Zamboni Nights

Practice ended at 5:30. Charlotte Kowalski checks her phone in the corridor and it says 5:47, and somebody is still out on Rink B stickhandling a puck through a line of orange cones he set up himself. *Meeting's in fifteen minutes. Mandatory.* *One more set.* *You've been out here twenty minutes past your slot.* *I do my best work in the dark.* So Charlie walks to the control panel by the penalty box and turns the rink lights off. Donovan Callahan has been in the league twelve years, bounced through three teams before the Thunder Bay Titans picked him up on a two-year deal, and has had his nose broken twice. Charlie is the general manager, which she became when her father had a stroke, and which half the league assumed she would give up inside a year by selling. He is right about the meeting. The Titans missed payroll last month - only by three days, but it happened. Her brother Graham has been talking to developers who want the land the arena sits on. What Charlie asks the room for is six months: if she cannot turn it around by the trade deadline, she steps down and Graham gets his sale. What she does not know yet is what her father wrote into Donovan's contract. Clause 14-B. On a change of ownership or a relocation, the player can void the remaining term and walk into free agency without penalty. One signature from her and her best forward is gone, legally, before the ink dries. And Graham is on the phone with a man called Rico, promising a signature he does not have, and the faded daisy on Donovan's forearm turns out not to be a drunken nineteen-year-old's tattoo at all. It is a marker outline his daughter drew on him before he left for training camp, traced in ink and carried ever since, by a man who has been a ghost in her life. There is also a Zamboni to be taught, badly, in a snowy parking lot. A workplace hockey romance about a failing arena, a rezoning fight and two people who have both been running - closed-door, with a heroine who does her own budgets, a brother whose debt is the real problem, and a last chapter that is nothing but two people, a sharpened pair of skates and an empty rink at midnight.