Dad drives up in a minute—he does an early shift most Thursdays so he can take me to skate with Ivan.
As I get in the car, he says, “Sorry I’m a little late—stopped at the bank to get four hundred out of your account.” He gives me a funny look. “You look green. Everything okay with Sinbad?”
“Yeah. Now we gotta wait to hear back from the lab.”
Dad nods. “All right. We just have to try to suspend our feelings until we hear, okay? Not time to panic yet. Actually, there’s never a time to panic. Have I ever told you that? There’s never an appropriate time to panic.”
“Yeah. I mean, no, you never told me.” I kind of want him to know I broke up a fight, ’cause I think he’d be proud of me, but to tell the truth, I’m so exhausted I don’t even want to talk.
We ride quietly to Garland. In the dungeons when I change, I just sit there for a minute in my underwear, completely out of energy. But I put on my gear, wearing a Grizzlies jersey that’s getting a little small. Public skating starts at three, the same time as my lesson. Not many people show up for public skating on time, so Ivan uses the fairly empty ice to time me going at full speed around the rink. You have to be super alert when you do this, ’cause you don’t want to hit somebody darting into your path.
Ivan is five-eight, good for figure skating but small for hockey. He played hockey, though, until he made the national figure-skating team for Bulgaria. He’s thirty-six, which he likes to mention periodically like it’s really old. And it is pretty old. But he’s still got a reputation as one of the best skaters in California. One of the best skating instructors as well. At his peak he could skate around the rink in thirteen seconds. That’s NHL-level speed. That’s why he has a one-year waiting list for lessons.
When he shows up, he stuffs three pieces of gum into his mouth per usual before he says, “Why don’t you take a couple of warm-up laps?” I use long, sweeping strides around the rink the way he likes and think I’m doing pretty good. He yells out, “You got lead in those legs?” Then he takes out his phone to time me. “Feeling like you got it today?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say honestly. But I’m the master of focus, IMO, so I get in position and concentrate.
“Okay . . . go!”
I take exactly three hard-running steps before I change to a running-gliding hybrid. At the first corner I lose a fraction of a second ’cause one of my crossovers is too short, and then on the first straightaway, three of my strides aren’t at full power. Otherwise I do okay. Ivan is nodding when I finish. He holds up the phone: 15.85! I should get in a fight more often!
“Super,” he says. “I believe that’s your record. Messed up a little on the first corner, and a couple of your strides lacked power. If you do it perfect, we could get it down to, uhhh, maybe fifteen point six. Okay, let’s get started.”
We spend the whole lesson with me doing intricate steps threading through some plastic cones. Every so often my eyes fall on my dad, waiting on a bench. When the lesson’s over, Ivan and I skate over to him. “How did he do?” Dad asks.
“Fifteen, eight-five,” Ivan says.
“Great!” Dad says. “He always misses that first crossover, though. That’s a concentration issue. I’m also wondering if he’s getting low enough when he skates.”
Ivan walks off the rink and sits on the bench beside Dad, chewing his gum like a madman. “You know, I know what you’re saying. It’s like pulling teeth to get him to keep low. I wish I’d gotten ahold of him earlier. I believe he was nine and a half when we started lessons?”
“That sounds right,” Dad says.
“I thought I got pretty low,” I say.
“You need to get lower,” Dad says worriedly.
Ivan’s next lesson skates up, so he tells us bye and skates off. As soon as his next student pushes off, his dad is already yelling at him. “And work hard this week!”
There was only one time I remember Dad yelling at me over hockey. That was during the AAA tryout, when I heard him shout “HUSTLE” from the stands. When I didn’t make that team, we both sat in the car with our heads in our hands. I thought my NHL hopes were over. Then Dad said, “Don’t worry about it—did you know David Perron played midget B when he was sixteen?”
David Perron is a left wing in the NHL. I lifted my face from my hands and said, “Really?”
“Yeah. He came out of nowhere and got drafted in the first round when he was nineteen.”
“Really?” That made me a little hopeful, but it took a few weeks to really feel okay again.
I watch for a second as the kid with the yelling dad glides around the rink. The father shakes his head at my father. “He doesn’t put his heart in it!”
Dad nods, and we walk off. I dress in a hurry, and we head straight to the vet. The parking’s all taken, so Dad drops me in front—Dr. Andris has only three parking spaces, and one of them is reserved for him.
Inside, as soon as I tell the receptionist who I’m here for, I can hear howling. Sinbad! He hears me! “I’m here!” I call out, and my pup howls like he’s dying of heartbreak. He’s pulling hard on the leash as they bring him out, and wearing a cone around his neck. I fling my arms around him while Dad appears, and I pay the lady with my precious cash from my account. The cone looks pretty undignified for a Dobe. “Aw, you look like a wuss!” I tell him. His tongue hangs out happily. I check out his leg—it’s shaven and stitched up. He pulls me out the door and immediately turns left, which ends up being the correct direction. Like I said, dogs are psychic.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
A WEEK LATER, all is wrong with the world. Sinbad has cancer. And it’s going to cost almost seven thousand dollars to treat. That makes me feel frozen inside, like my blood’s not moving for a minute there. I get the call from the vet while at my teammate Jae-won’s house. He didn’t make the AAAs either last year, and we both got so upset that our dads took us to a restaurant we all like. But me and Jae-won just ate really quietly and only wanted to get home.
I lie back on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Jae-won lives in an apartment in Koreatown, and the ceiling is stained. He and I were the two least rich kids on the team.
“ ’Sup?” he says.
“Sinbad’s got big problems,” I say. “He’s got cancer.”
“Aw, man, I’m sorry. He’s such a great dog. Can’t they help him?”
“Yeah, but it’s going to cost seven thousand dollars!”
Jae-won’s head flicks back a bit, like someone’s pushed it. “Wow. Man. You got the money?”
“Nah, man, I got a hundred and fifty left in the bank.”
“What about your dad?”
“I dunno. It’ll be hard.”
He lies back also. “Man. We’re only eleven, and we’re already in debt.”
Jae-won owes his dad for the last pair of skates he got, which cost six hundred dollars. He had to pay for them ’cause his dad had just gotten him a different pair of six-hundred-dollar skates, and Jae-won decided he hated them after using them twice. It’s tough when that happens. And you can’t really resell top-end skates for much ’cause they’re heat-molded ’specially for your feet. Still, they were able to sell them for two fifty.
We lie without talking. Like I said, sometimes staring at a blank space is a good thing. Then he says, “I’m sorry about Sinbad. Is he gonna live if your dad has the money?”
“Dunno. They say so, but I’ll read up on it later.”
Jae-won’s great. He just lies there next to me, and I know he’s not getting up unless I do. He’s like the world’s most sensitive hockey player. And he’s got the most unbelievable hockey hands in history, though his skating’s not that strong. But Dad thinks he’s headed for the NHL. At worst, Dad says, he’ll play Division I on a scholarship. I’ve seen him slip the puck through unbelievably small openings. In 1998 his dad played on a South Korean junior team that beat Thailand 92–0, which must be some kind of record. His dad is small, but Jae-won
was the tallest kid on our team last season. There’re no sure things, but I’m pretty sure that if he keeps growing, his future’s golden. Hands like his are one in a zillion.
I sit up suddenly. “Do you think your mom could drive me home now?”
“Sure! Mom!” He rushes out of the room calling out, “Mooooom!”
I feel like I need to get home ASAP. I need to take care of my boy.
“She’s ready!” Jae-won calls out.
Jae-won has five-year-old twin brothers, and we all go downstairs and pile into the car together. My friend sits in the passenger seat, and I sit in back, in the middle of the twins—they like the windows. That’s the way we always do it when his mom drives us somewhere, ’cause even though Jae-won is a hero to the twins, they like to sit next to me, too.
This time his mother snaps a few sentences in Korean, and both twins turn to me at once and say, “Do you want the window?”
“Nah, that’s all right,” I say.
All four of them look at me like I’m going to have some kind of mental breakdown, but I don’t. The twins start to bicker, and when they don’t stop, I truthfully just want to knock their heads on the windows. Finally Jae-won turns around and shouts, “Shut up! He’s thinking!”
“What is he thinking about?” one says, but then they don’t say more.
When we reach my house, the entire family gets out to say good-bye to me, like I’m going away for a long time or something. Jae-won and I knock fists. “Lemme know if you need anything,” he says.
“Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Mrs. Kang.”
“Oh, yah, welcome, Conor. You call if need ride or anything.”
“Thank you.”
She puts a hand on each of my shoulders. “You call, right?”
“Yes, thank you.”
When I go inside, Sinbad shoots into the air and hurls himself at me. “Sinbad!” I cry out, kneeling. He stays very still while I hug him, like he always does. I lean in, resting my head against his neck. I try to push him down so I can look at his stitches, but he thinks I’m playing and starts hopping around. “Sinbad, I’m serious! Down!” He lies down, then immediately hops up and slaps his front paws on the floor. He looks so happy, I decide to take him for a walk.
The house feels empty, so I go check Dad’s room and see he’s not home—I told him I’d be home at six, and it’s only four thirty. Tomorrow’s the AAA tryout—Jae-won and I decided not to do stick time like we do on some Thursday nights a couple of hours after I do Ivan. It just seemed like a good time to relax. And now I get to hang out with my pup.
I decide to take his cone off for a walk, then leash him up to go outside. We’ve been walking the streets instead of the hill ’cause so many of the leaves are burned and charred that it makes the hill kind of barren. There’s a small park about twenty minutes away, so we walk there. Nobody’s around, and I let Sinbad roam free. A squirrel appears; he tears off after it. He’s super prey-driven, so chasing squirrels is his life’s work.
The park’s got a few swings and one of those big plastic playgrounds. Dad used to take me here sometimes when I was little. Now it seems so . . . young. Thinking about Sinbad makes me feel like I’m a hundred years old. He’s running back, and I see something in his mouth. As he gets closer, I hear a bizarre screaming sound, which turns out to be coming from the squirrel in his mouth. “Aw, Sinbad! You gotta either kill it or drop it! Drop it! Drop!”
Surprisingly, he listens, the squirrel unsteadily loping off as I releash Sinbad. Watching how unsteady the squirrel is, I wonder if it would have been better to let Sinbad kill it. Now I feel guilty. But then the squirrel seems to have shaken it off, and he runs easily and quickly up a tree.
We head back home, Sinbad supremely satisfied with himself. I love seeing him so happy. I feel like I can’t take my eyes off him. As we reach the house, Dad is just rolling his police motorcycle through the gate on the driveway. I feel super nervous about everything we have to talk about. I’m used to being a little nervous for big hockey games, but this feels different. This feels crappy. Sinbad and I pass through the gate. Dad is lovingly covering up his bike. When he’s finished, he turns to look at me, and immediately I can see his concern. I didn’t mean to show anything in my face, but I guess I am.
“Did you hear from the vet?” he asks right away.
“He’s got cancer,” I blurt out. “It’s gonna cost seven thousand dollars to treat him.” I hold my breath and for some reason just keep holding it, like I do when I have the hiccups. Finally I gasp for air.
He just looks at me. Then he nods once and says, “If that’s what it costs, that’s what it costs.”
I say louder than I meant, “I don’t have to play hockey until Sinbad’s better. Will that save enough money?” That makes me feel sick to say. I love hockey, but I love Sinbad better. I really love hockey, but I REALLY love Sinbad. It’s all a sick feeling right now, though.
He thinks for a moment. “I’ll have enough to pay for being on the team,” he answers carefully. “But we’re not going to have the money for you to take lessons for a while. . . . I’m sorry, Conor.” He thinks for a minute. “But we’ll do extra dryland! That’ll help keep you strong. Russ discovered a workout video he’s obsessed with. He’s doing it every night and says he’s hard as a rock. I’ll order it for you. How would that be?” Russ is his former partner.
“Sure. I’ll do it twice a day.” I turn toward the wall, tap my fingers on it a few times. “Dad? I’m sorry I cost so much money.” I see that makes him feel bad, so I close my eyes tight and wish I hadn’t said it. When I open my eyes, he’s just standing, staring. He looks stricken.
“Conor, you’re my son. I don’t care how much money you cost. All kids cost money, that’s just part of having kids. You don’t get new clothes. You don’t get presents. You never went to private school. You never had a babysitter or a nanny. You haven’t really cost that much, as far as kids go. Even in a small town in Iowa, I had kids on my hockey team whose parents spent a thousand dollars on them at Christmas. They had new bicycles. They had five pairs of shoes. They went on nice vacations. They went to camps. You’re not like that.”
I look down at the ground, just thinking. I mean, I know from school and my teams that a lot of kids get a lot more than me, and their parents don’t have the slightest idea that they’re giving their kids a lot. They just think what they’re doing is normal. Dad’s right. I’ve never been on a nice vacation. I have one pair of shoes. A nanny never took care of me or drove me anywhere. I don’t resent kids who grow up with nannies or have five pairs of shoes, but I admit I resent that they think we spend too much on hockey. Dad was at some kind of school event once, and there were parents who told him it’s insane how much we spend, and yet they spend forty thousand dollars a year on a nanny. Basically, they asked Dad how much he spends, he told them, and then they kind of attacked him for it, ’cause they know he’s only a cop. Sometimes I think it’s rich people who resent poor people, not the other way around. Not that we’re poor. But we ain’t rich, either.
“Well . . . I’m sorry anyway,” I say. But then I see how hurt it makes my dad that I said that, like it makes him feel bad that he doesn’t have more money. So I say, “I just mean thanks for everything. That’s what I wanted to say.”
He musses my hair. “We’re going to get Sinbad better. I mean, look at him. Does that look like a dog who’s ready to die?”
Sinbad’s ripping apart an old blanket he picked up from the driveway. We give him blankets sometimes, ’cause he loves ripping them to shreds. Dr. Andris just said to be careful that he never swallows a long piece of it, since the cloth can get twisted up inside of him. He’s growling like he’s fighting a tiger. He most definitely does not look like a dog who’s ready to die. He looks like a dog who’s going to stick around for quite a few years. So that perks me up a bit.
As we head inside, Dad says he can take off work whenever I can get an appointment at the oncologist. I go to my room—Sinbad
right behind me dragging the blanket—and call the number of the oncologist, even though it’s five thirty.
“Vet Center,” someone answers. “How can I help you?”
“Hi, I was referred by my vet, Dr. Andris. I guess my dog has cancer. He had a bad biopsy. So we need to see Dr. Tracey.”
“Dr. Tracey is out of town right now. Would Dr. Pierre work?”
“Is he as good as Dr. Tracey?”
“She, yes, she’s excellent. They’re both excellent.”
I hesitate, only ’cause Dr. Andris specifically mentioned Dr. Tracey. But I say, “Okay.”
We make the appointment for Tuesday. Sinbad’s lying on the floor with a big wad of blanket in his mouth. I sit next to him and search “cancer” on my phone. A few months ago, all the kids from my school started using DuckDuckGo to search the Internet, ’cause it has only a small number of employees in a small midwestern town, and its whole thing is protecting the privacy of users. So nobody uses Google anymore. Stuff like that happens at school all the time, where a few people will start doing something, and all of a sudden we’re all doing it ’cause it’s way cooler than what we were doing before.
I pause, wonder how much money it would save if we canceled my phone. Then I start to make a list of what else I could give up, but the fact is I’ve already given up just about everything to play hockey. There’re the weekend fast-food restaurants, and my protein drinks. I could give up both of those. I don’t know how much the protein drinks cost. Dad usually gives me twenty-five bucks for birthdays and fifty for Christmas, and everything I wear is a hand-me-down from the Garcia brothers down the street. My grandparents on my dad’s side always give me thirty-five-dollar Ice Warehouse gift cards for Christmas, but on my mom’s side we kind of lost touch over the years. Dad says they were really hurt that he didn’t even wait two years to get remarried. To me, two years seems like forever, but what do I know? Maybe when you’re old, two years is nothing. But it made Grandpa Takao and Grandma Toshi really sad when he got remarried so soon. They sold their house and traveled for practically five years straight. After that, they were broke—they’d run out of all the money they’d saved for their old age. Supposedly they live off Social Security now. I tried writing them three times, and then one day out of the blue they wrote me back. The whole letter was about a trip to Hong Kong they took. They stayed on a high floor at a fancy hotel in a place called Kowloon, and out their window they could see a harbor, and across the harbor were the sparkling buildings of Hong Kong. They said that Hong Kong and Kowloon were also famous for their crowded, impoverished tenements. But it’s one of the safest cities in the world—they only liked to travel to safe places. I don’t know why they wrote to me about Hong Kong, but they went on and on about it for two pages. That was a few years ago. Then last year for my birthday, they sent me a frame. It was a nice frame and everything, not that I know anything about frames, but I admit I thought it was kind of a strange present to send an eleven-year-old kid. But Dad said they loved putting framed pictures all over. He said they probably had two hundred framed pictures in their house, when they had a house.