I Burned The Hockey Star Down novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: Duluth

He sat down across from me at Peg's kitchen table, in the chair where I'd eaten pork chops every Sunday of my life.

He took the lid off his coffee and didn't drink it.

I opened the laptop.

"Do you want me to type while you talk, or just listen?"

"Type," he said. "If you look at me, I'll stop."

So I looked at the screen.

"I heard it before I felt it," he said. "Like a branch snapping. Then I was on my back looking at the lights, and the trainer was running across the ice in his shoes, and I thought, that's funny, he's going to fall."

I typed it.

"Three surgeries. The first one didn't take. The second one got infected." He turned the cup in his hands. "By the third one, my agent had stopped calling. The team sent a fruit basket. Mostly pears."

"Pears," I said.

"I still can't eat a pear."

I laughed, and my eyes stung, and I kept typing.

"I went home to Duluth. Twenty-eight years old, back in my old bedroom with a poster of a goalie on the ceiling. My mom moved the couch so I could get to the bathroom on crutches." He was quiet for a second. "I couldn't walk for most of a year. She carried the laundry up and down the stairs, and she never once let me see her cry about it. I heard her through the wall, though."

My hands stopped.

"Keep going," he said. "Please."

I kept going.

"That winter, the lake behind her house froze solid. She took me out on it in February with a kitchen chair. I pushed the chair across the ice like a little kid. Like your bug in her pink helmet." He almost smiled. "Took me a month to let go of it."

"And then?"

"Then the Rainmakers called. New franchise, nobody else would hire a guy who couldn't skate backward. I took it." He looked at the window. "First day, they introduced me to their young center. Dane shook my hand and said he was sorry about my knee. He looked right at me."

I stopped typing.

I couldn't help it.

"That's chapter seven," Beau said. "That's all of it."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Peg snored in the next room over the sound of a 1988 skating judge.

I closed the laptop.

"You can look at me now," he said.

I looked at him.

His eyes were wet and steady.

He'd driven across the city at two in the morning to hand me the worst year of his life, so I could put it in a book.

I got up.

I came around the table.

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