“That’s always the way with sons of fathers who liked whisky a little too much: you either drink it all the time or not at all. There’s no in-between in some families.”

Peter went to the Bearskin more times before he turned eighteen than he’s been since. He usually had to carry his dad home; sometimes he had to help him beat up a debt collector from Hed while he was at it. The bar looks the same now as it did back then. Smells a bit less of smoke, and considering what else a basement bar can smell of instead, that isn’t altogether a good thing. It’s empty now, of course. Peter never comes here in the evening; it isn’t a healthy environment for the GM of an underperforming A-team. The old men in the bar have always had a lot to say, but the younger men sometimes go further than harsh words these days. There’s a constant threat of violence hidden just beneath the surface of a certain type of person in this town that Peter never noticed when he was growing up, but which struck him all the more plainly after he came home from Canada. Neither hockey nor school nor the economy ever managed to find a way out for these people, and they emanate a silent fury. They’re known as “the Pack” now, even if no one ever hears them say that themselves.

The team’s official supporters’ club has always been called “Ursus Arctos,” and technically the men who hang out at the Bearskin belong to nothing but that, along with the pensioners, preschool teachers, and parents of young families in the seats in the stands. The Pack has no membership cards or T-shirts. The town is small enough for big secrets, but Peter knows that even when they are at their strongest there are never more than thirty or forty of them, yet that’s enough to require extra police at A-team games in order to guarantee security. Players who have been recruited from other towns and are thought not to have performed well enough on the ice in comparison to their paycheck have occasionally shown up in Peter’s office out of the blue, wanting to tear up their contracts and move. Reporters from the local paper ask questions one day and are inexplicably uninterested the following morning. The Pack has scared their opponents away from coming to Beartown, but sadly the same thing applies to sponsors. The twentysomething men at the Bearskin have become the most conservative people in town: they don’t want a modern Beartown, because they know that a modern Beartown won’t want them.

Ramona pushes the cup of coffee across the bar, then knocks on the wood.

“Is there something you need to talk about?”

Peter scratches his head. The Marlboro Mom was always Beartown’s preeminent psychologist. Even if her standard prescription was usually, “Pull yourself together, there’s others have got it worse.”

“I’ve just got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”

He looks at the walls, covered with game jerseys and pictures of players, pennants and scarves.

“When did you last see a game, Ramona?”

“Haven’t seen one since Holger left me. You know that, son.”

Peter turns the cup between his fingers. Reaches for his wallet. When Ramona waves her hand dismissively he puts the money down on the bar anyway.

“If you don’t want it for the coffee you can always put it in the kitty.”

She nods appreciatively and takes the notes. The kitty is a box she keeps in her bedroom; she uses it to help when one of the boys loses his job and can’t pay the bills.

“The person who needs it right now is someone from your old line. Robert Holts has lost his job at the factory. He’s spending too much time here.”

“Oh shit,” Peter says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

He had meant to call Robbie from Canada; he had meant to call him when he moved home. Good intentions don’t count. Twenty years is too long for him to know how to start the conversation now. Should he apologize? What for? How? His eyes roam across the walls again.

“Hockey,” he says. “Do you ever think about what a strange sport it is, Ramona? The rules, the rink . . . Who on earth would come up with something like that?”

“Someone who needed to give drunk men with rifles a less dangerous hobby?” the aged landlady suggests.

“I just mean . . . Damn . . . this might sound a bit crazy, but sometimes you can’t help wondering if we don’t take all this a bit too seriously. If we aren’t putting too much pressure on the juniors. They’re not really much more than . . . kids.”

Ramona pours herself a glass of whisky. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day.

“That depends what we want from the kids. And what the kids want from hockey.”

Peter clutches his cup tighter.

“And what do we want, Ramona? What can the sport give us? We devote our whole lives to it, and what can we hope to get, at best? A few moments . . . a few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are, a few isolated opportunities to imagine that we’re . . . immortal. And it’s a lie. It really isn’t important.”

Silence settles between them, untouched. Only when Peter pushes his empty cup back across the bar and stands up to leave does the old widow drain her glass and grunt:

“The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

*

The best psychologist in town.

*

Kira gathers together Leo’s pads and folds his laundry and packs his bag and puts it in the hall. He’s twelve, he ought to do his own packing, she knows that. But she also knows that she’s the one who has to drive him to practice and will have to come straight back to pick up half his things if he packs for himself. When she’s done she sits down at the computer for half an hour. When Leo was at primary school, his teacher once told them during a parent consultation what he had said when he was asked what his parents did: “My dad works with hockey. My mom writes emails.”