Page 26 of The Prince and the Puck
Joey clearly thought I was following her line of thought. I was clearly not.
“And?”
“And someone in West Virginia had an illegal wombat as a pet, and they recently surrendered it to the exotic animal rescue here. Maybe the team can adopt it!”
My mind reeled. Joey wanted us to adopt a wombat? “What would we do with a wombat?”
“Do you even have to ask? It could be our mascot!” Joey’s eyebrows did this little dancing thing, moving up and down toward her hairline, that told me she was even more excited than she had been about the butt calendar idea.
“A mascot?” I asked.
“A mascot is the ultimate PR move,” Joey said. “Wombats are adorable, as we have already established, and having an actual wombat at games would be such a media draw.”
“OK, how do we get this wombat?”
“You leave that to me,” Joey said.
CHAPTER 17
DECK
HOCKEY IS LIFE?
I avoided calling my brother.
I wasn’t proud of it, especially because I’d been thinking about him a lot lately. But if Lambert was calling—or rather, texting me to call him—I just had a feeling it couldn’t be good news. And my selfish heart, the one that had led me to leave in the first place, abandoning my brother to his duties and to his solitude... that same heart made me afraid to pick up the phone and see what he needed. Because honestly? My life was pretty good.
Samuels and I went over the tape from the last game, and while there were a lot of contributing factors to my flawed play at the end, I did identify some areas for improvement. And that gave me some ammunition to keep in my back pocket for the discussion I knew was coming with the coach when I got to practice the next morning.
He’d scheduled a couple of one-on-ones with various players, and he’d already had the whole team rewatch certain parts of the tape, highlighting areas for improvement. My screwup was a big one.
I arrived at the rink Tuesday morning, feeling ready for my one-on-one.
“Coach?” I stood outside his office door.
Coach Merritt was bent over his desk, jabbing a pencil into a piece of paper in front of him repeatedly, as if he were giving it a good talking-to. It really seemed like the paper had probably gotten the point by now, but he gave it one more solid jab before he looked up at me and barked, “Come in.”
I did, doing my best not to look scared. I was probably twice as big as Coach Merritt, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid of what his opinion meant for my life—and my career.
“Sit down, Deck.”
“Coach, hi, I?—”
“How about I go first?” The coach leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, dropping his chin a little and giving himself a couple of extra chins, which did nothing to make him look less formidable. At least, not if you were me.
“Sure, okay.”
“Deck, you’re part of this team’s foundation.”
Well, that had to be good.
“But I gotta say, son, that foundation is looking pretty fucking shaky.”
Well, that was less good.
“I don’t know what was going on with you in North Carolina, but you need to know that your foundation is a little shaky too.”
What did that mean? I was afraid to ask.
