Page 46 of Gross Misconduct

My old bedroom is the first one in the hall. The bed is gone, as are the posters I had tacked up. Boxes line the wall under the window. The bookcase that used to be a shrine to my medals and trophies and news clippings sits empty. When I was playing in the NHL, I’d come home to my room in pristine condition, exactly how I left it at eighteen. Now I’m a ghost.

I kneel down and begin searching the boxes, scrambling through years of hockey memorabilia, digging through the good times. It takes epic concentration to avoid reading old articles about “Promising Hockey Star” Jack Gross.

“Shit,” I mutter, getting to the bottom of one box with no luck. I pop open the next one. Old trophies clang together. I hate all of them. They’re gravestones for success.

After opening all four boxes and coming up short, I search behind furniture and in the nooks and crannies of my old closet. But there’s no way it would be there. The lanyard bracelet always sat on the bookcase. It needed to commune with those fucking trophies, according to my dumbass teenage logic.

“Where did my bracelet go?” I ask Dad after stomping down the stairs.

“What bracelet?”

“You know which one. The blue and green one that I wore for every game. It was my good luck bracelet.” My junior high girlfriend made it for me at church camp. (We only kissed, and I thought of her brother the whole time.) I knew she’d get pissed if I didn’t wear it, so I put it on for one of my games. I wound up scoring a hat trick. From then on, I wore it for every game. Hockey players are very superstitious when it comes to good luck.

Of course I’ve been rusty and not my best self on the ice lately. I haven’t been wearing my lucky bracelet.

“I last had it on the bookcase in my room,” I tell Dad, who shovels a sad, shriveled piece of meatloaf into his mouth. “I put it there after my final game when I moved back.”

“All your stuff is in those boxes.”

“When were you going to tell me you boxed up my old room?”

“You never come home. I figured you didn’t want it.” Dad’s callous expression screams “you snooze, you lose.” I’m surprised he didn’t burn all that shit in a bonfire.

“So you were just going to throw all that stuff away without telling me?”

“If you want it, it’s there. I’m planning to turn that room into a home gym.”

“Wonderful,” I deadpan. “Do you remember seeing the bracelet?”

He shrugs, and I catch a flash of something dark in his eye. He goes back to watching the news on a small flatscreen sitting on the kitchen counter.

“You threw it out.” I clench my jaw. “Of all my shit, that’s the thing you throw out.”

“I might have. I did a purge in your room, getting rid of random junk.”

He knew it wasn’t random junk. He saw me put that bracelet on before every game.

“Why do you need it? For that beer league you’re in?”

“Yeah,” I say confidently.

“How’s it going?”

“It’d be going a lot better if I had my bracelet.”

“If you need a fucking bracelet to win against a bunch of amateurs, then you’re in deep shit.” He gets up and takes his dinner to the trash. He washes his cutlery in the sink, dries it, and puts it back in the drawer.

“Griffin Harper is in the league.”

Dad’s back tenses up. The muscles flex in instant fury.

“When you told me the story of what happened, you left out the part about gouging the other player’s eye out.”

“He charged at me!” Even now, as a full-grown adult, hearing Dad yell makes me want to cower in fear as if I’m still a little kid. “I had no time to move!”

“You never apologized to him.”

“Because I didn’t do anything wrong!” Dad wipes his hands and throws the dishtowel on the counter. He squirms from the movement. We rarely had father-son catches because of his shoulder. Maybe that was for the best since he would’ve been critiquing my pitching the whole time. “At least he can still play.”

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