The Slapshot Heart

Duncan Nash kicks open the equipment room door hard enough that the hinges groan, and the woman at the back table does not look up from the blade she is testing. He wants the new Vapors, size eleven. His pair blew out during drills. He has been in this league six years and he knows how it works. *Head equipment manager. And you didn't put in a request.* What Molly Chen has for him instead is a battered pair four years old, somebody's backups out of the minors, the steel pitted. What she will not do is favours for players who don't know her name. He called her the gear girl in the hallway two days ago, and she heard it from the laundry room. So he challenges her to a lap of the rink to settle who knows the ice better. Duncan made a promise in a hospital room in November, to a man who died at two in the morning with the machine still beeping thirty seconds afterwards. No more pulled shots. No more flinching. Every shift like it is the last one. He has been keeping that promise with a shoulder grinding bone on bone, with Sorokin skating circles around him in scrimmages, with a contract that expires when the season does, and a sister four hundred miles away whose tuition comes due in six months. Molly has not had skates on in two years. Her father's are still under her bed. There is a photograph inside her locker she does not have to look at to see. And there is a clause in her employment contract, short and precise, saying that an equipment manager who takes up with an active roster member is terminated immediately, without severance. This is a contemporary hockey romance about promises made to the dead and what they cost to keep, about a man who has stopped protecting his own body and a woman who measures and files and fixes everything, and about how far each of them will come to meet in the middle. The romance is closed-door.