True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson Page B

appearance in the locker room.” It had been a long time since Faith had been around so many men in a confined space. Not since they’d stuffed money in her G-string. A lot of them had been jocks. As a rule, she generally didn’t like jocks. Jocks and rock stars didn’t think they had to abide by the rules.
    “You have to, Faith,” her mother said, pulling her attention from the ice below. “Do it for Virgil.”
    Do it for Virgil? Was her mother smoking weed again?
    “Reporters will be there,” Jules continued. “So it’s important. I’m sure they’ll want you to make some sort of statement.”
    On the ice below, a whistle blew and the action resumed. “What kind of statement?” Faith askedas she studied the players, who looked like a swarm of organized blue and white jerseys.
    “Something easy. Talk about why you decided not to sell the team.”
    She glanced at him then returned her attention to the game. “I decided not to sell the team because I hate Landon Duffy.”
    “Oh.” Jules chuckled. “When you’re asked, you should probably say you love hockey and Virgil would have wanted you to keep his team. Then mention that people should come out and watch Game Four next Wednesday night.”
    She could do that. “What if they ask me something about the game?”
    “Like what?”
    She thought a moment. “Like icing. What’s an icing call? I read the rules last night and didn’t understand it.”
    “Don’t worry about it. Not many people understand icing.” Jules shook his head. “We’ll go over a few basic answers before you talk to reporters. But if there is a question you don’t understand, just say, ‘I can’t comment at this time.’ It’s the standard non-answer.”
    She could do that. Maybe. She sat next to her mother and watched the rest of the game. In the last three minutes, Ty knocked an opponent off the puck and raced to the opposite end of theice. The crowd inside the Key cheered, and just inside the blue line, he pulled back his stick and fired. The puck shot across the ice so fast that Faith didn’t know it scored until a horn blasted and the light above the net flashed. The fans jumped to their feet screaming, “Rock and Roll Part 2” thumping the concrete beneath Faith’s pumps, and the Chinooks skated around Ty, slapping him on the back with their big gloves as he skated with his hands in the air as if he was the champion of the world. All except Sam, who punched some player in the head, then threw off his gloves—and the fight was on.
    Jules lifted one hand and gave both Faith and Valerie high fives. “That hat trick is why you pay the Saint thirty million.”
    Faith didn’t know what a hat trick was and made a mental note to look it up in her Idiot’s Guide .
    He grinned. “Damn, Virgil put together one hell of a team this season. I’m going to love watching them play.”
    “Does that mean you’re my assistant?”
    Jules nodded. “Oh yeah.”
     
    In the aftermath of Seattle’s 3–2 victory over Vancouver, the post-game media scrum inside the Chinooks locker room was more jovial than the last time they’d played in the Key Arena. The coachesallowed the reporters in after a few minutes, and the players laughed and joked as they toweled off after their showers.
    “You’re tied in the playoffs. What are you going to do to advance to the next level?” Jim Davidson, the reporter from the Seattle Times asked Ty.
    “We’re going to keep doing what we just did tonight,” he answered as he zipped up his dress pants. “After our last loss to the Canucks, we couldn’t afford to lose points in our building.”
    “Having been the captain of both the Canucks and the Seattle teams, what would you say is the biggest difference?”
    “The coaching philosophy in each club is different. The Chinooks give me more freedom to play the kind of hockey I like to play,” he answered, and wondered when they were going to get around to asking about his hat trick.
    “Which