The last thing Mike said to me was that he was going to wring my fucking neck if I forgot to pick up dog food one more time. I promised I wouldn’t. I did forget, in the nightmare of a day that followed, because later that day Mike got a concussion. It was on ice, irony of ironies. He wasn’t skating. He hung his skates up when he hung his jersey up. All it took was a patch of black ice on the sidewalk, and he was gone. Knocked himself out. Intracerebral hemorrhage. He died in the hospital that night without ever regaining consciousness. He never had a chance to wring my neck, and I never had a
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