We split the drive to practice

Practice is five-fifty in the morning. That's the ice time. Doors are at five-forty.

It's twenty-six minutes from my driveway in Oradell to the rink in Wayne if 208 behaves, and 208 stops behaving right around the Fair Lawn exit. So I'm out at four-forty. I make coffee in my own kitchen because nothing's open at that hour except the Dunkin on Kinderkamack, and that line is all guys in work vans. Six minutes minimum. Not worth it.

Danny's more or less on the way. I swing down, he comes out with Charlie, Charlie gets in back with Nate, and those two won't say one word to each other until we're pulling into the lot at the other end. They're thirteen. They sleep sitting up with their mouths open.

We split the driving. Three winters now, Tuesdays and Thursdays, tournaments on top of that. We split gas. Whoever's going down to Brick eats the Parkway both directions.

I do claims for a regional carrier, out of the spare bedroom. Water losses mostly. Somebody's icemaker line lets go on a Thursday in Ridgewood and by Monday I'm looking at forty photographs of what it did to their kitchen. I'm good at it.

Nate's a defenseman, which is a minute and a half of skating and then somebody from Ramsey putting him into the boards. He doesn't talk to me in the car. At the rink he'll talk to anybody.

Mia's nine. She'll narrate a whole episode of something at you from the back seat with nobody asking her to. Lately she wants to try goalie because the pads look like a costume to her.

Danny's with the water company, out of the Haworth plant. Every fourth week he's on call and he's got the truck, so those weeks it's my car regardless of whose turn it is. We worked that out the first winter on the back of a receipt in the lobby while the kids were on the ice. My car's the Highlander, so it's got the room anyway.

He swam at Rider and he'll have it into a conversation inside ten minutes of meeting you. Still has the shoulders. He's thick through the middle now and he'll say it about himself before you get anywhere near it.

In February the Zamboni went down. Vitale's standing in the lobby at quarter to six telling everybody six-thirty instead of five-fifty, and the boys went off with the goalie coach for stick time on the small sheet in back. That left us forty minutes. We drove up 23 to the Wawa. Got coffee and sat in my car at the far end of that lot, over by the air hose, nose in toward the fence. Five-twelve in the morning.

The Tuesday after, I picked him up at four-forty like always.

My mother's in Palisades Park. She came east after my father died. She'd been in Ohio thirty-one years and she was finished with it. I take Mia over most Sundays and we come home with about nine deli containers, and somewhere in there she asks whether I've been going to mass. She asks in Korean and I answer in English, which is how it's gone since I was nine or so. I tell her I've been busy with Nate's hockey and she says hockey, so early, and puts another container in the bag.

Dana and I have been divorced four years. We're fine now. There was about a year where we weren't. The agreement says alternating weekends and Wednesday dinner. It doesn't say anything about five in the morning.

There was a morning in March where Danny got in and didn't say anything at all until we were pulling in. So I filled it. I talked about the toll hike on the Parkway for probably eleven minutes, the whole schedule of it, what a run down to Brick costs now against last season. When I shut the engine off he said okay, and got out.

I said twenty-six minutes before. Twenty-six is if nothing's wrong. Most mornings it's thirty-one, thirty-two.

Both boys made the same summer team in April, so it didn't stop in March the way it usually does. Different rink, same five-fifty.

In August the Ferraros did the pool party, that house up in Oakland with the deck built around the pool. Danny came in a gray t-shirt and kept it on. He was in the water in it. Kim said something to him about the shirt and he said something back about the neighbors, and he still had it on at the end of the night. I stood at the table with the coolers most of the afternoon.

Kim and Dana sit together at the games. The same two rows, all season.

That Wawa up 23, the one with the air hose. It was about forty minutes, and then we drove back down and collected the boys, and I had a nine-thirty on a Tahoe that a silver maple came down on in Wyckoff.

Neither of us has talked about it since. He still goes straight for my radio before he's got his belt on.

Two weeks ago the winter schedule came out. Kim posts it in the team chat every year, and this time she put a second message up under it. Would it be crazy to add Luke Ferraro to the Tuesday and Thursday run, Mark's on nights at St. Joe's until January. Eleven people hearted it inside four minutes. I know it was four minutes because I was standing at the counter with the phone in my hand watching them come in. Then I hearted it too.

What am I supposed to do. His father's working overnights and everybody in that chat can see who answered.

Danny didn't put anything in the chat. Two days went by. Then he texted me direct, not in the chat, and the whole message was four-forty still good.

I wrote back yeah.

So he's in the passenger seat and there's three of them behind us now instead of two. Three's louder than two back there. Luke's mother works from home Wednesdays, so she'll take a run eventually, and then it's four families on a rotation and I'm driving one morning a week instead of two. And then it's the spring schedule, and Dana asks a reasonable question about why I still need the Thursdays.

Monday night I went out and took Nate's bag out of the middle of the back seat and put it in the trunk with the sticks. Had to shove the sticks over to get it to lay flat. The light in the garage is on a timer and it went off on me while I was standing there.