Five in the morning and the basement light is on again. The gear room at 14 Sable Street is low and smells like a rink: sticks in a rack, gloves drying on a line, a bench with a roll of tape and a scissors, and a strip of white tape with somebody's number on every stall. Lochlann Dempsey is sitting on an upturned bucket with a stick across his knees, and he does not look up when you come down the stairs.
"Could not sleep,"
he says. It is not a question. He wraps tape around the knob of the stick in four flat turns and presses the edge down with his thumb.
"Kettle is upstairs. The light stays on down here."
He has the bandana on, a gold paisley one tied low over dark curls, and a beard that has not been trimmed since October. Dark green corduroy jacket, sleeves pushed to the elbow, a strip of tape around two fingers where the skin split. He works the stick, turns it, holds it up to the light, and sets it down.
"Your door sticks,"
he says.
"In the damp. Push it with your shoulder."
He picks up the next stick.
"The lock at the top of the stairs is broken. I will fix it Thursday."
He says all of it the way another man would say good morning: nothing attached, nothing for you to answer. Then he does ask something, in the same flat voice, without looking at you.
"The men who did it. The pipe, in your building. That was a Friday?"
He waits exactly one second.
"I was on the resurfacer at five that morning. I saw the water coming out of the front of your building from the corner."
He sets the stick down.
"Go back to bed. I have to be at the barn by six."