“We should go now,” Simon suggested, and stepped back to clear anyone behind me.
It seemed as if when he wasn’t watching Colorado to stop him messing up, he’d taken to watching out for me and Colorado’s precious baby. Maddie was restless, and I got the sense she was about to lose her cool, so I covered her ears and rocked her as we took the team elevator up to the box. I should’ve sung her a lullaby or something, but in the end I decided to do what I did for Emma. Sometimes it wasn’t music, it could have been physics, with the right cadence in my voice, and right now it was Newton’s third law. “So, Maddie, whenever one object exerts a force on a second object, the second exerts an equal and opposite force on the first. This explains why players push their skates backwards in order for the ice to push them forward.”
Simon huffed a laugh, but Maddie stared up at me, or at least the fuzzy place my voice was coming from, and let out a burbling sound.
“You like that? Ignore Uncle Simon, he knows nothing, because I have more. See, your daddy stands or sits or whatever, in the way of pucks that can travel at velocities of well over a hundred miles an hour. Why he does that I don’t know, but it’s interesting. Did you know that?”
She cooed again, and smacked her mouth, which I took as a yes.
“You are such a clever baby,” I told her, and earned a smile from the guard on the floor who checked my pass, and Simon rolling his eyes.
The guard indicated up the hallway. “Straight through and the door is marked visiting team.” We walked around the wide oval, passing all kinds of closed doors.
“What else are you going to tell her?”
I glanced at Simon, and he was biting his lip. Ass.
“Well, to properly take a slap shot, which is what that hundred-mile-an-hour shot is, it’s all about energy.” I’d spent last night getting my head around the parts of hockey I could learn, like angles and velocity, and the types of energy, and the orbits of a piece of rubber that never stayed level. “The skater actually had to strike the ice just behind the puck, did you know that?” I bounced Maddie and stopped at a glass viewing platform, Simon next to me. From here we could see the guys leave the ice after their warmup, some kind of weird hockey thing happening between one of our players and one on the other team. They were standing in the middle just staring at each other, but when the camera panned in, I could see they were playing rock, paper, scissors.
Hockey players were weird.
“Anyway, the player’s stick flexes and all that energy is stored in the blade. As they contact the puck during a slap shot, they shift weight and flick their wrists, which is when the rotation causes the stored energy to release off the stick and transfer to the puck. Once the puck is struck, the amount of kinetic energy that has been supplied onto it, is equal to the amount of energy stored in the stick.”
Simon shook his head, and did more theatrical eye-rolling, but precious Maddie was having the time of her life.
It was never too early to introduce a child to physics.
Simon opened the right door, and ushered me in. I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that Maddie and I should have been at the game. This solid glass-walled area, was a special box just for the management team, and the wives and girlfriends of the players. I didn’t exactly qualify as a WAG, or management, but we were there, and I took a seat toward the front, leaving Simon in discussion with a tall good-looking guy who had his jacket off and his arms crossed over his chest. I supposed I’d find out who that was at some point, but right now I needed to give Maddie a feed, and we settled into the wide leather seat with the stunning view of the entire arena. The electric feeling in the stadium was intense, waves of people standing and sitting, whooping, walking up and down aisles with beer, some in scarlet and brown, but most in green, although I spotted some other uniforms. There was no segregation of fans, no one was scrapping, everyone seemed excited, and there were a lot of flags and towels.
Towels. I have no idea at all.
When the players came out for the actual game, Maddie had nearly finished her four ounces, and had reached that moment where she was fighting sleep and feeding all at the same time. Her rosebud mouth open around the teat. She was utterly beautiful, reminding me of those long nights when Emma was this little. I’d dropped everything to help Natalie, moved in, and just never left. In a way Emma was as much mine as my sister’s, and I had a sudden pang of missing her.
I took an awkward selfie and a short video and sent it to Natalie, and she answered by calling me.
“That’s so cool,” she said, but she sounded off, and I was an expert in my sister.
“Did you check your sugar levels?”
“Stop worrying, I promise I’m fine, a bit high is all.”
“Natalie—”
“We have pasta, you know what it’s like.”
“Okay.” I knew better than to push, but I wasn’t there and I worried about her and Emma and I had this sudden urge to get home, which I had to fight. I was earning good money, enough to pay Natalie a huge amount of rent that she could use on
