Jase by MariaLisa deMora

daughter.” She sounded more self-assured now, but there was a fragile tone threading through her voice.
    “Nita, yeah. I remember you. You had a good slap shot. You hung out at practice and chased pucks.” He smiled at the memory; she was about thirteen when he moved away, first to Quebec and then to Russia. Coach Patterson was his hometown coach before juniors, and had helped shape him both as a player and as a man. He held him in the highest regard and always made time to see Coach when he went home to visit.
    “Jase, Daddy died. Yesterday. I’m sorry I’ve left the call so late, but I just found the paper where he had written stuff down, so I’m calling now. I’m sorry.” Her voice cracked and broke on the last words as she sobbed softly over the phone.
    His stomach clenched and he reached out to pick up the phone, turning off the speaker. This conversation required more intimacy than yelling across the table. “Anita, honey, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
    “His heart,” she whispered and cleared her throat. “He had a heart attack. I found him when I went to pick him up for breakfast.”
    “I’m so sorry, honey.” Jase didn’t know what else to say. He hadn’t much experience with sympathy, on either side of the fence, so he didn’t have ready platitudes to offer her. Both sets of his grandparents were still alive, and he never had attended a funeral that was personal.
    “So I found this paper. And you can say no, I realize it is late notice and a long way to come, but he put you down as someone he wanted at his funeral. He put this pre-planning thing together, and I didn’t know about it until I found this paper. He’s got you down as eulogy and pallbearer. I know I don’t have a right to ask for it, but I’d be pleased if you could. He thought a lot of you, eh?” Her voice trailed off, and then she spoke again, “I’m sorry to bother you, Jase. I found the paper—”
    He interrupted her, “When is the service?”
    “Day after tomorrow, five in the evening,” she responded quickly.
    “I’ll be there. Count me in.” He shivered; those words sounded familiar.
    “Oh, Jase, thank you. Daddy thought a lot of you, eh?” It sounded as if she was wiping her nose.
    “Is this a good number to reach you?”
    She said it was, and from there they talked small details. Jase kept her on the phone until she laughed at least twice, then finished the conversation, hanging up with a promise to text her his flight details. He called his mother next, verifying he would be able to stay with his parents. He had been planning a trip up anyway, but sometimes she had his nephews over. When she did, there wasn’t enough quiet or room in the house to suit him and he could make other arrangements.
    Next day, he was standing in customs at the Calgary airport, waiting on the woman in front of him to finish flirting with the customs agent and move along. Once he was through, he texted his parents then picked up the reserved rental car and headed north. It was the early days of summer and the scenery this time of year was beautiful. Rolling green prairie to the west ran across a broad expanse of land up to the tree canopy pressed along and against the mountains in the distance. To the east was more prairie, broken only by scattered farms and homesteads.
    The sun was slanting to the west when he pulled into Red Deer, and he hit up a Tim Horton’s drive-thru, asking for his usual hometown order of a double-double and a box of Tim Bits. He finished his trip with a grin on his face, popping donut holes into his mouth one-by-one as he navigated the surface streets to his parents’ neighborhood. Sitting in their driveway for a moment, he looked around smiling. Home was the one place in his life he could count on remaining exactly the same, with an unchanging neighborhood and unchanging people. Simply unchanging.
    He exited the car, stretching and rolling the tension of driving for several hours out of his back and