The Checkout Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

she wanted to think her father would be proud of her.
    She watched to see how someone stickhandled or made a fast turn. See how a play formed on the ice. How a player on a breakaway skated down along the boards and after a quick turnaround flicked the puck in front of the goal where a rushing forward picked it up, shot, and scored.
    She was learning technique. And she started to apply it when she skated after supper, whenever Connie let her go to the school rink. Practising abrupt turns. Practising backward starts and stops. She took her stick and skated with a puck, fast stops, restarts, caressing the puck with her stick, or deftly dropping the puck, an almost invisible move — she had it, then she didn’t — for another player, one of those imaginary ones, the only ones she ever got to play with.
    When she turned twelve, her mother let her take the bus to Junior A games on Saturday afternoons. She went alone and sat behind some regulars, men who had known Charlie, and who reminded her of her father. Working men who huffed warm breath into their callused bare hands and had weekend-stubbled cheeks. Who wore clean green cotton work pants with faded knees and baggy bums, school janitor pants. They called her Charlie’s kid.
    â€œHey, it’s Charlie’s kid,” one of them would say as she settled in her seat. Another would ask, “How’re ya today?” Then another, usually the one with the Rangers toque — the one growing the Fu Manchu mustache that the other men kidded him about — would ask, “How’s your mother doing these days?” Sometimes he’d add, “And that sister of yours, how’s she getting along?”
    Kathy said, fine and fine and fine. But once the game started it was all hockey talk. And she listened. Listened to their comments on who was good that day and who was having a hard time, and why. She listened to their commentary on the play. She brought her skates because after the games, after the ice was cleaned and smoothed, there was an hour-long free skate for the fans. Kathy practised what she’d learned from the men and combined it with what she saw on TV. And she improved, getting faster, stopping easier, turning on a dime.
    When she got home, Connie would ask, “How was the game?”
    â€œGood,” Kathy told her, because that’s all she wanted to hear. For a while Kathy tried to tell her what had really happened: a brilliant goal, an unfair penalty, a brutal drop-the-gloves fight. But Connie’s hockey-talk stamina lasted about a minute before she’d tell Kathy there were leftover egg salad sandwiches in the fridge.
    Then Bobby Orr joined the Bruins. If Connie came down to the rec room to watch a game with her, Kathy tried to explain what a good skater Bobby was. She’d use words she thought her mother liked. Dazzling, she said once. Like Cassius Clay dancing around the ring, evading opponents, making them look clumsy and slow. That was Bobby on the ice, she told her mother. An artist. She could watch him forever.
    That night Connie called Kathy’s enthusiasm for skating a hobby, like it was knitting or stamp collecting. Kathy had just told her mother that doing something with her skating was her dream, even though she had yet to figure out exactly what that dream could be. She was so excited she couldn’t stop the words coming out of her mouth, even when she sensed she was going to get hammered.
    She certainly wasn’t going to get into the NHL, she told her mother. And she didn’t figure skate, so that eliminated competitions. There didn’t seem to be a job out there for a girl on hockey skates, who could skate circles around imaginary opponents, and stickhandle imaginary pucks into imaginary nets. Or none that she knew of. But she wasn’t going to stop dreaming.
    Her mother said, “Face it, Kathy, it’s just a hobby.”
    Connie’s turning from the window, and she’s