up, Shu looks at me and just shakes his head like I’m a whiner or something. Speaking of whining, my skate blades are dull. We didn’t get them sharpened ’cause the guy who usually does it was out sick when we came by Friday, and I won’t let anyone else sharpen them. So I’m skidding a bit out there. Nobod
y who doesn’t know hockey would notice, but my dad probably sees that I’m not skating as well as I usually do. Even a tiny nick on the blades can throw me off my game ’cause I’m so picky.

  Then Shu has me and two guys from my new team named Aidan and Aidan go up against Nick by himself. I don’t know why, but sometimes it seems like half the guys in hockey are named Aidan. Even as good as Nick is, I don’t see how he can get the puck from the three of us. We’re all good passers. But somehow on Aidan 1’s first pass, Nick lunges and just tips the puck, then speeds over to it, and it’s game over. He scores with a flick of his wrists. Shu whips his stopwatch on Aidan 1’s helmet, making a clang. “Go again,” Shu says.

  So we go again, and this time I’m the loser. I execute what I think is going to be a perfect saucer pass to Aidan 2, but Nick whips his stick through the air and hits my pass, then flashes over to the puck. He hits a blazing slap shot into the net. How can this guy not be in the NHL?

  “How can you not be in the NHL?” I ask him.

  He just smiles, but I wonder, seriously, how is this guy not in the NHL? You must have to be a freaking superman to be in the NHL. I mean, if Nick can’t make it, who can? Or maybe Nick will make it someday? The major junior level is way up there in the hockey hierarchy. Not as high up there as my dad got, but pretty darn high.

  Then Shu has two AAA midgets go up against Nick, and he still beats them, though it’s a struggle.

  We’re on the ice for three hours, alternating drills and scrimmages. I can hardly see with all the sweat pouring down my face. All in all, a great workout. Then we finish up with a few dryland exercises outside.

  Later, in the car, I ask, “So, Dad, will Nick make the NHL?”