Pipe Dreams(3)

It wasn't too high a price to pay for a long vacation on Fire Island  with her high school friends. She'd needed that vacation badly. The  play-offs season had ended in a third round loss to the Rangers, and  everyone had been crushed as well as exhausted.

But now she was sporting bikini tan lines and a happy outlook. In four  days she'd start a new semester of night classes at LIU, inching closer  to her BS in business management.

Things were looking up.

She tucked her bag away in a desk drawer and set about tidying up the  office. She adjusted the air conditioning from sixty-six degrees  (probably her father's doing) back up to a more reasonable sixty-nine.  The old grouch was next door at the practice facility right now, so she  hummed to herself as she worked.

"Nice top. Sexy," her coworker Jill said when she arrived a half hour later. "It's new, right?"

"Mmm?" Lauren said, not rising to the bait. The top was sexy. It was  sleeveless, exposing her tanned shoulders. It was hot pink with a  playful gather at the bust without actually showing cleavage. She didn't  want to start off the new season with a tongue lashing from her father.                       
       
           



       

"Have you seen him yet?" Jill asked.

"Who?" she asked, playing dumb. She and Jill had sat side by side in  this office for eight years. There was nothing in Lauren's life that  Jill didn't know, including the fact that she was nursing an eight-year  long crush on a married man. But Lauren could not be prodded into  discussing it. What was the point?

"Who," Jill scoffed under her breath, and if Lauren had turned her head  she surely would have seen the older woman's eyes rolling. "Mike Beacon,  that's who. I'm surprised he's not sitting on the end of your desk  already, chatting you up."

Once again Lauren demurred. It was true that she and Beacon were close.  As the team captain, he spent more time in the front office than any  other player. That meant more time with Lauren and Jill. And, sure-he  and Lauren gravitated toward one another. They were almost the same age,  and they'd both been part of the organization for exactly eight years.  Beacon had arrived as a trade from Quebec the same month that Lauren  started working for the team. The joke at the time was that they were  both rookies.

The difference was that Beacon arrived in Long Island with a wife and  toddler in tow, and made half a million dollars a year. While Lauren  worked for her father-the team manager-because he wouldn't pay for her  to attend college.

"It'll be good for you to figure out how the real world works," her dad  had said. "Save up some money and then get that business degree if you  want it so damn bad."

Eight years later and she was still taking two courses every fall, but  none in the spring, because play-offs season often made final exams  impossible.

Her whole life had been ruled by hockey, with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, after eight years, Lauren and Mike Beacon were good friends.  Their jobs required having each other on speed dial, and at the top of  their texting apps. It didn't matter that the happy sound of his  laughter always bounced around inside her chest, or that she had the  exact shape of his smile memorized.

She didn't dwell on it, the same way she didn't pine for the penthouse  apartments listed in the Real Estate section of the New York Times. Some  things weren't meant to be hers, and thinking about them too much only  made her feel pathetic.

"Jill," she said, changing the subject, "are we still planning that  charity skate for the end of September? I can't remember which date we  decided on."

Her coworker just stared at her, and Lauren began to feel  self-conscious. Her new top wasn't that sexy. And there was no way Jill  could know that while she'd stood in front of the dressing room mirror  at Macy's, she'd been thinking about a compliment Beacon had paid her  last spring. You look good in pink. You should wear that color more  often.

"He hasn't been by yet?" Jill asked, pressing her luck. "Really?"

"No?" Lauren said, letting her confusion show. "It's nine o'clock. Time  for the morning skate. We never see players at this hour. Why would he  be in here?"

Jill's eyes widened slightly. "I just thought he'd be by to talk to you, is all."

Lauren was tired of games, so she turned away and began the process of  logging in to her desktop computer. The number of e-mails in her work  account was probably astronomical, because for once in her life she  hadn't opened it while on vacation. She lifted her takeout coffee cup  and took a sip.

"I mean," Jill continued quietly, "things will probably be different for you now that he's left his wife."

Lauren choked on her coffee. It hit the wrong spot in the back of her  throat, and she coughed violently. "What?" she hacked, trying to get a  breath of air down her constricting windpipe.

"You didn't hear?" Jill looked very pleased with herself. "He caught her  cheating with the tennis instructor. He moved out the same day. I heard  he rented a house on the edge of Old Westbury."

"Oh," Lauren managed, her eyes watering from both the coughing and from a  suddenly dizzy spell. "How sad," she said, and meant it. They had a  cute nine-year-old with her mother's smile. And poor Mike! Betrayal was  so ugly.

Jill just clucked her tongue. "We'll see how sad you are a month from now."

The coffee turned to battery acid in her stomach. Lauren stood up and  carried her coffee cup right over to the trash bin and chucked it in.





THREE


APRIL 2016


The day before the first play-offs game, Mike Beacon was right on time  to pick his thirteen-year-old daughter up from Brooklyn Preparatory  Academy. And when another car pulled away, he even snagged a coveted  spot at the curb, sparing himself the indignity of doing laps around the  neighborhood until Elsa emerged.                       
       
           



       

Kids had already begun to stream out of the imposing wooden doors, and  he watched the social clots of preteens take form and then reshape. The  girls all seemed to talk at once, with nobody actually listening. The  boys at the center of the scrum seemed more interested in shoving each  other around a little bit. One kid grabbed a retro metal lunch box out  of another's hands and then ducked behind a group of giggling girls. His  victim gave chase.

Beacon just shook his head. You couldn't pay him to be thirteen again.  What a painful age. He could never please his teachers. He couldn't  please his parents. Hockey had been the only thing he did well. So he'd  just kept doing it. At thirty-two, it was still the only thing that he  was sure he hadn't fucked up.

One trick pony, much?

Elsa emerged from the doors eventually. Even though his sightline was  compromised by dozens of other bodies, he spotted that pink stretchy  thing holding her hair in a ponytail. Then she came fully into view, her  violin strapped to her back, moving slowly. And talking to another  girl.

He sat up a little straighter, trying to see who it was. Not that he was  picky-Elsa needed friends. They'd moved to Brooklyn only seven months  ago, in September, and he still felt guilty about making her switch  schools just six months after her mother's funeral.

Shelly had been in the ground just over a year. It was a lot for Elsa to process.

But moving was the only way he could get more hours with Elsa. Her  pricey new private school was just two and a half miles from their  pricey new home, which was less than two miles from the practice rink  and training facility. If they hadn't left Long Island, there was no  chance he'd be picking her up from school right now. He'd spend all his  time on the LIE trying to get back in time just to say good night to  her.

Elsa had spotted the car and was weaving through the crowd at top speed  now. A moment later the passenger door opened and his daughter flung  herself into the seat. She wrestled off the instrument case and slammed  the car door. "Let's go," she said.

He didn't, though. "Hello to you, too," he said instead.

Elsa rolled her eyes. "Hi, Daddy. How was your day?" The question dripped with forced politeness.

"Why, thank you for asking! It was awesome!"

Her heart-shaped face broke into a cheesy grin, and he laughed. She was  still his girl, at least for today. Supposedly teenagers turned into  heartless monsters, but it hadn't happened yet. Not too often, anyway.

He put the car in Drive and waited for an opportunity to pull out onto  Lincoln Place. He didn't know any other teenagers. His teammates'  children were mostly preschool-aged. Not only was Beacon a veteran  player, but he'd gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant when they  were both eighteen.