Sure Shot (Brooklyn #4)(64)

“Nah. Everyone looks well compared to me.” He takes an audible breath just to finish the sentence. “Take the compliment.”

I pull a chair a little closer to his hospital bed and sit down, and the silence threatens to choke us both. What do you say to a man who’s dying? “Is there anything at all I can do for you? Any of your favorite foods you need me to fetch?”

“Not a thing,” he wheezes. “Unless you’ve got any decent gossip. It’s boring being old and sick.”

“Huh. Okay. This year I think I am the gossip.”

“This too shall pass.” He removes a folder from the table by his bed and hands it to me. “These are for you.”

I flip open the cover, and I’m staring down at a set of documents that I’d forgotten about. “Final decree of divorce,” I blurt. What’s the proper reaction to receiving one’s divorce decree? If there’s a right way to feel, I don’t know what it is.

I’m failing at this, too.

“Yeah. You don’t even have to sign it. Sorry, kid,” Henry says.

“No, I’m really okay.” I remove the paper from the folder, fold it into quarters and tuck it into my jacket pocket.

“Take care of that,” Henry says, pointing at my pocket. “You’ll need it if you get remarried.”

I laugh suddenly. “No chance of that.”

“You say that now, but…” He gives me a fond smile. “You know how after a disappointment some coaches say: ‘We’re having a rebuilding year’? Well, this is a rebuilding year for you, personally.”

“I might need more than one year.”

“You have time,” he says. And that’s a refrain between us. It has been for years.

Henry first approached me when I was a teenager playing juniors hockey. My father had left the family by that point. I was the man of the house, and I had a giant ego at seventeen. I thought I was going to go directly from juniors to playing beside my idols in the NHL.

I was really good at visualizing. The team shrink would have loved it.

Henry knew better. When I was nineteen, he talked me into applying for college. “Go to school. Play some hockey. Gain forty pounds of muscle. Skate faster. And get an education. You have time. The big leagues will still be there when you’re ready.”

It had worked out just like he’d said, too. I’d made it to the Show at twenty-three, without bouncing around in the minors.

“Did you find an apartment yet?” he asks eventually.

“No, but I got a guy working on it for me.” Finally.

Henry clicks his tongue. “I wish I could help you with that. I’m sorry to abandon you.”

“You never did,” I say as my throat grows thick. “Not once.”

“Gotta get yourself another agent, son. A while ago I told Bess Beringer she should take you on as a client. She had all those opinions about what you needed in order to settle in.”

“Yeah.” I swallow hard, thinking of Bess. “Actually, I’m gonna go with Eric Bayer.”

Henry tilts his head and seems to consider this. “He’s a good man. Not so much experience, though. You and Bess don’t get along?”

I force my face into a smile. “Oh, we get along. We got along too well. But she’s not exactly speaking to me at the moment.”

“Oh dear. You sly dog,” Henry says, and then he coughs. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you and Bess have something together some years ago? Wasn’t that you?”

“Ancient history, but yeah. She was working for you back then. You weren’t supposed to know about it.”

“Ah, well. I did know.” He leans back against the pillows. “I’d forgotten all about it, and now I wonder if I did you two a disservice.”

“How so?”

He closes his eyes. “I heard the rumors. Couple of players made some jokes, you know? And I felt bad for Bess because she seemed like the kind of girl who wouldn’t like people talking about her. I didn’t know what to do about it, though, because I didn’t like the idea of telling a young woman how to run her life.” He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling, as if deep in thought. “So I asked Pines to give her some perspective.”

“Oh.” I try and fail to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“Pines is a great agent, but she’s a little…”

“Bitchy?” I supply, because I’m not over that woman telling Bess that she was a whore.

“Acidic is the word I was looking for. Anyway. I didn’t know what to do. I guess I could have ignored the whole thing.”

“Maybe,” I agree, wishing he had. But he hadn’t meant to make Bess feel bad, and it’s not like I’d banged down her door to tell her I loved her after she’d dropped me. Nope. I was too stupid to do that.

Still am.

But our little tragedy wasn’t Henry Kassman’s fault. “Bess still feels it’s unprofessional to date a player. And we’re not together anymore. So don’t tease her, okay?”

“Not even a little?” Henry asks. “I don’t get much entertainment.”

“Tease her as much as you want, Henry. But not about this.”

“Fine,” he grumbles. “I can see you two as a nice couple. You both have a lot of spirit. I know I shouldn’t hand a man his divorce papers and then press him about his love life, but…”