*

Kira leaves the girls in the cafeteria, laughing in spite of herself. If Peter had heard the things she herself had said to her friends when she was fifteen he’d have needed a defibrillator. They were so surprised by each other to start with. She told him he was “the only prudish hockey player,” and he covered his ears when she joked around with other bar staff. She was so used to being the only girl where she worked—it is the same in law firms as it had been in the restaurant—but testosterone has never been a problem for her. Peter was the one who needed a paper bag to breathe into when one A-team player, sans front teeth, once told Kira gleefully at one of the few team dinners the wives were still invited to that he had “rubbed his knob on every fucking glass in here,” in the hope that the GM’s wife would be disgusted. She responded by explaining the female equivalent to him in great detail, until the toothless wonder didn’t dare look at her again for the rest of the evening. Peter was ashamed at the time. Still is. The last embarrassed Neanderthal. All these years, and they can still surprise each other. That’s not such a bad thing.

She walks toward the parking lot through the rink, but stops by the ice and just stares at it. No matter how much she tries, she will never be anything more than Peter’s other half in this town. She assumes that all adults occasionally wonder about another life, one they could be living instead of the one they’ve got. How often they do so probably depends on how happy they are. Her mother always used to say her daughter was an incurable romantic as well as hopelessly competitive, both at the same time. Kira presumes that’s true, based on the fact that she and Peter have gone bowling three times and are still married. The third time they ended up googling “emergency marriage counselor” at one thirty in the morning. God, how much he annoys her sometimes, but God, how she loves him. It wasn’t a love that developed gradually, it hit her like an affliction. It’s an ongoing condition. All she wishes is that each day were forty-eight hours long. But she’s not greedy, she’d be happy with thirty-six. She just wants to be able to have a drink and catch up with a TV show, is that really too much to ask? She just wants sufficient time to make a big enough blanket.

She thinks about that other life far too often. The one someone else is living. She was so happy for Peter when he got his professional contract, but she was happy for herself when he stopped playing. When there was space for her. Will she ever be able to admit that to him? The brief period when he was neither a player nor GM, when he sold insurance and simply tried to be happy, is the best time she can remember. How can you tell the person you love something like that?

When Isak died, everyone did everything for them. When their lungs collapsed, they needed a fabricated form of love that could help them breathe. So Kira made the hardest decision she has ever made: she realized she was going to have to give hockey back to Peter.

There’s a thin line between living and surviving, but there’s one positive side effect of being both romantic and very competitive: you never give up. Kira gets the milk from the car, then stands there just laughing to herself, and realizes that she’s learned to laugh that way more and more often. Then she takes out a green scarf emblazoned with the words “Beartown Ice Hockey” and ties it around her neck. On her way back into the rink she greets and hugs other people wearing the same color, and for a few moments everything else seems unimportant. You don’t need to understand every aspect of the ice to love it, and you don’t have to love the town to feel proud of it.

*

Peter is wandering around the rink like an exorcised ghost. His entire day so far has been a sequence of moments similar to walking into a room and instantly forgetting why you are there. In the hallway outside his office he absentmindedly walks into Tails, which is no mean feat seeing as there’s a lot of Tails not to notice. He’s six and a half feet tall and a good deal sturdier around the waist than when they played in the final of the Swedish Championship together. He was always the sort of guy who compensated for a lack of self-confidence by trying to attract as much attention as possible; he talks as loudly as a child with headphones on, and when they were teenagers he always turned up at parties in a suit when everyone else was wearing jeans, because he had read in a magazine that girls liked that. Toward the end of their time in high school, one of the club’s sponsors died and the whole team was told to wear suits for the funeral. When he heard that, he showed up in a tailcoat. And that was how he got his nickname.

These days he owns a chain of large supermarkets, one here and one in Hed, and a couple more in places Peter has never really bothered to make a mental note of when Tails has been going on about them. He’s managed to get thrown out of every hunting club in the area because he can’t even keep quiet in the forest. When they played together he would gesticulate with his long arms every time a call went against him, veering between laughter, tears, despair, and rage so quickly that Sune used to say it was like trying to coach “a mime who can’t shut up.” Tails was a mediocre player, but he loved the competitive aspect of the game. When his hockey career came to an end, that attitude made him a far-from-mediocre salesman. Now he gets a new car every year and wears a Rolex the size of a blood-pressure monitor. Trophies from a different sport.

“What a day, eh?” the bulky grocer grins, gazing down at him.

They’re standing next to the old team photograph, in which they’re standing side by side.

“And now you’re GM and I’m the main sponsor.” Tails smirks in a way that stops Peter from pointing out that he’s actually a long way from being the main sponsor.

“Yes, what a day,” Peter agrees.

“We look out for each other, don’t we? The bears from Beartown!” Tails roars, and before Peter has time to respond he goes on:

“I bumped into Kevin Erdahl yesterday. I asked him if he was nervous. And do you know what he said? ‘No.’ So I asked him what his tactics were for the game, and do you know what he said? ‘To win.’ Then he looked me right in the eye and said: ‘That’s why you sponsor the team, isn’t it? To get a return on your investment?’ Seventeen years old! Did we talk that way when we were seventeen?”

Peter doesn’t answer. He’s not sure he can remember ever being as young as seventeen. He goes over to the coffee machine. It’s gone wrong again and rattles and hisses before reluctantly emitting a dribble the color of old chewing tobacco and the consistency of glue. Peter drinks it anyway. Tails scratches himself under one of his chins and lowers his voice.