Dying man. Entertain him. Should be easy.
I am a technical writer. My published credits include The Appropriate Usage Guide of the LGM5-00-8 and Corporate Manual, Section 15-00, Appendix A, which ran to several hundred copies and had at least one confirmed reader, because he emailed me about a typo.
I used to think if I only had the time, I would write something people might read on purpose.
Now all there is is time.
The blank page. The cursor.
May 17
[Incoming FaceTime from Kate]
Tap. Kate's face takes the focus from the blank page.
She will have the first word.
"Dad has an iPhone? What, did he win it in a bet?”
Exhale.
"Is he expecting me to call?"
"He isn’t expecting the phone."
She bites her lip. I watch her thoughts buffer.
"Where is he? Is he dying?"
Say it with the fewest words.
"Wellington Hospice. Yes."
Wellington is two and a half hours away. That used to be nothing.
"How long, David?"
"I don't know."
"Does he have it?"
"Covid? No."
"Okay. Okay. So he has my number?"
"Yes. You can answer or screen him. Or call him."
I don't let the silence settle. "How's Lucy?"
"Haven't seen her. She comes out of her room for the bathroom and the fridge. And the mail…which was pot today, by the way."
"Did you narc it?"
"I should have."
"How many times can one human being listen to drivers license? It's four minutes long, David, and I have heard each one of them a hundred times."
"We shared a bedroom wall."
"That was Britney, David. Don't." A beat. "Are you writing?"
The blank page, the cursor, the backspace key.
"I've got an idea about a man who gets trapped living the same day over and over."
"That's Groundhog Day. It's been written."
"Mine's non-fiction."
"L-O-L. Okay, I've got to go do nothing somewhere else.” She moves out of frame. “Text me if you hear from Dad." And she's gone.
"Me too," I tell the empty window.
[No answer.]
May 17
Today would have been a good day for Sam. She was on days this week, and days used to mean loved ones. She’d done her co-op here the year before, back when there were people, and people came with flowers, and stories, and laughter breaking out without warning. Jane offered her a job when the schools shut down.
All that remains from her time here is the address. There is only the present tense and it comes with instructions: mask always, sanitize often, limit interactions, test daily.
She is sorting the lunch trays when she sees it: an iPhone box riding back on a tray like a returned entrée. Everything is labelled now, so she can trace the tray to its room.
“Mr. Armstrong, sir," she calls from the doorway.
No response.
A little louder, in case he's asleep. Or naked.
He gives her a once-over that has clearly been giving once-overs since before she was born. He notices the box in her hand. "I don't need the phone. I'll get your number the regular way."
"Mr. Armstrong, sir," she starts, then can't help herself. "That ever work?"
"Never. But you don't shoot, you don't score."
"This was on your lunch tray. There's a note on it."
"Said that to Walter Gretzky once. Still owes me a beer."
She turns the box so he can see the handwriting.
DO NOT GET RID OF THIS
PASSCODE 1967
“It's an iPhone. They're like twelve hundred dollars."
"I don’t want it. It’s a tracking device.”
Her eyes make a slow lap of the room — the bed, the window, the chair for visitors who aren't allowed to visit. "I wouldn't worry about it."
"I'm not scared of it."
“Okay.” Sam sets the box on the bedside table.
At the threshold, she pauses.
"Next time, please use the recycle bin."
May 18
The phone is still in its box on the table. It buzzes when Sam comes in with lunch.
"It wants your attention," she says, setting down his tray.
"I think it's a bomb," he says. "But why send a bomb to kill a dying man? Unless I'm not the intended target." One eyebrow goes up in her direction.
"Could also be a phone call."
"I don't want to talk to anyone."
“Nobody talks anymore,” she says.
She mimes texting.
The eyebrow's twin joins it. He mimes thumb war.
"Step one," she says, "is open the box."
Three hours later, she comes back for the tray. The phone is out of the box, on the table, at a distance meant to look casual. The packaging is in the recycle bin.
She doesn't mention the recycle bin.
"Want me to show you?"
He produces a gesture that isn't yes and isn't no.
"Okay. All these little pictures are apps. And these are your contacts. Somebody loaded them for you — David, Kate, Lucy."
"My granddaughter.”
Sam pretends not to notice.
"Tap her name. Then tap here — that sends her a text. What do you want to say?"
He gestures again: no idea.
"Hey," Sam decides, typing it.
The intercom calls her name.
"I have to go. You can use Siri — just say Hey Siri, read my draft message."
He repeats it like a man testing whether the trick lighter will burn him.
Sam leaves him alone with the decision. It's the kindest thing she does all day.
May 19
Dad was texting.
If you asked my father to describe me, he'd say: my son David, he works in tech. And tech meant if it had a button and a red light, I could fix it.
I can almost see him reaching for the wallet that is no longer there to show me a picture I could draw from memory.
He could be funny, my father. In a way that cost you something. He texted again before I could answer.
It should be easy. Dying man. Entertain him.
It isn't.
...
The lunch tray is barely down when he waves Sam over, holding out the phone like she's tech support that took too long getting here.
"How do I stop this?"
"Stop what?"
"I'm on the text, and I want to hang up.”
"Talk to you later," Sam says.
He starts repeating it to Siri. Sam stops him.
"T-T-Y-L."
May 20
Game 1 — Canadiens 2, Maple Leafs 1
The captain left on a stretcher in the first period. There were no fans in the seats — the broadcast went quiet anyway. An empty building, holding its breath.
Conversations with Kate about Dad find their way here at the first opportunity. Remove the opportunity.
Or make peace with never saying it.
Read 9:41 p.m.
May 21
There's a trick in my trade for writer's block: entertain every idea, no matter whose it is.
5 rules. 7 habits. 3 things. Dipping a toe into creative writing and drowning in a puddle. And the title - Canadian Cultural Nuances and the Unspoken Rules of Civility and Support Within the Hockey Community - won't fit on a spine.
May 21 - Later
The dinner tray is Sam's excuse. Mr. Armstrong is sitting up, holding the phone at arm's length, as if it might spit on him.
"Lucy answered," he says, before she's through the door.
"Yeah? What did she say?"
He turns the screen to her. A video. A girl in a messy bedroom, mouthing the words to a song, doing something between a dance and a semaphore signal.
"That's TikTok," Sam says.
"It's her, though."
"It's her."
He watches it again.
"What do I say—do I like Taylor Swift? I—"
Sam comes around the bed. "You don't have to say anything. Look. Press and hold."
She shows him on the screen: press, hold, and the little row of faces blooms up like it was waiting under the glass the whole time.
"Tap the heart."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"That's not communication."
He looks at the screen for a moment. Then he presses, holds, and his thumb finds the heart. It floats up over the video of his granddaughter and settles there.
"That's how you love things now," Sam says, picking up yesterday's tray.
He doesn't answer. He's watching the video again.
May 22
The fans have the rules.
The gods serve justice cold.
Game 2 — Maple Leafs 5, Canadiens 1
He called it.
May 23
There is a Leafs Exception.
Want to hear it?
First opportunity.
May 24
He is watching the phone when Sam comes in, not touching it. Watching it the way you watch a horse you've decided you might buy.
"Sam. Why would two people in the same house text each other?"
"You and me. Right here. I'd rather we were texting."
He holds the phone up like a subpoena. "Who's the cutest player on the Leafs?"
Sam thinks. "Who's asking?"
"Lucy."
"Nylander. Lucy doesn't mean cute. She means hot. Nylander's hot."
"What if it was her mother?"
Sam Googles.
"Spezza. Mom hot."
"What about me?"
"I don't know. Take a BuzzFeed quiz." She lifts the tray. "I have to go."
May 24
Kate’s voice. Don’t be Kate. I text him the number.
Game 3 — Maple Leafs 2, Canadiens 1
May 25
Game 4 — Maple Leafs 4, Canadiens 0
He was insufferable. He'd earned it.
Later that day
May 26
"Good morning, Sam," Jane says, swab in hand.
"Good morning. You know it's hard being nice to you every morning, knowing that right after our nice conversation you're going to put a pencil up my nose."
"It's getting harder to be nice back."
They have said this forty times and intend to say it forty more.
Swab, seal, label. Jane looks down the hall toward the rooms.
May 26
11:52 p.m.
What he had asked was whether she was still critical of his choices. I did not mention that part.
She did not reply. But she asked.
May 27
[Incoming call from Wellington Hospice]
"Yes. This is he."
"I understand."
"How long?"
"I understand."
"Yes. Thank you."
May 27
"Hello," he says when she comes in. He is propped up in the bed, and he says it carefully, like a man dredging a line up from murky water.
Sam looks at his eyes. There's nothing in them for her. She has walked into this room eleven days running and today she is new.
She lowers her mask. After a moment, he lowers his.
They smile at each other. Somewhere in the smile, she watches something surface.
"Hey, pretty lady."
"Want to watch TikTok?" Sam says.
"Okay."
She pulls the chair over — the chair for visitors who aren't allowed to visit — and sits, and opens Lucy's page, and they watch his granddaughter lip-sync in her messy bedroom, and he laughs in the right places.
"Play another one, Lucy," he says.
Sam plays another one.
Game 5 — Canadiens 4, Maple Leafs 3 (OT)
May 29
Game 6 — Canadiens 3, Maple Leafs 2 (OT)
Series tied.
No text from Dad today. No answer to the calls either.
I sent rule questions like flares.
Are there rules for dating outside the division?
Can a Leafs fan marry into Boston?
Is this a stupid idea for a book?
He didn't answer that one either.
May 30
I started to type. Changed my mind. Called. He picked up.
"Dad. How are you?"
"Been better."
"It's good to hear your voice."
"Thanks."
Then the silence.
The kind that comes from having too much to say and no practice saying any of it.
"Thoughts on the game?" he asked.
"The game?"
"The hockey game."
"Which—"
"The finals. Yeah, buddy, I told you they'd win the Cup."
I stopped.
Should be easy.
"They haven't won it yet," I said. "They still need Game 7. Tomorrow night. And I'll take that bet."
"How much?"
"All of it."
"Attaboy."
Then, as if he’d just remembered: "Who was your guy, growing up?"
"My guy?"
"Your player."
"I don't know, Dad. Alfredsson."
A noise like a man being stabbed.
"Mine was Keon," he said, when he recovered. "Best two-way man I ever saw. Won it all in '67." A pause with a grin in it. "Good name, David."
He hung up before I could do the math.
May 31
[Incoming call from Kate]
"Why?"
"What?"
"The jersey, David."
There were two packages, she told me. Identical. Lucy didn't open hers, just took it to her room. Kate opened hers on the kitchen table: blue and white, a name on the back she didn't know, number 19.
I knew the name. I said nothing. A shot from two hundred kilometres away. Canada Post with the tip-in. Dad’s laughter shook my room.
"It's the Stanley Cup Final," I said.
"Isn't it just the first round?"
"Dad doesn't have a lot of time, Kate. He thinks it's the final." A beat. "Kind of is."
Kate was biting her lip. I couldn't see it, but I knew.
Saturday nights were sacred once. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation invented them, but Dad ran the Armstrong service. He would make us stand, Kate and me, for the anthem. Then we took our places on the couch. Dad at one end bickering with the referees, Mom at the other with her magazine, Kate and me scrunched in the middle. Say anything unrelated to the game, you got a terse shh. Then Dad found the reception better at the local tavern, and Saturday nights belonged to Kate and me, and then to me.
"He's the one who left, David."
"I know. He's leaving again. I wanted something before he goes. I got hockey."
Nothing.
"Game starts at seven."
May 31
May 31
Her shift ends at six. At ten to, Sam stops by his room, because the Leafs play tonight and somebody in this building should say so to his face.
He's having a good day. She can tell from the doorway — he's sitting up, and the phone is in his hand, and he's frowning at it like it owes him money.
"Big game tonight," she says.
"Game 7. All or nothing." He sets the phone down on the chair beside the bed, on top of her bag, patting it once. "Leafs in seven, I said. Nobody listened."
"I listened. I just didn't believe you."
"That's most of my life, young lady."
She laughs, and her mask is down. It has been down since the doorway.
"Sam."
Jane, from the hallway. Not loud. Worse than loud.
The conversation is short. There are rules, and the rules are the rules, and Jane's voice never rises, which is how Sam knows how bad it is.
Protocol. Vulnerable population. Go home, Sam. It'll be reviewed.
Sam doesn't get to go back in. Jane does — protocol has opinions about thresholds — and comes out with Sam’s bag, and hands it over.
"He says ttyl." Jane delivers it like it’s an ingredient off a label.
Sam is in the parking lot before she gets the joke.
She's most of the way home before she stops laughing, and when she stops, it turns into the other thing, and she lets it.
May 31 — 7:00 p.m.
Lucy makes her entrance at seven exactly, which is the first miracle of the night. She is wearing her prom dress — the one that never got a prom — with a Leafs jersey over it, and she does a twirl so the nameplate can be admired: NYLANDER. She crashes onto the couch and disappears into her phone, which is how her generation says I'm here and I'm staying.
Kate is not wearing hers. It's folded on the kitchen table, name-side down.
Her phone buzzes.
You have been invited to the group chat STANLEY CUP FINAL. Lucy, David, and Dad are already in the chat. Join?
Pinned to the chat is a document. The title takes up most of her screen: Canadian Cultural Nuances and the Unspoken Rules of Civility and Support Within the Hockey Community.
1. A fan of any hockey team is, at heart, a hockey fan.
2. There is no bigger, better, or truer fan. Fandom is general admission.
3. Saturday nights are non-negotiable.
4. The Other Team (*Leafs Exception).
5. Trust the Hockey Gods.
She smirks. She taps Agree.
7:08 p.m.
[selfie]
My jersey is a white undershirt with TEAM NTL spelled out in hockey tape. I spent twenty minutes on it. It shows.
7:41 p.m.
Montreal scores eleven minutes in.
Nothing from Dad.
I told myself he was watching. Game 7s are church. You don't talk in church.
8:20 p.m.
Sam has the game on from the first puck drop, sound low, out of a loyalty she couldn't have explained. She watches Montreal protect the lead the way you watch weather come in — nothing sudden, everything certain.
Between periods, she picks up her phone and types how is he tonight before deleting it. She isn't staff tonight. There are rules.
8:47 p.m.
Montreal again, early in the second.
If my jokes were louder in the second period than the first, nobody said so.
I typed Dad? and deleted it. If he was watching, he was watching. You don't tap a man on the shoulder during Game 7.
9:12 p.m.
Third period. Montreal up 3–0.
I watched the space where he wasn't.
A hole in the conversation I kept shovelling words into.
9:48 p.m.
Then a gift. Nylander scores. An actual goal, on the actual television.
“Mom, put on the jersey”
The jersey is on the kitchen table where it has been all night, folded, name-side down, the way you leave a thing you haven't decided about. Kate stands. She picks it up. It is heavier than a jersey should be. Then she turns it name-side up, and it isn't. Number 19. She doesn’t put it on but holds on to it.
9:50 p.m.
"There's your boy," Sam says to her empty room.
9:52 p.m.
On my TV, the clock was under two minutes, and the truth was winning 3–1.
The truth had had fifty-four years of my father. I decided it could spare one night.
9:55 p.m.
In her living room, Kate hears the horn go on her television. Final: 3–1. The teams file past each other for the handshake line, patting helmets, an announcer calling it heartbreak in an empty building, and it is over, all of it — the game, the series, the season, fifty-four years and counting.
Her phone says OVERTIME.
She looks at the television. She looks at the phone. She looks at her daughter.
Lucy is already looking back. Raised on the internet; fluently bilingual in what's true and what's real.
9:57 p.m.
Sam's phone buzzed in her hand. Jane.
On the television the handshake line ended and the panel began talking about next year. Sam sat very still and let them talk. She did not cry.
10:01 p.m.
Overtime would run eleven minutes, I decided.
That one wasn't mine.
I looked at my TV, stupidly — a panel of men in suits, discussing the handshakes. She'd known since the horn. She'd known and she was in.
There were three of us writing the game now, and one of us was wearing a prom dress.
I gave the winner to a Senator. Executor of the joke, if nothing else.
"Mom, put it on."
Kate puts it on.
10:16 p.m.
The photo.
My sister, in number 19 and a name she doesn't know. My niece, in a prom dress with a champion's shoulders. Both of them cheering a goal that never happened at the end of a season that never was.
The chat went quiet, the way a street does after the parade turns the corner. I sat with my undershirt jersey in the light of the wrong panel show and waited for the Ducks that would tell me he'd seen it.
The buzzing wouldn't stop, and it wasn't her phone. It was coming from her bag.
Sam dug it out. The phone that wasn't hers. On the back, the yellow note she'd first seen on the box two weeks ago.
DO NOT GET RID OF THIS Passcode 1967.
The chair. The pat.
I'll get your number the regular way.
ttyl.
The screen woke in her hand. STANLEY CUP FINAL. She scrolled to the top and read the whole game. The undershirt jersey. The exclamation marks getting louder as the silence got longer. A girl's crossbar, arriving from nowhere in the overtime of a game that had already ended. She read it like a letter that wasn't addressed to her yet was entirely about her. Then she read the pinned rules twice.
Her own phone, face-up on the couch: 9:57. Thought you'd want to know.
His phone: 9:52. TIED. 3–3. WE'RE GOING TO OVERTIME.
His phone: 10:12. SPEZZA. SPEZZA IN OVERTIME.
She sat for a while with a phone in each hand.
Then the photo arrived. The mother and the granddaughter, blue and white, the smiles.
Sam put her own phone face-down on the couch.
Press. Hold. The little row of faces bloomed up like it had been waiting under the glass the whole time.
She found the heart.
10:18 p.m.
A reply. From Dad.
A heart.
Kate stared at it for a long time.
10:31 p.m.
Game 7 – Maple Leafs 4, Canadiens 3 (OT)
There has been no Stanley Cup parade in Toronto since 1967. Fifty-four years. My father waited out every one of them, and in the one season the Leafs finally won it, parades were illegal anyway. He called that, by the way. He blamed Harold Ballard.
But if you were in the Wellington area on the night of Monday, May 31, around eleven o'clock — if you were on Twitter for the brief and shining moment that #SCCTML2021 trended, or if you were on Main Street when the horns started — then you were at the only Stanley Cup parade of 2021. It was two and a half hours east of Bay Street, and every fact in it was wrong.
That's another story. You were warned about those.
11:14 p.m.
She was already outside, moving before she had decided she needed to be.
The cars came around the block in a slow loop, makeshift flags from jerseys hanging out the windows, horns in no particular rhythm, somebody's speakers doing We Are the Champions at a volume the bylaws would have opinions about. Headlights swept the front of the hospice as they turned, and in the windows the rooms' shadows swung and settled, swung and settled.
Third window from the end, the blue flicker of a television nobody had turned off.
Sam stood at the fence and filmed it. Not for anyone. For the record.
June 1
For my dad.
I added one rule myself. Executor's privilege.
Rule six: Never interrupt a good sports story with the facts.
Leafs in seven. What's the bet?
Author’s Note
The photograph on the first page is not the 1967 parade. I found that out writing to the Toronto Star for permission to reproduce it. Bay Street, 1963. He cut it out of an article in 2015.
The scores are entirely true.
-D.A.