The Whiteboard

You wake up at seven with your phone on your chest and the screen still open to the conversation.

You read the whole thread again before you've even brushed your teeth. The jokes about the shin pads. The part where he got serious. The part where you both stopped being careful for a few lines at two in the morning and then pretended you hadn't. You don't know exactly what you are to each other after last night, but you know you're not nothing, and that's a problem, because nothing was the plan.

"You're smiling at your phone," Zara says from the kitchen doorway, toast in her mouth. Her box braids are piled on her head and she's wearing your bathrobe again. "That's the face of a woman who has sinned."

"I have not sinned."

"Is it Alley Man?"

"There is no Alley Man."

"There's a man, and you met him in an alley, and I know who he is, babe. I tried to tell you that night. I made a whole face." She points the toast at you. "Captain. Coach's captain. Coach's favorite person on Earth after you."

"Nothing is happening."

"Nothing is happening at two in the morning, Ava," Zara says, "on your phone, with your face doing that."

You throw a dish towel at her and go to work.

The first preseason game is that night against the Hartford Rooks, and it's a massacre.

You're in the video booth up in the rafters of the Chebucto Centre with two cameras, a laptop, and a headset that pipes in the bench audio: two channels, one for your father and one for the assistants, mostly so you can tag line changes for the coaches later. The crowd is thin, preseason thin, but loud. Gulls painted on the ice at center. The smell of popcorn floats all the way up here.

The Gales score first. Mason wins a faceoff clean on his backhand, the side he says he's bad at, and you catch yourself grinning before you remember to be professional.

Then the second period starts and everything falls apart.

You know the plan, because you watched your father write it on the whiteboard at the morning skate. Penalty kill: Gorski with Kowalchuk, then Pruneau with Okoli. It's in your father's square block capitals, underlined twice.

Two minutes into the second, Zeke Gorski takes a lazy interference penalty in the neutral zone. And the first PK pair over the boards isn't Gorski's partner and a fresh body. It's the two slowest defensemen on the roster, both just off a long shift.

Hartford scores in eleven seconds.

You frown and rewind your feed. Channel one: your father shouting at the ref. Channel two: a wash of noise, sticks banging, someone yelling a name you can't make out.

It happens again later in the period. Different penalty, same wrong pair. Another goal. By the third it's 5-1 and the crowd is booing, and down on the bench Mason has his head bowed, saying something to the guys around him that makes them all sit up a little straighter.

After the game you take the stairs down to the coaches' room with your laptop. Your father is at the whiteboard, erasing it with angry strokes. Duff is on the couch with an ice pack on his knee, looking a hundred years old.

"Tough one," Duff says.

"Dad." You hold up the laptop. "The PK pairs in the second. They weren't what you wrote. You had Gorski and Kowalchuk first, and..."

"I know what I wrote." Your father doesn't turn around.

"I just wanted to flag it, because it happened twice, and both times..."

"I know what I wrote." He slams the eraser down on the tray. The room goes dead silent. He's never once raised his voice at you at the rink. Not when you were eight and spilled a slushie on a referee. Not ever.

He breathes out through his nose. "It's preseason. We were trying stuff. Tag it, Ava, and go home."

Duff catches your eye and makes a little face: let it go, kiddo, he's tired.

You let it go. You don't feel like you let it go.

At home you sit on the kitchen counter eating cereal for dinner while Zara gets ready for her late shift. She has to be at the Breakwater by ten. It's a good bar to work at, she says, if you like tips and don't mind that the owner is a little bit of a creep.

"How was the game?"

"Bad. Five-one."

"Oh, I know." She's lining her eyes in the toaster's reflection. "There was a guy at the bar last night, one of Cy's regulars, telling everybody the Gales would lose by three or more. Put a whole stack on it in the back room. He was very smug."

You stop chewing. "Who's Cy?"

"Cy Arsenault. My boss. Owns the bar." She waves the eyeliner. "Runs a little side thing out of the back room. Everybody knows. People bet on Gales games, he takes the bets, nobody talks about it because he tips the cops in free wings."

"And the smug guy bet that we'd lose by three."

"And win. He always wins. Him and a couple others." Zara caps the eyeliner. "Weird, right? You'd think they'd lose sometimes. Everybody loses sometimes."

"Everybody loses sometimes," you repeat.

She grabs her bag and kisses your cheek. "Pick me up at one, Ava? My car's making the noise again."

You go back to the Cave. You tell yourself it's to tag the game while it's fresh. It's because you can't sit still.

Your phone buzzes once while you work. saw you in the booth tonight. you made a face at the second period like it owed you money. same. Then: get some sleep, Mullane.

You don't answer. You're too busy watching Zeke Gorski hook a man who wasn't going anywhere, over and over, from three angles.

At 12:52 you pack up and drive down Lower Water Street toward the harbour. The fog is in, thick and orange under the streetlights. The Breakwater's sign glows through it like a lighthouse. You pull into the narrow lot behind the bar, the same alley where a stranger once asked if he could kiss you, and you text Zara: here.

Then your headlights sweep across the cars parked against the back fence, and your foot comes off the gas.

A silver Ford Explorer with a dented rear bumper and a faded GALES HOCKEY DAD sticker you put on it when you were fourteen.

Your father's car.

At one in the morning, behind a bar where a man named Cy takes bets on his team.