“Layla has a job?”
Callie snorted and kicked her rock back down the ice. “We all have jobs.”
She followed her rock, and Max walked along beside her, pulling a small, compact video camera from her jacket pocket and flipping it on. “Even you?”
Callie nodded. “I have several part-time jobs. I tend bar on an as-needed basis. I work for a lawn care company all summer. In the winter, I do snow removal for the same company. I walk dogs and house-sit when I can. Mostly, though, I pick up shifts at a local, used sporting goods store.”
“Why?”
“They’re flexible, and they let me come in after hours to sharpen skates, resize golf clubs, or take inventory of new trade-ins.”
“No, I mean why work so many jobs?”
Callie got back into the hack, spinning the rock until the handle came to a stop in the position she wanted. “Mostly for giggles.”
“Really?”
Callie rolled her eyes. “Of course not. We’re all broke. You may not have noticed, but there’s not exactly a line of sponsors and advertisers beating down my door.”
“But you get funding from the national team,” Max said matter-of-factly.
“We do,” Callie admitted, pushing off again and going into her slide with her usual grace and focus. She released the rock before popping up and strolling down the ice, broom in hand. She picked up the conversation right where she’d left off. “Our entire team got about $25,000 last year.”
Max did the math in her head. “That’s only, like, six grand per person. You can’t live on that.”
“Live?” Callie laughed and crouched down to inspect which rock was closer to the button. “It’s not enough to even travel on. We have to pay for our flights, our hotels, and our meals at every tournament all season. Think about the last bonspiel—that’s what we call the big tournaments—flights from Buffalo to Nova Scotia, five nights in a hotel, five days of eating on the road. It all adds up.”
No, it didn’t add up, not for professional athletes. Not for Team USA. Who would ever sign up for hemorrhaging funds while the national Olympics body raked in all the dough for merchandise and TV ratings? There had to be a missing piece in the equation. “What about winnings?”
Callie stood and frowned, her usually youthful features creasing with worry lines. “Sometimes we win individual tournaments, which adds a bit of extra money to our pockets. We have a better shot of winning smaller bonspiels, but the smaller the competition, the smaller the payout. Bigger events pay more, but the likelihood of doing well enough to make prize money shrinks.”
“Who makes the call on which ones to play?”
Callie’s shoulders dipped, only a little, but enough for the camera to catch the weight pressing down on her. “We get some guidance, some encouragement, but we also have a lot of freedom to make those decisions as a team.”
“But you’re the skipper,” Max pressed.
“Yeah. I am. A lot of things fall to me.”
“So, what do you choose? The bigger money, or the better shot to win?”
“Neither.” Callie started sliding back toward the other end of the ice.
Max scurried behind her, briefly wondering why they hadn’t begun to wear matching troughs down the middle of the ice and carpeted platform. “Uh, sorry, would you mind elaborating?”
“I choose our tournaments based on the ones I think will make us better. To be the best, you have to compete with the best. That’s all I look for. The pool size, the location, the prize purse, they’re all secondary to the quality of the curling. I want to improve our ranking, I want to improve our game, I want to improve, period.”
The steel in Callie’s voice left little doubt to her seriousness, and Max didn’t question any further along those lines, but the issue of full dedication did loop them back around to the original issue. “But when you’re working so many jobs, how do you find time to focus on curling?”
“I don’t ever find time to curl. Curling is the focus, always. I have to find time to work around the travel and tournaments and practice sessions. That’s why I have so many sporadic jobs. Paying the bills comes second to my passion.”
“Does that make paying the bills hard?”
Callie’s smile turned wry. “Hard is relative. Do I have to do without some things other people take for granted? Sure. Is it worth it to be able to spend my physical prime doing something I love? I think so, usually.”
Max probably should’ve jumped on that ‘usually,’ but she was too hung up on the phrase “physical prime.” Stealing another glance at Callie’s long legs in those tight pants, she could only appreciate the term’s aptness.
“So I spend as much time here as I can. I spend at least one hour a day working out, alternating strength and conditioning, and I spend one to two hours a day on the ice.”
Callie quieted as she surveyed the damage at the other end of the ice, frowning slightly as those hazel eyes swept over the rocks before she quickly rearranged them and headed back to the hack again.
Max smiled at the understatement. “How many hours do you think you spend on curling-related activity in a regular week?”
Callie didn’t even hesitate. “I shoot for thirty, but weeks when we have bonspiels I probably get closer to forty or fifty.”
“Plus several part-time jobs.”
Callie shrugged.
“How can you manage that pace over the course of months? Something has to give. There are only so many hours to go around.”
“I guess I don’t need as much sleep as other people.” She wedged her right foot back against the hack and coiled her body once more, but Max didn’t want her to push off again, not when she felt so close to something that the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Still, as those hazel eyes locked in on her target, flecks of brown and gold shifting like an amber kaleidoscope, she felt the woman before her shifting into another dimension. She wanted to grab for her, to anchor them both together or, better yet, be transported with her. Almost subconsciously, she zoomed the camera in her hand as if trying to get closer. But as Callie began to rock back, all her energy building to propel her forward, Max called out the only thing she could manage to blurt.
“Why?”
Callie froze, then slowly turned her head, until the focused gaze she’d leveled at the other end of the ice suddenly encompassed Max, in all its intensity and intimacy.
“Why choose to put in those kinds of hours and make those kinds of sacrifices for something that doesn’t even pay the bills, much less offer fame and glory?”
“I didn’t choose any of it,” Callie said, her voice as cold and flat as the ice between them. “Not any more than my eye color or my sexual orientation. This is who I am.”
With that emphasis, she surged forward—controlled kinetic energy, mass, velocity, and honey-colored hair blowing in the breeze of her own momentum.
Callie crouched and spun the rock in front of her until the yellow handle stopped, and she wrapped her fingers around it loosely. Clutching her broom in her other hand, she glanced up. She didn’t see the scoreboard. She didn’t have to. They were tied with the number-one team in the world, and the final stone sat in front of her. This was their last shot, and everyone in the packed arena knew it. She didn’t look at Brooke’s face, either. Her vice didn’t want to play the shot she’d called, but she held her broom between two red rocks anyway. Callie would have to hit them both, simultaneously, with equally distributed force and enough oomph that her rock would continue to move forward rather than transfer its energy to one of the guards.
The shot wasn’t a physical impossibility so much as a feat of physics. The thought comforted her more than it seemed to her teammates, whose nervous energy wafted down the ice to her. They wanted her to play a safe shot or burn the rock by throwing it short. They were all happy to tie the top team rather than risk bumping one of the red guards into a winning position for Sweden.
She wanted the win.
T
he choice really was that simple. The physics, the score, the tension, the overall rankings all fell in line behind a singular desire and her faith in her own ability.
The world around her fell silent. All of her periphery blurred. She saw only her line. With steely certainty, she pushed back, swinging the rock with her, before reaching her pendulum peak and reversing course. All her momentum swung forward, and with an extra shot of strength through her leg, she added her own thrust to the gravity of the movement. Arm extended to the front, leg extended to the back as though it were the most natural position in the world in which to fly down the ice, her hair fluttered back away from her face as the worry slipped from her shoulders. And then she let go.
She slowed to a stop but stayed low to the ice, trying to gauge the line of the shot between the bodies of both sweepers hustling down the ice. All the fear and uncertainty that had fled during her slide slammed back into her. She’d chosen a shot dependent on millimeters. Slivers of millimeters. The width of dental floss could make a difference here. She held her breath even when Brooke shouted, “Stay with it.”
Then came impact, a flash and crack that reverberated through the cavernous space. Both Layla and Ella pounced, jumping over the spinning guards and sweeping furiously to eke every remainder of forward propulsion out of the rock, until finally, in the same instant, they stilled.
Six people stepped forward, trying to position themselves directly over the rock, but when the crowd cleared, Brooke shot one hand in the air, index finger raised.
Callie wobbled as every joint in her body threatened to give way.
They’d won.
Pushing herself slowly up until she could trust her balance again, she let the applause of the crowd wash over her.
“We won.”
“Be cool.”
“We’re in the finals.”
“Act like you’ve been here before.”
“We’re the top Americans left in the draw.”
The seesawing comments of her teammates floated all around her, but she could barely hear them over the sound of her own heartbeat throbbing through her ears as she shook the hand of the Swedish skip and managed to say, “Good curling.”
She accepted compliments with nods and mumbled thanks, but their joy still eluded her.
They’d done it. They’d beaten the top-ranked team in the world in a stunning upset, and Callie was, well, stunned. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought they could win going in. She always believed they could beat any given team on any given day, but being able to do something and actually doing it were two very different things.
A hand clasped her shoulder, and she turned to see Layla smiling broadly at her. “You okay, Skip?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I’m great.”
Ella reached up and mussed up her hair. “Holy spit, that shot was flipping wicked.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Brooke added, grabbing her by the scruff of her jacket and giving her a little shake. “Do you know the probability of making that shot evenly?”
She shook her head. “Please don’t tell me the odds.”
Brooke laughed. “Okay. You earned one night off from sciencing, but please, at some point watch the TV footage because I could hear the announcers behind me, and I think they geeked out so hard they might’ve blown a gasket.”
Callie glanced over her shoulder, searching the riser where the commentators would’ve sat. She hadn’t paid any attention to the press area during the match, but if Max had been so excited to call her hammer shot, maybe she should go congratulate her, too. It would also offer a chance to help pump up the press coverage. She internally justified her need to seek out someone only tangentially related to her in the immediate aftermath of a huge win.
“She’s not there,” Layla said, as if reading her mind.
“Who?” Ella asked.
Layla turned back to the general stands and nodded up to a lone figure still sitting in the front corner of the raised bleachers.
Max wore a baby blue dress shirt under a gray wool coat, and her dark hair was impeccably coiffed. Her professional attire made her stand out against the rest of the spectators, in brightly colored sweaters and stocking caps, but not as much as her slumped shoulders and downtrodden expression did.
“She’s been there the whole match,” Layla said, “not a camera on her.”
“So?” Ella asked. “Did she get fired . . . again?”
“No,” Callie said quickly, her chest tightening at the realization she didn’t know that for sure, not any more than she knew what the “again” part of the question alluded to.
“More importantly, why would we care?” Brooke asked.
Layla shrugged. “Maybe she’s not totally terrible.”
“A ringing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one,” Brooke said.
“She’s been better lately,” Callie defended weakly. “Besides, she’s the one covering us. If she’s not happy, we’re less likely to get the press we want from a win like this.”
“Not if she got replaced,” Ella mused. “Then maybe they’ll send someone serious to work with us.”
The thought rubbed Callie the wrong way, but she didn’t quite know why. Ella wasn’t totally off-base. And yet, faulting Max for lack of seriousness didn’t feel right, either. Max had always been serious, maybe even to all of their detriment, but more than that, she seriously seemed to be trying to save herself lately. The echo of her pleas on the phone two weeks ago still rang through Callie’s ears every time Max entered the club. She’d seen the fear lacing the focus in her eyes as she attempted, time and time again, to interview people who didn’t want to talk to her, which had been often, over the last week.
“Yeah, but I just think maybe—”
“But nothing.” Brooke cut back in, giving her a little shove. “You just made the best shot of the entire bonspiel in an epically clutch moment. The only thing you should be thinking about is the finals tomorrow.”
The last part of that statement stuck much more than the first. She’d made a great shot, she’d got a great win, yes, but no amount of celebration would’ve kept her from going to Max right now as much as the reminder that her own work was not done. She didn’t have time to rest. She didn’t have time to worry about anything but the work ahead. She was the skip of the hottest team in the tournament, and tomorrow they’d try to take it all. That meant tonight they needed to watch video of their match, study the tactics of their opponents, and talk strategy.
“You’re right. Let’s go get showered and changed, then takeout and review session in my room at six?”
Her teammates’ smiles and nods of agreement all confirmed she’d made the right choice, but as they gathered their things and walked away, she couldn’t resist glancing over at Max once more. She hadn’t moved, and the forward set of her shoulders hadn’t shifted, but she’d lifted her eyes, steely and gray. Callie froze. She couldn’t say why, she couldn’t even breathe, but something Max radiated surged through her, a sadness, a sense of betrayal, the determination of a drowning woman.
Then a group of people stepped between them, blocking her view and cutting off her connection as they shuffled past, totally oblivious to anything other than the air of celebration she no longer felt. By the time everyone moved out of the way, Max was gone.
Callie shivered. For a woman who’d spent all day on the ice, this was the first time she’d felt truly cold.
Chapter Eight
That’s a perfect takeout for the Japanese skipper. Callie Mulligan will likely play the same shot with her stone, Max commentated internally. It’ll give her one point to close the gap a little, but not enough to take the lead, and she’s running out of rocks to play.
Her internal monologue wasn’t exactly inspired, but she would’ve held her own. She didn’t even have a cheat sheet of terms in front of her anymore. If she’d had Tim or some other commentator to bounce off of, she would’ve done even better. She’d already made up her mind to play the role of infor
med newcomer, a sort of eager emissary between the curling in-crowd and people new to the sport. If what Flip had said about slowly but steadily increasing viewership was true, there had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of people interested but not fully engaged in the game. She could serve as a sort of bridge for them. Or at least that’s what she’d tried to argue when Flip had refused to let her back on the air.
Oh, he’d said “yet” and been adamant that they hadn’t found a full-time replacement, but a whole hell of a lot that did for her now, watching the finals from the stands while someone else called the shots of her team.
The thought made her shake her head. When had she started to think of Team Mulligan as hers? Brooke and Ella still wouldn’t even speak to her, and Layla had warmed but not fully thawed. Only Callie had really let her in, but damn, she couldn’t help feeling like that meant something. Or maybe she’d just watched the footage she’d shot of her so many times over the last week that she’d internalized it. How could she not? That moment when Callie’d leveled those cat eyes of hers right at the camera and said, “This is who I am,” still sent a shiver up her spine.
Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that passion? And for the last week of shadowing her workouts and matches, Max had felt like part of it—maybe not the curling, but at least the sort of collective momentum Callie seemed to sweep people up in.
Even now, as her team trailed by two in the final end, she carried herself with an enthralling mix of command and affability. Max should’ve been the one to point out those details to the viewing audience. Instead she sat idly by while Callie made another perfect shot to curl around a guard, knock out the closest Japanese rock, and sit right on the button. Plus she made it look easy. Max had seen several others miss similar shots over the course of the bonspiel. It was textbook, it was beautiful, it was admirable even, but it wasn’t enough. What a freaking metaphor for Max’s life right now.
She didn’t know how Callie kept from screaming at the frustration of doing everything right only to come up short. They’d both deserved a better outcome today, but as the match concluded and everyone shook hands, Max didn’t find the loss nearly as disheartening as her distance from it.
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