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IN THEIR PLACE (HH)

_ By _

_ Gruffy _

_ 2017 _

THE HOCKEY HUNK HHS07E01

*

Hello, dear people!

I present to you, with great pleasure, the latest installment in The Hockey Hunk. It has been some time since the previous chapter. A lot of stuff has been going on in between. There's been some real life drama, a lot of work, and a lot of writing, and now I hope that I am finally able to give this story the attention it deserves. I would not be posting this if I didn't trust that I'm up to scratch, and hence I shall be very curious to hear what you are thinking.

I will post another chapter on Friday this week, as a special treat, and from then on keep to posting one chapter a week on Mondays, and try to keep up this pace for now on.

Seeya :)

*

I was a good way into making dinner by the time the front door opened.

"HEYA!" I called out at the sound of pawsteps already running up the stairs, a Doppler effect of taps.

There was no answer from Paul at that point, but he returned my greetings once he appeared on the doorway to the kitchen a few moments later. He'd gone to drop his things in his room, I thought, since he appeared without his bag or his coat. His glasses were slightly askew on the bridge of his muzzle. He must've taken his sweater off as well.

"How are you?" I asked from my spot by the stove.

He went to the fridge and opened it, and took out a can of Sprite. I didn't feel like nagging about him spoiling his appetite with the soft drink when there was only half an hour left or so before the dinner was ready. Paul was a grownup, although sometimes it was difficult for me to remember that fact when looking at him and realizing that I'd missed a decade of his life. Those years made the difference between him collecting Pokemon cards and now hauling phone book-sized textbooks about biochemistry in his backpack. I was sure there were some other things that were different for him now as well, but I was still only learning to know him again..

Kshhh. The can was cracked open in his paws.

"Okay," he said.

Paul slumped at the dinner table the way I knew people his age did, and I let it go. I added some pepper into my stew and stirred it to my heart's content.

"Had fun with balls today?"

I let my ears flicker over to him before I turned about, ladle in paw.

"Excuse me?"

Paul smirked. He looked at me over the rim of his glasses.

"Eyeballs," he said. "Did you have fun?"

The most fun thing about eyeballs was probably the joke Hal had told about someone's _immaculate_eyesight today at the break room, but unless Paul remembered his anatomy properly, the joke would fall flat on him and I would probably embarrass myself trying to explain it all. So instead of going into Hal's jokes, I just told him that the day had been pleasantly busy and that it was a good thing.

"Yep," was his opinion too. "Good to hear it's busy."

"Challenging at times, but good," I continued.

"As long as it keeps paying the bills," he said.

There was no immediate danger of that not being the case, as far as my business was concerned, and I had managed to save up a good amount over the years for any sudden expenses, but I didn't want to start talking about money now. I wanted to relax, and I was sure that Paul wanted to do some relaxing as well. Maybe he'd be amenable to some father-son relaxing, instead of both of us disappearing to our own activities. He'd probably have to do a fair amount of homework still, despite spending all day at the campus. He'd been to work too, I thought, recalling his schedule.

"How was work?" I asked.

"The usual," he said. "Books."

"Just like I had eyeballs," I replied.

"Heheh," he sipped his soda. "I was pretty close by today, maybe I should have come and see you at work."

"Oh?" my ears perked again. "Did you do some shopping at the mall?"

"Mostly just grabbing a bite to eat," he said.

"That's nice," I agreed. "Did you go with friends?"

"Mason from work," he said. "We hang out sometimes to eat and stuff."

I knew that this 'stuff' was what occupied young people for most part of their days. I knew little bits of its contents, because I worked with a lot of them, though certainly my contact with them was brief and consisted of small talk in my dark office to get them relax. It helped if I knew a little bit about these things, although I often resorted to just asking the kids about the thing the previous customer had talked about. That was a bit of a hit and miss technique, but worked more often that it did not.

It wasn't quite as easy with Paul, but I did my best.

"That's great," I said. "I'm glad you're fitting in."

He shrugged.

"We're grownups, we known how it works," he said. "It's not like high school where you keep trying to fit in, or at least people keep telling you that you have to."

I didn't really know whether Paul had fit in or not. Rachel and I did not discuss things like that. I was sure that I'd heard if Paul had been in real trouble, gotten into fights or the like, but besides that, I was not privy to detailed reports on his activities.

I couldn't help but smile at him calling himself a grownup. It was often difficult to comprehend the fact, especially considering that when I was his age...good grief, wasn't it true that around his age I had already gotten married to Rachel and it wasn't long after my 20th birthday that Paul himself cried his way into this world and nothing was the same ever again.

"There's room for everyone in college," I suggested to him, then, sage fatherly advice. "Just have to find the right place."

"Like E231 maybe?" Paul replied.

I gave him a very puzzled look, amid the fumes of my cooking. I felt a bit of condensation forming on my muzzle from the steaming pots.

"What is that?" I asked. I suspected some sort of a secret teenager code. Hopefully it wasn't anything too rude.

Paul tipped his can about. It wasn't hard enough to bruise the tabletop.

"The Hillel," he said.

"Oh, right," I said. Paul obviously enjoyed turning my fatherly chatter into a joke. It wasn't like I minded it, though. I was just happy to be talking with him, hearing about his day and all the interesting things he'd learned and done and the people he met. "I didn't know you go to the Hillel."

"I don't," he said, though he held a little pause before he did. I wasn't sure what to make of that. It almost felt like he wanted to say something else, but something kept him from speaking openly. I couldn't really say what it might be. Maybe he even thought that I expected him to go to there.

"Of course if you want to go..." I tried, but that only got a chortle from him.

"Not really," he said. "I've heard a lot about that stuff back home. And I saw them out on the orientation day when all the different clubs were recruiting. They had their stand out there just like everyone else."

"Didn't catch your fancy?"

He shrugged.

"I just don't see the point of hanging out with them if all they do is talk about planning a trip to Israel to find their roots or something, or sing Kumbayah."

I chuckled at the last bit.

"I don't think that's one of ours," I mused, but I think I got the point. "It's not all that, though."

"Their websites and the brochures doesn't make it sound much different," he said.

"Well like I said, it's up to you to decide if you want to go," I said. "I mean, Grandma Crane isn't here..."

He tilted his head, but was still smiling.

"It's so funny that you call her grandmother too," Paul said.

"A bad habit," I said. "I suppose after my grandmother died and you...well you were born and Diana was born and Max..."

"I know my cousins' names, dad."

I flicked my ears at him.

"I was just thinking aloud," I said. "I know you never knew your great-grandmother, because she died when you were 2 years old."

He nodded. I remembered her, of course, and recalled what she looked like perched over my Paul's crib. Her legs had grown very weak but she still had her arms, and I remembered her paw resting on the edge of the crib while she spoke Yiddish to him softly and I think she sang some lullaby as well. She'd looked so terribly old, while I was incredibly young when Paul was born, shocked and surprised, in awe of what I had managed to bring into the world. The whispering in Yiddish was what I remembered best about the moment, considering I only knew a few words myself. I didn't really understand what she said but it must've been important, and something very old and maybe a bit religious, too, things from the old world that her parents had brought over with them. They immigrated in 1909 on one of those huge transatlantic ships crammed full of people and landed on Ellis Island, two funny looking Germans with a few parcels and only a few words of English they knew between them, if any.

"How did she die?" Paul asked suddenly.

I didn't expect that question.

"She was very old," I told him after I put the facts in order in my own mind. "She'd had a stroke a couple years previously and she developed pneumonia and...and that was it."

Paul looked at the top of his soda can for a moment.

"So she just died?"

That was one way to put it, I thought to myself.

"Yes," I said. "Like sometimes people do. She just faded away. No pain, no... she just went asleep."

I hadn't thought about it in a long time. It had been so long ago, and my life had been so busy then, with my studies and Paul and everything else that was going on. I wondered why Paul was talking about it now.

"Have you been thinking about our family?" I asked.

He shrugged.

"Kinda," he said.

I made sure the food wasn't about to burn, and took a step closer to the table.

"What is it?" I asked then.

He rolled his shoulders. It wasn't quite a shrug, but close enough.

"I kinda...had to do the talk again," he said.

He kept puzzling me with these indirect comments that he possibly thought that I could masterfully interpret without a problem. I was worried by the possibility that Rachel (or even Seth) had such uncanny ability that I lacked in the parenting department. I was sure that my own mother had some of that ability, and the aforementioned long dead great-grandmother had probably been a pro too.

"What do you mean?" I made my confusion plain.

"The whole...'I'm Jewish and I know that a lot of Jews were killed but please don't think that my own life is tragic because of it' thing," he muttered.

That explained the sullen mood, for sure. I took a deep breath. He heard it and scowled at me.

"Did I upset you now?" he asked.

"No," I said quickly, hoping that he wouldn't become even more upset. I could tell that he was to some extent. "Of course not. Did that happen with your friends then?"

He twiddled his thumbs over the top of the soda can.

"Their teacher showed up," he said, "this funny guy, this lion...and they started talking about this play they are doing, and joking about it and...joking about the Nazis and..."

My ears flicked quickly.

"What do your friends do exactly?" I asked. It did sound odd.

"Do you know this thing called_Cabaret?"_ he answered with a question.

I rubbed my muzzle. It still felt a little damp from all the steam rising from my pots and pans.

"I think so," I said, "Liza was in it, I think."

"Liza?"

I coughed.

"You know, the actress," I explained to him, "Judy Garland's daughter...singer..."

"I don't really know sixties pop culture that much, dad," he said.

At least he was smiling, though I managed a shocked look.

"It was the seventies! I wasn't even born yet!" I said. "I think it was made back then, but I admit I'm not sure. I've only seen it on television. There is a movie version, that I know. And I think I do remember them making fun of the Nazis."

"Well that's a bit of what they were talking and I...I said that my mother would've never let me watch something like that because of the Nazis and because of great-aunt...whatever her name was."

I felt supremely guilty for not remembering the name of Rachel's father's mother's sisters, so long dead, disappeared into the annals of history as just another name on a long sheet of paper registered for 'resettlement' or whatever it was called back then.

"How did they take it?" I asked.

"The same way normal people do," he said. "Saying they're very sorry and then being super awkward."

I nodded.

"That's how I've known it to happen a lot, yes," I said.

He huffed and tapped the tabletop.

"I even told the Anne Frank story to try to ease them out of it."

Now that one I knew, though I didn't really think it was very funny. But it was a good example of how people reacted when something they only knew from history book photos or movies suddenly became all that more real because someone you thought was a normal person with a normal family and normal troubles revealed something dark about their past. I'd read enough, and talked to people who had experienced it, because believe me, even if none in my immediately family had to go through it all, there were others. The communities are small and tight. Everyone knows who was one of the survivors. When I was a child it was still a thing not that far away in the past, just a single generation. My parents were baby boomers themselves, conceived after the war that great-grandmother Crane and my great-grandfather spent in safe war industry work. All those new conscripts the war desperately needed also needed a great many eyeglasses, and that made them essential. I think the story went that great-grandfather Crane also worked at making bomb sights for B-17's, but that might've just been a story.

"Just so you know, everyone's experienced that," I told him in my best 'wise father' voice, and I wanted to pat his shoulder or something, but I didn't want to crowd him. "Even with Hal..."

I'd told Paul about some of the horrible things we said to one another, after the episode with the two of us driving on Hal's 'JESUS LOVES YOU' van across the state. I could tease Hal about his wife's religious family, and he was the only one whom I could ever think of letting to joke to me about being related to the people who built the pyramids. But even Hal, with his filthy raccoon muzzle, even he would never dare to talk about the camps.

"I guess I'd just gotten used to people not really knowing," he said.

I didn't really feel upset over the way he said it, but I felt sad about the fact that he felt like he had to say it at all.

"Does it really matter that much to you?"

He almost growled.

"I'd just rather have fun and get to know people the normal way without anyone freaking out over something that has almost nothing to do with me," Paul said.

That little addition in the end made me feel better, oddly enough, and I decided that I would have to think about it more, what it meant to me. Bothering Paul about it probably wasn't the way to go at it, however.

"Everyone has a past," I said, "whether it's a collective past or personal...luggage to haul along as you go."

I felt like the words came out sounding more weighty than I meant them to be. It also made me think about great-grandmother Crane's paws, twisted from hard work and gripping the edge of Paul's crib ever so gently while she murmured sweet nothings to her great-grandson.

I thought about that same young tiger eventually bawling his eyes out when he was told that his father was moving out. (Thrown out, but there was only a slight difference by that point.)

I thought about the one time I had seen one of those camp inmate tattoos on the arm of a survivor, in the flesh and made all the more shocking for that fact.

I thought about the photo I had seen of a pile of discarded eyeglasses from that same camp, a sprawling mountain of spectacles that struck my mind not only because I worked with eyeglasses every day, but because I knew that those were such precious, intimate and personal items that they'd probably been told to give away only momentarily before they would be given back to them. If you needed your glasses, you just didn't give them away lightly. You held onto them like treasure.

I thought about the fox who was doing our website, Tate, how usually only the slightly stiff swing of his leg reminded me that he too had a very heavy weight to bear.

And I thought about Paul, now sitting here and perhaps being a bit immature about looking 'odd' in front of his friends, but I also understood him, and wanted to love him and tell him that everything was alright and would always be so.

"I know," he said. It'd probably only been 30 seconds, the silence between us, but it had been heavy and full of thoughts and the hiss of the meat frying on my pan.

I smiled.

"Besides, shit happens to everyone," he said. "Mason's friend Haakon, he's from Norway, his friend back in Norway was almost killed in that island thing back in summer. Someone he knows really well."

My ears flicked curiously at that statement, as much as the odd name he pronounced after a fashion.

"Really? That sounds just horrible," I said.

"Yeah..." he said.

"I'd imagine that almost everyone over there knows someone who was there, or knows someone who knows someone," I said, "It's not a very big country."

My sentiment reminded me of my earlier thought about the survivors. It was probably the same for the Norwegians, in regards to this horrible thing. Everyone knew everyone in the end.

"And their teacher..." he went on, "they'd thrown him in too."

"Throw him where?" I wasn't sure what he was going at.

"Dachau," he said.

I felt an uncomfortable clenching in my stomach at the mention. It was like he'd spoken some forbidden incantation, and I wondered if he'd even used that name to shock me on purpose. It was one of those unholy names that everyone knew, at least...we did.

"Is their teacher Jewish?" I asked politely.

"Nope," Paul said. "I don't think so. But he's really light on his loafers."

My ears jumped at that statement, not really because I was shocked of the content of his words but that he'd use such a term in the first place. I hadn't heard it in years, I was quite sure of that. I wondered where Paul would have picked up something like that.

"Well you are correct," I told him. "It wasn't just the Jews who were put to the camps. Others, too. Other innocents."

He looked quite thoughtful.

"I guess it's kinda funny," Paul said, and when he saw my curious look, he carried on quickly, "that a gay guy is now directing a play about Nazis beating up gays."

It was hard to say anything about that.

"Maybe it's a form of revenge," I offered, mostly at loss on what to say on that topic. "At least that's what great-grandmother Crane always said. That our best revenge would be to just...do good in life. No matter what anyone ever said. Your friends didn't say anything mean, did they?"

"Of course not, they're cool," he said. "I just...maybe I'm reacting a bit strongly, it's the first time this thing happened here, is all. Maybe I thought that it's different here."

"Well you should think about them too, I mean, reacting strongly," I said, "maybe they've never heard someone say something like it before, telling that your relative died in the Shoah. Just like you never met someone whose friend was involved in that Norway thing."

He nodded. I hoped that I had managed to instill some fatherly wisdom on Paul.

"I guess you're right," he said. "I hope I didn't make an ass out of myself."

So he really was mostly concerned about upsetting his friends and looking like a fool. It was almost adorable, knowing he could still have such petulant thoughts despite often appearing to be very mature.

"I'm sure you didn't," I said. "And now to prevent to make yourself an ass in my eyes, you should help me set the table."

He slumped on his seat, but with theatrical flair I appreciated, and smiled to him some more.

*

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