“So, what do you think of Lunengrove?” Pat asked. “It probably doesn’t seem like much, compared to Salt Lake.”
Felix laughed at that, shaking his head. “It’s small,” he pointed out, making everyone else laugh, too. “Hey, I grew up in a city! It’s small!” In fact, I thought most of the guys had grown up somewhere bigger than Lunengrove. It was a very different vibe, something that I hadn’t actually appreciated until now.
“It’s nice,” Will commented. “I mean, Felix is right, it’s a small place, but it’s pretty charming. You’re obviously happy settling here,” he added, nodding at Pat. “Did you ever think about it, Sam?” he asked, making me hum into my beer.
Had I? No, not really.
“No hockey.” I shrugged. Well, no NHL hockey.
Everybody nodded at that, except for Pat. My team-mates knew what it was like to give up having a choice in where you lived. It was the only way to be in the NHL - or in any other professional hockey league. Having a choice just wasn’t as important to any of us as playing hockey with the best of the best.
“There’s always retirement,” Chase joked. None of us talked about the fact we would one day have to stop. Or at least, stop playing hockey at a professional level. “I think I’ll always want to live in cities,” he carried on. “But plenty of people do retire to their home town.”
Pat hummed, glancing at me. “Do you think it would be weird? Trying to live here again after all this time?”
The fact that my first thought when thinking about that question was of Helena was somewhat worrying. Shaking my head, almost like the physical movement might get rid of it, I thought about what my answer actually was.
What I might do after retirement wasn’t something I had given much thought to. It always came with the unpleasant twang of thinking about no longer playing hockey. But if I could set that aside and think about things beyond hockey, the answer was…
“Maybe? Before this summer, spending so much time here didn’t seem like something I’d want but... it’s been good. It’s very different from how it felt when I was a teenager. Like how I feel, not the town,” I laughed. There certainly weren’t that many changes in Lunengrove. As an adult, I just appreciated things that were there more.
After giving it a bit more thought, I finally shrugged. “Maybe,” I repeated but this time with more conviction. Giving Pat a grin, I added, “It’d be nice to live closer to my family.” And that was certainly true, even if it wasn’t their faces that had entered my head first.
Pat beamed at me. “Hopefully, you’ll be an uncle by then,” he teased. Having kids was something I’d known he and Charlotte wanted. I hadn’t thought about how that would make me an uncle!
“Uncle Sam,” Chase teased, whistling a few bars of the American national anthem. I groaned. Oh, fuck, that was definitely going to stick! Especially if Pat and Charlotte ever did have any children.
Pat laughed, shaking his head. “There may be more of you Americans here right now, but I bet we can still drown you out.” It was good to see him getting on with my team, able to chirp them right back, even if he wasn’t a hockey player.
“We’d love to have you close,” he said to me. “But we’d also understand if this is just too small a town for you. You could always live close enough to visit more often.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I agreed, somewhat absentmindedly. It was hard not to think about retiring here in connection with Helena. But those weren’t helpful thoughts. By the time I was going to retire and move, life would have changed a lot for both of us. “Anyway, is the food almost ready?” I called out to Luke.
Luckily, it turned out that it was. Soon, we were all too distracted by delicious meat to talk more about what my life might be like post retirement.
Chapter Twelve
Helena
MARCH 5TH, 2009
I could count on one hand the number of people who believed that Sam and I would graduate high school still very much in love. Charlotte, obviously. She’d become my best friend within a few weeks, and had always supported me in everything. Sam’s family, too, had been great. Spending time in their kitchen had made me feel at home in a way my parents’ tastefully decorated dining room never had.
It wasn’t that my mom and dad didn’t like Sam. They’d just made it clear that high school relationships didn’t last. We would grow up, they’d promised, and realize that we wanted different things.
In some ways, they were right. Sam’s dearest ambition was to play professional hockey. He’d moved away right after graduating, being drafted to a team in Edmonton. As different as hockey might seem from getting a university degree, there were similarities, too. We were both ambitious. We both knew what we wanted.
For Sam, it was hockey. For me, the dream was to get accepted to the University of Toronto to study law. But first, I had to finish my undergraduate degree.
I’d always liked studying, and it was exciting to leave home and try out adult independence for the first time. But I missed Lunengrove far more than I thought I would. And on top of that, I missed Sam.
Which was why, when he picked me up from the airport, I practically threw myself into his arms. He caught me, just like he always did, leaving my suitcase on the ground
