The Husband Hour(6)

“Hey,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Didn’t Mom tell you I was coming?”

“Yes, but I mean here. At the café.” She glanced around. “I’m working.”

“Yeah, I know, Lauren. You’re always working or running or some shit and I need to talk to you away from Mom.”

Lauren sighed. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know exactly. Mom has a bug up her butt about something. Did she say anything to you?”

Concerned, Lauren thought back over the most recent phone conversations she’d had with their mother but didn’t see any red flags. “No. I can’t think of anything. Let’s just…see how things go this weekend. Where’s Ethan?”

“At the house with Mom.”

“And Brett?”

Lauren barely knew Stephanie’s husband of a year and a half; he and Stephanie had eloped after dating for two months.

“He’s not coming.”

“Okay, well. I’ll see you later.” She turned around and eyed her tables.

“One more thing: I need to stay here for a few weeks. Maybe a month.”

Lauren turned back to her. “At the shore?”

“Yeah. At the house.”

No. This could not be happening. Summer weekends, she could tolerate. But weeks at a stretch?

“Stephanie, I know it’s beach season and the house is technically a beach house but it’s my home. If I lived in Philly, you wouldn’t just show up and say, ‘I’m moving in for the summer.’”

“At this point, I would. I’m getting divorced, and I have nowhere else to stay.”

Divorced. Lauren couldn’t even begin to act surprised.

“What about Mom and Dad’s?”

Stephanie shook her head. “That’s a no-go.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure. It was actually Mom’s idea that I stay here this summer.”

What? “I can’t deal with this right now, okay? Just—go. I’ll see you back at the house.”

Lauren made a beeline for the kitchen. She wanted to be consumed by the heat, the clanking of dishes, the controlled chaos. She wished the lunch hour would stretch on forever.

Summer hadn’t even started, and it couldn’t get any worse.



Matt knew he had Craig’s attention. He fast-forwarded the reel to his latest interview and paused it.

“Last week I spoke to a former assistant coach with the Flyers who’s at Villanova now.”

Matt hit Play, and the Hatfield Ice Arena, home ice to the Villanova men’s ice hockey team, filled the screen. The coach, John Tramm, sat on a bench, the empty rink in the background.

“I can’t talk specifically to Kincaid’s situation because I didn’t know the guy,” Tramm said.

“Of course. I’m just trying to establish the overall climate in the NHL,” Matt said.

“The time period you’re looking at—Kincaid’s two seasons—were right before things began to change.”

“What changed?”

“Starting in, maybe it was spring 2011, if a guy took a hit to the head, he’d be removed from the game and evaluated by a doctor.”

Matt leaned forward. “Are you saying that prior to 2011, that’s not how players were treated?”

“There was no hard-and-fast protocol for players who took a hit to the head. So they’d sit on the bench and the team trainer would evaluate them. And there is the expectation for the player to just shake it off. Hockey culture demands resilience. Guys feel pressure to prove their toughness, and, frankly, they know they can be replaced. Especially the rookies.”

“I understand there’s a class-action lawsuit by about a hundred retired players,” Matt said.

Tramm nodded. “Yes. The lawsuit is in light of the new research about CTE.”

Matt knew all about CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder. Matt still couldn’t believe that he’d found a head-injury angle on the Rory Kincaid story. At first, he’d doubted himself. He thought he was projecting. He’d been obsessed with head-injury consequences for over a decade, ever since his older brother came back from Afghanistan. Everyone knew it was a problem for wounded warriors. And people knew it was a problem for pro athletes. But in Rory Kincaid, he might have found an intersection, a perfect storm that had taken down America’s golden boy.

“Now researchers are looking at the brains of deceased former players,” Tramm said. “One of the first to be studied was one of our guys, Larry Zeidel. He was a Flyer. Nickname was Rock. A great guy—everyone loved him. Then he retires and suffers from debilitating headaches. Starts having a bad temper, gets violent, makes crazy financial decisions. Impulsive decisions. His entire life fell apart.”

His entire life fell apart.

After more than four years, Matt finally had his film.

Craig, however, seemed less sure.

“So the film is no longer about a war hero?”

“It’s bigger than a story about just one war hero. It’s told through that one hero to question a system that fails these athletes, just like it fails our wounded warriors. We live in a society that hails these guys as heroes, then does nothing to help them when they need it.”