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“He's a strange man,” was all Faith said.

*   *   *

We practiced Tuesday at the Garden before we flew to Ottawa. Our won-lost record was 13–12 entering December, still eight points behind first-place Montreal in the Northeast Division but only two behind second-place Ottawa. It was important that I play wickud pissah against the Senators because a win would tie us for second place.

I stopped at my condo to pick up a few things for the trip. By the time I got to the dressing room Kevin Quigley had already torn up the photo of Mrs. Robinson. But not before most of the guys saw it and figured out what was going on.

“Hey, Flipper, the answer is the Starland Vocal Band. What's the question?” Taki asked Flipside Palmer.

“Who recorded ‘Afternoon Delight,'” said Flipside, adding, “Hey, Quig, ‘Afternoon Delight' was a one-hit wonder, just so's you know.”

“Kev, is it true women hit their sexual peak just before menopause?” Cam asked.

Quig did the smart thing, which was to turtle—take the hits and say nothing.

“So what's the story on Nan O'Brien?” I asked Kevin after most of the guys had gone out on the ice and I was replacing a broken toe strap on my right leg pad while Kev taped a couple of extra sticks.

“Widow. One daughter. Kid's in her second year at Holy Cross. Husband died about seven years ago. Stroke. She lives out in Framingham.”

“So is she a free agent?”

“Free and unrestricted, near as I can tell.”

“You find out her age?”

“Thirty-nine. Be forty in January.”

I didn't ask Kev anything else, partly because he wasn't in a particularly expansive mood but mainly because I had to go out and face a whole bunch of shots I didn't feel like facing. So it surprised me that just as I was putting on my mask, Quig said, “She's a nice person, JP. A kind person.”

He said it with un-Quigley-like sincerity and with a finality that told me our conversation was over. A
kind
person? That didn't sound like the Kevin Quigley I'd known for five seasons.

Just as I was walking out to the ice who do I see running through the building—suitcase and equipmet bag in hand—but Gaston Deveau. I flipped up my mask so he could see it was me. “Bonjour, Gaston!” I yelled, genuinely happy to see my old college teammate.

“What is so
bon
about the
jour,
Jean Pierre? Boston traffic is worse than New York. I thought the cab would never get here from the airport.” We shook hands and I told him to hustle up. That Packy had already listed him in Brendan's old slot at right wing.

“
Tabernac … mon Dieu …
I'm a center,” Gaston said, angry and disappointed he'd be playing out of position. I knew that
tabernac
and
mon Dieu
were strong French-Canadian profanities even though
tabernac
means “tabernacle” and
mon Dieu
means “my God.” While American profanity is usually sex-based—seems I hear “motherfucker” and “cocksucker” in our dressing room from time to time—French-Canadian profanities are religion-based. My grandmother—who wasn't above the occassional “
calice
” when something went wrong in the kitchen—told me that for centuries the Church had such an iron hold on everyone's life that to use a religious word in a profane way was more shocking than to use a sex word.
Calice
means Chalice.

*   *   *

The defense and I played well in Ottawa but it wasn't enough. We lost 2–1 and Gaston on right wing wasn't reminding anyone of Gordie Howe. On his first shift he carried down the right side—jersey flapping, full head of steam—but as he cut left at the top of the circle the defenseman put a hip into him and sent Gaston cartwheeling through the air, stick and gloves flying. The hit made it onto ESPN's
SportsCenter
.

Gaston still has great wheels, and the twenty pounds he's gained since college are all muscle. But he's been a center since youth hockey, and working along the wall doesn't allow him to create and exploit space. I can't blame Packy for playing him there. We've got two great centers in Jean-Baptiste and Taki. So the only way Gaston plays center is if he drops to the third line—a checking line for us—or the fourth line. A martini gets more ice time than our fourth line.

We won 3–2 in Atlanta but Gaston didn't figure in the scoring and had only one shot on goal. He told me on the flight back he was nervous: “I'm squeezing maple syrup out of the stick,” he said. I reminded him his sticks are made of compressed graphite.

Because Cam, Gaston, and I make Boston the only NHL team with three alumni from the same college,
Sports Illustrated
decided it wanted a photo of us wearing Vermont game shirts and standing in front of the gold dome on the statehouse, on which the magazine planned to paint the Vermont logo. You can't believe the clout
SI
has. I'd like to say the
SI
shoot is why we lost 4–1 to the Penguins that night, but why we lost is mainly because I sucked and let in two of the first five shots. Gaston had only one shot on goal and, worse, more turnovers than Sara Lee.

Sunday was also Rex Conway's birthday. If we play a home game on a guy's birthday we let that player pick out the music for pregame warm-up. But that doesn't apply to Rex, because two years ago on his birthday he led off our warm-up set with a Christian-country song: “Backhand Me, Jesus, to the Top Shelf of Life.” You think skating around to that wasn't embarrassing?

Packy started Rinky Higgins in goal on Tuesday when we beat Buffalo 4–2. Late in the game with the score 3–2 Rinky made a spectacular blocker save on a shot that looked like it had the top corner. He lost the rebound but he made a left pad stop on the second shot, then caught the puck as it popped in the air and held on for the face-off. I get mixed feelings watching something like that. On the one hand I want us to win. But I know if Rinky keeps playing like that my job will be in jeopardy.

Packy came back with me Thursday in Pittsburgh, where I got some revenge on the Penguins in a 4–3 win.

The Fitzmorris-for-Deveau trade continued to look like the most lopsided deal since the Louisiana Purchase. We lost 5–2 to the Flyers Wednesday night at the Garden and not only was Gaston pointless again but he was on the ice for three of the Flyers' even-strength goals. He looked lost out there. Back when he played center his job in the defensive zone was to provide coverage in the high slot. But as a right wing he's supposed to cover the left point man. The score was 2–2 midway through the Flyers game when Gaston got confused and picked up Philly's high forward in the slot. “My man. I got him,” JB yelled at Gaston, but it was too late. The winger on the half-wall slid the puck back to the open point man, who blasted a laser into our net, low stick side. That was the game winner.

It was no surprise that Gaston and I were seated next to each other on the bench Thursday when Rinky played in goal and we lost again, 3–2 to Atlanta. We also lost Taki for a few games because Atlanta defenseman Ulf Bjorke—a notorious cheap-shot artist—leg checked him. Kevin Quigley beat the snot out of Bjorke but the only thing we got from that was satisfaction and a five-minute penalty to Quig. Well, maybe I shouldn't say “all,” because when I walked into the dressing room on Friday, Packy had changed the lines around and Gaston was centering our second line.

He also told us I'd start in goal against the Canadiens—“Got to have this one, JP,” he said. Later, Faith doubled the pressure by telling me I had to meet her parents at their house on Sunday, the day after the Montreal game. I'd met Faith's parents ages ago when they'd visited her at college. But that was no biggie because back then Faith and I weren't dating and now … well, you just never know how parents are going to feel about the guy who's screwing their daughter.

*   *   *

The media went crazy with Saturday's game. TV-8's Alvin “Captain Baritone” Crouch called it “a statement win” and Lynne Abbott called it “the defining win of the season thus far.” What happened is that we hammered the Canadiens 5–0 in one of the fastest, most wide-open games we've played in years. I had twenty-nine saves for my fourth shutout; and finally—at last—Gaston scored. Then he scored again. And added an assist for second star of the night, as voted by the media. Away from the boards and free to create, Gaston was everything he'd been in college and in Europe—elusive, imaginative, free. He scored his first goal on a breakaway after he'd slipped the puck between Tim Harcourt's skates and the second on a quick wrister from a face-off to the right of the Montreal net. Gaston could have had a third goal, I thought, but after drawing goalie Claude Rancourt to his knees Gaston slid the puck to Quig for an easy tap-in. The crowd went crazy. But Gaston's best move came late in the game when a defenseman—who must have seen the TV highlight of the hit Gaston took against Philly—tried an open-ice hip check and caught nothing but air as Gaston danced around him, leaving him with his butt sticking out and looking ridiculous. It was an important move. Word gets around in this league and if guys think they can hit you they're going to do it until you show them they can't.

I had one of those nights where I feel like a big Velcro basket and everything coming my way sticks to me. I felt like I was wearing the game. Goaltending is a lot like sex or golf—the more you think about what you're doing, the more likely you are to do it badly.

Of course the Mad Hatter, who rarely visits our dressing room until the media leave, came into the room right after the game, no doubt to make sure he got his props for our acquiring Gaston and sticking with him through six unproductive games. It was actually Packy who'd stuck with Gaston.

The only bad thing about the win came in our dressing room after the game. The Canadiens bring a huge contingent of media everywhere they go. JB answered their questions, switching smoothly from French to English and back. Apparently one of the writers had asked JB about his views on Quebec separatism and JB said, in English: “The French are a separate people. We should have a separate country.” That's when Jimmy Porter, the left wing on Jean-Baptiste's line, threw a towel into the laundry cart and said, loud enough for the players near him to hear, “Fucking frog.”

“Hey, Jimmy. Lighten up. I'm a frog too,” Gaston said.

“Yeah, Gaston, but you don't want to jump out of the fucking pond.”

Gaston didn't say anything and Jimmy stalked off to the shower. That stuff bothers me because I never know if it's a benign tumor or a cancer in our room. But I felt so good about the win that it was an hour before I started getting nervous about meeting Faith's parents. By Sunday morning I was sitting on the edge of the bed, a towel in my hands and teetering on the edge of full throw-up mode just as if it were forty-five minutes to game time.

“Why are you so anxiety stricken about going to my parents' house?” Faith asked. It's the same kind of question people have asked me since my first day of grammar school. It's hard to explain except to say that I wasn't completely joking when I said my first rule for a happy life is not to meet anyone I don't already know. I never know what to say after I've met someone. It's why I say no whenever Denny Moran approaches me about making some extra money by playing in a corporate golf outing or making an appearance at a sales meeting. You'd think that being a high-profile player makes socializing easy, that people come to you with their autograph requests and questions like “What's Jean-Baptiste Desjardin really like?” But being a player only gets you to conversational first base. The truth is I don't know much about business, politics, or world affairs, and I find that your average adult isn't all that interested in the nuances of the Bruins' right-side overload power play. My idea of socializing is what Lisa used to call “bump-and-run”—a quick hello and handshake, maybe a remark about the team, then an “I'll catch you later” and I'm off to stand in line at the bar or pull a bump-and-run on someone else. But I couldn't bump-and-run Faith's family. To my relief and surprise I didn't have to.

Faith had used a chunk of her dot-com money to buy her parents a house in suburban Winchester. The house is about a hundred feet from a pond that on that mid-December Sunday was covered with black ice, that early-season ice that's so clear you can see through it to the dead leaves and muck on the bottom of the pond. Even though Faith's money meant that her parents could retire, her father, Jim, kept his job as a history teacher and boys varsity basketball coach at Cambridge Catholic, and her mother, Susan, did a lot of volunteer work for the Winchester Hospital. Faith's younger brother Jim Jr., twenty-five, in his last year at Tufts University Dental, was at his parents' house for the weekend. While no one in Faith's family had played organized hockey they're all pretty good natural athletes, and they'd skated enough to be comfortable in the nearly two-hour pickup game we played with various neighbors and kids. It was just like when I was growing up. We marked the goals with boots and had a rule about no lifting the puck because no one was wearing pads. I played defense so I got to skate a lot and carry the puck for a change. There must've been ten players per side and it took me fifteen minutes and about a dozen giveaways before I figured out who was on my team. This was hockey the way it was first played, with creativity demanded and rewarded by open ice. There were no subs; everybody played. And there was no ref, because we didn't need one. When I held Faith's mom to keep her from getting to a rebound in front of my team's goal she tripped me with her stick just as I was skating away with the puck. If I got hurt out there it would have taken Denny Moran and a platoon of Carter & Peabody lawyers to keep me from being found in violation of my Bruins contract. But I didn't care. I was having too much fun, the kind of spontaneous good time that's become a foreign concept to most NHL players, including me. If there's a better game than pond hockey on black ice I've never played it.