Page 17 of The Rest of the Story
“Kathy Woodard faxed over your proposed contract this afternoon.” He started laughing again. “I’m just gonna go ahead and sign your name and send it back.”
“What’s it say?”
When he told me, I nearly shot straight into the sky. Kathy, goddamn it. Unbelievable, fucking unbelievable. Shea had signed his contract extension in Connecticut, with a beautiful raise and a gorgeous bonus, and I’d been content that Kathy had taken what I’d said to heart and was going to sign me to a team-friendly contract of peanuts. I didn’t need money. I never cared about money.
No. She’d gone and inked a ten-year, no-trade, one-hundred-million-dollar contract, which put me both in the absolute stratosphere of players in the league and secured me on the Outlaws’ roster until well after I was likely to still be playing. In ten years, I’d be over forty. You could count the number of hockey players over forty years old—both all-time and current—on your fingers. I wasn’t likely to be joining the record books near Gordie Howe, in this universe or any other. Kathy knew that, but she was going to sign me past my playing years anyway. It was a gift. A thank-you, and such a strong statement of faith and commitment it stole the oxygen from my lungs.
“So do you want me to shop around?” Mike was still laughing. “Every team in the league wants a piece of you. One year, you said, then get me out of there. I can, good buddy. I can put you anywhere you want to be.”
“Sign that contract today,” I told him. “I’ll be an Outlaw until I die.”
“They’re going to retire your number.” I could hear his pen moving across the paper. “I don’t know what you did down there, Moogs, but whatever it was, keep doing it. Goddamn.”
“I showed up,” I said.
You showed up, Morgan, when you didn’t have to. That’s the finest thing a man can do in this life: be there for someone.
Mike’s pen cap snapped shut. “Yeah, buddy.You did. You really fucking did. How’s it feel to be one hundred million dollars richer?”
“I gotta hang up, Mike. I need to call Kit-Kat and give her a piece of my mind.”
He kept on laughing. “You do that, Moogs. I’ll be there when they hang your jersey in the rafters. And when you guys win the Cup, invite me to the parties.”
* * *
Shea and I came home at the end of July, in time for the Outlaws preseason to slowly ramp up. None of that shit from last year, when the guys were worked to the bone and breaking down. No, we started with team barbeques and video game tournaments, back yard Frisbee golf and tag football with the toddlers. We went to the rink every day, but we skated to have fun and get loose, hit the weights to get in shape with our friends, and then went home to have dinner as a family, with the wives and the kids and our best friends.
There were a few changes. Logan had found himself a girlfriend, a dynamite forward on the University of Denver women’s hockey team. She was training for both the Olympics and the world junior championships, and Logan was head over heels in awe. She was a wonderful woman, and when he brought her to the rookie house to introduce her to us, I had a vision of Kathy twenty years before, when she was young and lighting up the hockey world, on the cusp of greatness that would launch her to the stars. Logan’s girlfriend was on the same trajectory.
Kathy had received a promotion. She was president of the Outlaws now, the big kahuna in charge of every damn thing. As part of her promotion, she was in charge of finding a real coach for the team, because as much fun asthathad been, white-knuckling through the season with Kathy, me, and Steve—who still didn’t know which way to hold the playbook—we needed better.
Another of Kathy’s former teammates was in the market for a head coaching job, and when the guys heard that there was an opportunity for Colleen Schattenbaum—theColleen Schattenbaum—to come be their coach, they lost their ever-loving minds.
Colleen flew in for three trial practices with us, and they hung on her every breath. If Brody had treated me like I was delivering hockey gospel last season, then he and the rest of the guys treated Colleen like she’d written that gospel, and all I had been doing was repeating her greatness. They wanted her to be their coach, desperately, and just about every other day, they were asking me for updates. I kept telling them, no, no official word yet.
Kathy told me privately that Colleen was nearly a done deal, but there was a professional women’s team in Finland that was trying to make the decision a difficult one for her. “I am pretty certain Colleen is going to be an Outlaw,” Kathy said. “Being the first female NHL head coach? And beingyourcoach?” She grinned. “That’s not something you pass up.”
After the Cup finals, Brody took Lawson home to his parents’ farm, where the two of them stayed for three weeks. We were treated to photos in the team chat of the two of them feeding chickens, working with the sheep, and mucking around on ATVs, covered in mud down to their toes and beaming, both of their arms around each other’s shoulders. They looked out-of-this-world happy.
After those three weeks, Brody and Lawson went on a camping trip into the Rockies, and we didn’t hear a peep out of them. I told Shea I was going to text Brody and ask if they’d been eaten by bears, like Brody had asked us when we had eloped. Shea laughed at me, but he had a look in his eye that said maybe there was something-something going on there.
Maybe Lawson had figured out how to say what he’d needed to say, and maybe Brody was in a place where he was ready to be loved the right way, by someone who worshiped the day he was born and each beat of his heart.
When they got back, the air around both of them shimmered like glass. Lawson buzzed, so goddamn happy he was electric. Brody was both shy and bold, flushed and big-cheeked, beaming and effervescent, and the only time the two of them seemed to settle was when they came together. Then it was soft eyes and soft voices, hands not-so-secretly being held, and Brody resting his cheek on Lawson’s shoulder whenever we crowded around the couch or around the fire pit in the back yard.
* * *
It was a beautiful day on an upward trajectory, and I already knew the evening was going to be perfect. Six o’clock, the golden hour in a Colorado summer, and I was sitting on a lawn chair with Shea beside me, his legs tossed across my lap. He’d skated with us for part of practice. No contact, and just enough ice time to work his muscles, but even that left behind a lingering soreness. I liked to massage that ache out, and every night, I’d rub up and down his legs, make sure every inch of him was feeling no pain.
To the left and right of us were our teammates. Logan and his girlfriend were kicking around a soccer ball with Gavin, Gabe, and Julia, and Connor and Josh were building up the logs in the fire pit. Brody and Lawson were sitting on the porch steps and gazing into each other’s eyes, totally forgetting, for the moment, that the rest of us were there. Lawson had a box of Red Vines in his lap. Brody had one hanging out of his mouth, the end dangling in his smile.
I was thirty days into my ten-year contract. The end of summer was right around the corner, and the whole league was gearing up for another season. Sportswriters across the country were speculating about the Outlaws, throwing down predictions that we’d take the crown and the Cup from Montreal this year. I’d texted Bryce a little devil face emoji and a link to one of the articles. He sent me a palm hand emoji.
We were going to do it. I could feel it. I felt it in the air we breathed and in the hum of the city, felt it beneath our skates and buzzing through the ice. I felt it in the way we looked at each other, and in how we’d taken not just a step or two forward in the offseason, but how we’d joined hands and leaped, all of us flying for our futures.
At this point, it was destiny. Too many things had lined up, all of the threads of all our lives coming together in this team, at this time. If Lawson hadn’t lost his heart to Brody as soon as he saw his sunshine smile. If Gavin hadn’t lied his ass off to get me on the roster. If I hadn’t come down from Winnipeg and turned Coates’ face inside out. If I’d had the puck-hard heart I’d always believed I had, and if I gave just a little less shit about everything.
If I hadn’t stretched myself and found a new horizon I could traverse within my soul, I wouldn’t be basking in this perfect day, inside all the unbridled joy of these men, men who I was damn proud to call my teammates, my friends, and, more than that, my family.
I wouldn’t be in this chair, holding my husband’s legs across my lap and watching the sunlight slide across his freckled face as my heart skipped and skidded.
Shea turned to me, a soft grin stretching his cheeks. “Whatcha looking at, Husband?”
You are everything to me, Shea. You are my mornings and my midnights, my days of sunshine and my nights of candlelight. You are my everything, and my love for you has no end.
I smiled. “You.”
* * *