The Lake Point Municipal Ice Arena had a rink open for pick-up hockey on Monday afternoons, so Jon and Linda grabbed their skates from the shelf in the garage and drove over as soon as Linda had hung up the phone. She filled her son in on all of the backstory on the way, but neither could really believe that this was happening.
And Jon did not make the connection between his wish for his mom to get a "Stanley cup," and the fact that it was now somehow a possibility, if an extremely remote one, that Linda would win the Stanley Cup. They had been talking about water vessels, neither had even been thinking about hockey at the time.
But the stone wants what the stone wants.
Jon knew how to skate, but it had been a while since he'd been on the ice. He was unsure of himself on his feet for a few minutes, but slowly began to feel more comfortable. Linda, on the other hand, took to it like a duck to water. Like an Anaheim Duck to a rink of frozen water. She'd been off of the ice for longer than Jon had, but she'd practically grown up in skates. It was like second nature.
The game of hockey, on the other hand, required the use of muscles that her peri-menopausal body did not enjoy engaging. The muscle memory was there, but there was a cost for every action, and that meant that Linda was always a beat slower than her brain told her she should be.
It was after the third time a defender stripped the puck off of her that Linda found herself skating to the edge of the ice and slamming a fist into the boards. Jon came up next to her.
"It's alright," he said. "So you're out of practice. Nobody's expecting you to be Mario Lemieux right out the gate."
"They kind of are, though," Linda huffed. "I'm already winded, and this is just a nothing-league pick-up game. In a week I'm going to be expected to compete against the best hockey players in the world, and I know we're not expected to actually win or anything, but if I can't even handle this, how am I going to survive a single game in the NHL?"
A wind came from somewhere in the rink, even though the two weren't near any vents, tousling Linda's hair into a bird's nest over her head for a moment, before it settled back down and let her hair drop. If anything, it seemed to fall back into place more neatly than it had looked before. She took a breath in, then out, and her expression changed.
"I think I've got my second wind," she said as she pushed off the wall.
But that's not what it looked like to Jon, watching his mom skate her way into the next play. Her posture was different. Stout. Like a woman in her 40's who was also a boulder sliding on the ice at the same time. Sure-footed, but fast of reflex. Jon watched her check Randy Goodman hard into the boards, and the football player fell hard on his ass as she pumped her stick into the air in triumph.
Maybe his mom would be okay surviving in the NHL after all.
