by Jack Falla
“HEY!” I yelled, freezing Jackie’s would-be punch at the top of her windup. “Don’t hit a guy wearing a helmet and visor. You’ll hurt your hand.”
“Ah, now there’s good fatherly advice to a daughter,” said a voice behind me. Faith had just gotten home from work.
“Mom. They said I didn’t score but I did. It’s still in the net. Look at it,” said Luc, skating backward away from his sister and pointing at the puck.
“We said ONE shot. That was TWO shots,” Jackie said, holding up two fingers.
“Picked up some Chinese for dinner,” said Faith, switching to a subject that had everyone’s approval.
“You guys have so much energy, grab a shovel and help me clean the ice. I’m going to resurface.”
Faith headed for the house while Jackie, Luc, and I tilted the heavy metal goal over the low boards and off of the ice; then we each grabbed one of the three plastic snow shovels I keep near the rink and began scraping the ice and flipping the shovels full of snow over the boards. When we finished, the kids walked up the plywood runway to the mudroom to take off their skates and hockey equipment in the warmth of the house. I opened the metal bulkhead doors to the cellar, grabbed a bottle of Molson Canadian from the cellar fridge, then hauled up the garden hose and screwed it onto the water faucet protruding from the basement wall. I had to pour a pitcher of warm water over the faucet to thaw it out. The hose hissed and shuddered like a snake as water surged through it. Setting the brass nozzle on a hard spray and stepping over the boards, I walked to the far end of the rink and—a beer in one hand, the hose in the other—began sending a spray of water over the ice. Resurfacing is a healing act, like forgiveness. The water rushes into the cracks and skate cuts, melting what ice chips escaped the shovels and producing a perfect uncut surface. It makes the ice new again.
Cam, Tamara, Lindsey, and Caitlin would be visiting for the weekend and I wanted the ice to be as good as it could be. Cam is a senior partner of Carter & Peabody and an alternate governor of the Bruins, which his father still owns. When Cam joined the company he founded the Sports & Gaming Fund, a mutual fund investing in the stocks of sports equipment makers, publicly traded European soccer teams, and casinos. It returned 33 percent in its first year and has earned double digits every year since, pleasantly shocking his father. “If you’d have asked me I would’ve said Cam was just keeping the goddamn chair warm for Lindsey,” Cam’s dad said.
I signed on as a volunteer goalie coach for Vermont. I go to most afternoon practices but I’m home in time for dinner. It’s a nice life.
“Dad, dinner in twenty minutes,” Jackie yelled from the mudroom door.
“OK,” I said.
It took me about fifteen minutes to finish the ice and the beer. I coiled the hose, threw it down the bulkhead stairs, and dragged it onto the floor of the unfinished portion of our basement. About a pint of water gushed from the hose over the basement floor, where it would quickly dry in the heat from the furnace. I closed the bulkhead doors, left my boots near the hose, and took the empty beer bottle into the finished portion of the basement—“the Man Room” as Faith calls it—to store it in a case of other empty bottles.
That Man Room was my idea. It has a wet bar, a half bath, a hundred-bottle wine rack, a working fireplace, a plasma TV equipped for hi-def, and some great framed hockey photos. There’s a print of Bill Barilko scoring in overtime to win the 1951 Stanley Cup for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the picture of an airborne Bobby Orr after he scored the goal that won the 1970 Cup for Boston. There are shots of Cam and me from our playing days with the Bruins including a great shot of Cam knocking Serge “the Weasel” Balon through the door to our team’s bench in my first year back in Boston. We could’ve won the Cup that year. But we didn’t. Cam missed seven weeks with a broken foot; I missed twenty games with a groin I kept pulling; Taki missed the whole season with his knee injury; and Rinky Higgins wrote his ticket to Providence by going 4–16 and three times being replaced by Rudy Evanston. The next season, my last, was better.
“It’s on the table, hon,” Faith called down the stairs. I started toward the staircase but couldn’t stop looking at the pictures. There were photos of Rudy and I working together at practice … Cam on his special night when the team gave him the seat from the penalty box after he’d racked up 211 minutes in penalties in his final year … Kevin Quigley on one knee giving a fist pump after he’d scored the goal that eliminated Ottawa in the quarterfinals.
Then I stared at the photo I always stare at, the one over the fireplace. It was a hurry-up thing our team photographer put together on the night Cam and I played our final game. We were in various stages of undress when the photographer called for us to get together in the middle of the room. Players only. There was no posing. Some guys stood, some knelt, a few sat on the floor. There was Quigley, bare-chested, his hockey pants held up by an old-fashioned suspender looped over his right shoulder; Flipside Palmer still dripping from the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist; Taki, who’d come back after missing a year, still in uniform and smoking a cigar; Cam sitting on the floor staring straight at the camera, exhausted. And, beside Cam, me, in my long underwear, hair sweat-matted onto my forehead, and grinning ear to floppy ear, my skinny welted arms wrapped around that big silver Cup.
I closed the door and went upstairs.
About the Author
Jack Falla is the author of five books, most notably Home Ice, an essay collection. He covered the NHL for Sports Illustrated for many years, and during that time wrote two cover stories on Wayne Gretzky. His work has also been published inUSA Today, Boston Magazine, and USA Hockey. You can sign up for email update here.
Also by Jack Falla
Home Ice
Sports Illustrated Hockey: Learn to Play the Modern Way
Quest for the Cup
(with Jack Batten, Lance Hornby,
George Johnson, and Steve Milton)
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
The Skating Pond
Chapter One
Chapter Two
High School
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Hurt
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Coda
About the Author
Also by Jack Falla
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
SAVED. Copyright © 2007 by Jack Falla. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36826-5
ISBN-10: 0-312-36826-7
First Edition: January 2008
eISBN 9
781250103307
First eBook edition: October 2015
