The Hockey Star's Forgotten Baby Mama novel · Chapter 13 of 32
Chapter 13: Ice Box Nights
The coat check attendant stopped moving.
Lulu sighed in her sleep and pressed her goalie mask into Johnny's collarbone.
I looked at my father in his good overcoat.
"Neither," I said.
"I wasn't offering you a choice, Leighton."
"I know. You never do. That's why I stopped taking them."
Johnny shifted our daughter higher on his shoulder.
"I've got eight years on a contract you signed," he said. "I live here now. So does she."
My father buttoned his coat, one button at a time.
"We'll see who lives where in July," he said.
He walked out into the rain without an umbrella. Somebody always held one for him.
Somebody did.
Christmas morning, Johnny was on our couch at six a.m. in a Santa hat Lulu had glued felt hearts onto.
He'd been there since five forty. Stevie let him in and went back to bed.
Lulu came down the hall in her goalie pajamas, saw him and stopped dead.
"You're HERE. On CHRISTMAS."
"You invited me. In front of two hundred people."
She launched herself at him from three feet away.
He caught her. He'd learned.
He made cinnamon rolls from a can. He burned the bottoms.
Lulu said they were the best in Portland, and Stevie said Portland was in trouble.
On the first Monday in January, I stood in the team kitchen in front of twenty-three players and held up a piece of paper.
On it, in Lulu's purple crayon, it said ICE BOX NITES.
"Tuesdays," I said. "Fifteen-dollar seats for families. A free clinic on the practice rink before the game, run by you. Dinner for every kid after, cooked by us."
The captain scratched his jaw.
"Ownership killed fifteen-dollar seats."
"Ownership killed his fifteen-dollar seats. Anybody can buy a ticket and sell it for less."
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