Author's Note: The whole premise of this fic is as historically accurate as I could make it. There was a pre-Olypmic tournament in Lake Placid in December that the US hockey team participated in, and while they were there, Rob McClanahan and Mark Johnson, as confirmed by two different articles with quotes and everything, did have a Christmas tree in their hotel room that meets the same fate as the one in this story. (If the thought of Rob and Mark having a Christmas tree in their hotel room doesn't make you want to run out of your house squealing to hug your closest neighbor, then I don't know how you found this fanfiction, honestly.) A lot of the little details are as true as I could make them, too. For instance, Bob Suter did accompany Mark and Badger Bob Johnson to the trials for the '76 Olympic team that Bob Johnson coached, and I seriously found an article (if you don't spend your leisure time looking up obscure articles about the Miracle on Ice, I don't know what's wrong with you) that relates how Bob Suter was chattering about how he wanted to be on an Olympic team one day and what Badger Bob's response to that was. Naturally, that whole scene was too adorable not to be included in fanfic…
Handle with Care
"How does your ankle feel?" Mark Johnson asked Bob Suter. They were both on Bob's bed in the hotel room he shared with Ken Morrow, Mark's chin resting on the knees he had folded up to his chest, and Bob's leg stretched out on a pillow propping his injured ankle.
"Unstable," answered Bob, looking out the window at Mirror Lake, which was a perfect reflection of the steely gray sky, instead of into Mark's eyes. It was early December, most woodland animals were hibernating, and the trees, blanketed in snow, resembled nothing more than bare, skeletal arms forever reaching for something intangible and out of grasp.
"Like you can't walk or skate on it?" Mark bit his lip, wishing that Bob's skate had never found that crack in the ice during practice today.
"Yeah, and like it's as hot as the ninth circle of hell one second and as cold as liquid nitrogen the next." Bob snorted, and Mark grimaced. That didn't sound pleasant at all, and Bob, a naturally fearsome defenseman, was even more dangerous than usual when he was fighting through his own pain. At the University of Wisconsin, he had been the all-time record holder in penalty minutes, and Mark was always grateful to have Bob as a friend and teammate, rather than an opponent trying to destroy his dreams of lighting up the scoreboard. "Like it's numb one minute and has got a hundred knives stabbing into it the next. Doc says it broken."
"I'm sorry," murmured Mark, almost choking on the words, because there was nothing else that could be said to a friend whose body betrayed him by breaking the December before the Olympics. It could take months for a player to return to peak playing condition after breaking an ankle or a wrist, and if Mark knew that, so did Herb. By the time Bob healed completely, the Olympics might be over, and the question that made Mark's throat burn with bile was whether Bob would experience it in person or through a television screen. Injuries were the specter of doom that no collegiate or amateur athlete ever wanted to confront. A career could end as suddenly as a bone could break, and an Olympic hope could snap with an ankle.
"Don't be sorry." The hundred muscles controlling Bob's facial expression all seemed to tighten at once. "I can still play."
"Of course." Mark nodded. To him, it had never been a question that Bob would charge back onto the ice as soon as Doc determined that such an exertion wouldn't exacerbate the injury. At their level, players were expected by themselves, their coaches, and their teammates to work through pain in the same way factory workers pressed on with their tasks, ignoring deafening noises of clanking machinery. Sometimes Mark even suspected that there wasn't a hockey player who had competed on the Division I level who hadn't skated on a taped ankle or knee, or shot with a bandaged wrist or shoulder. To an outsider, that might have appeared like cruel coaching (and when it resulted in a worsening injury, it was), but anyone who had ever played hockey or any team sport knew it was a different, more terrible agony to have to sit on a bench, watching your team play and hopeless to help them when they needed it. That was why the threat of being sat out for even as little as a shift was such a powerful tool in a coach's disciplinary and motivational kits. Nobody wanted to be a benchwarmer when they could be heating up the ice instead. "With a bit of adrenaline and tape, you can do anything."
"I'm as tough as toenails." Appeased, Bob's typically pugnacious face softened into a slight smile. "It's good to know that someone, even a person with as poor taste as you, appreciates that."
"Speaking of toenails, that reminds me of a brilliant moment in your college hockey career." Mark's eyes sparkled mischievously. "Remember that time my brother partially severed your toe during a warm-up skate, and you still came racing out to play as soon as the doctor had finished stitching your toe back on properly."
"You're never in a million years going to let me live that down, are you?" grumbled Bob, but his eyes blazed more with pride than irritation. Bob would always be satisfied to be remembered as a player who could tough out anything, even a chopped off toe.
"I'm not going to let Peter live that one down, more like," Mark corrected, grinning. "For a big brother, that is comedic gold."
"I bet your siblings love you." Bob rolled his eyes. "How could they resist your charming, sensitive knack of worming their most embarrassing moments into every possible conversation?"
"They more than return the favor." Mark chuckled. "And I detect unwarranted sarcasm in your voice, because, seriously, who wouldn't want me for a brother?"
"Hmm. Let me think like Einstein." Exaggeratedly pensive, Bob rubbed his chin. "I can list four names off the top of my head—"
"What a coincidence," observed Mark wryly, "since I have four siblings."
"Coincidence?" Bob scoffed. "I think not."
"No need to tell me you don't think like it's new information." Mark smirked. "You never did much thinking."
"Oh, shut your trap." Bob's brows drew together in a glower. "I liked you better when you didn't talk."
"An occupational hazard of being Mac's roommate is you start imitating his bad habit of giving a snappy retort to everything anyone ever says." Mark shrugged. "If you think you can hold up better under a constant barrage of Rob McClanahan attitude, we can switch rooms."
"You just want to win the Most Mellow Roommates in History award with Morrow." Bob gave a bark of a laugh. "Anyway, if I roomed with Mac, I'd end up punching out all of his pearly-whites within an hour, and his dad probably has some lawyer friends who could sue the very clothes off my back for assault. I like my clothes, as old and as unfashionable as they might be, so we should probably keep the roommate arrangement the same."
Mark chuckled, thinking that it was not exactly astonishing that Bob had noticed the almost terrifying zeal with which Rob performed basic grooming tasks like brushing his teeth. Mark brushed his teeth in the morning and evening to prevent cavities and bad breath; Rob brushed his teeth at least twice a day (preferably three or four times to ensure maximum cleanliness) for those reasons but also presumably so that his smile would be white enough at any moment to be photographed for a toothpaste advertisement. It was hard not to laugh at such extreme devotion to personal hygiene, though Mark would be the first to admit that he would prefer a neat freak roommate to a total slob. After all, it wasn't as if Rob forced Mark to adhere to his manic grooming regimen. A roommate who wouldn't step out the door with a hair out of place was a fair trade for a roommate who didn't create a carpet of sweaty, dirty clothes. When it came down to it, rooming with Rob McClanahan was more of an amusement than an annoyance.
"Yeah, well, speaking of Mac, I think he wants to go to the grocery store with me," said Mark, pushing himself off Bob's bed and heading toward the door. Whenever the team stayed in a hotel for a few days or more, Rob and Mark would go to the supermarket to stash up on what Mark referred to as the college student staples. Theoretically, splitting the cost of food was supposed to be cheaper for both of them, but Rob's penchant for selecting food with more of an eye toward quality than price tag got quite expensive pretty quickly. "Got to pick up the basics to fill up the stomach. Want me to get you anything?"
"No." Bob shook his head, and then added so quietly that Mark almost didn't hear, "I wanted to be in the Olympics for years."
A memory rammed into Mark's mind with the velocity of a speeding tractor trailer, and he was seventeen again, talking and laughing with Bob in the back seat as they traveled to Colorado to watch the Olympic trials Dad was running. Air streamed through the open windows, blowing their hair and smacking into their cheeks, and two hundred mile marker signs from nowhere whizzed by as Bob bounced around in his seat like an energetic puppy, babbling on about how much he wanted to be in the Olympics one day. When Bob, crimson from oxygen-deprivation, finally stopped speaking long enough to draw breath, Dad had smiled into the rearview mirror and remarked that Bob needed to play for him at the University of Wisconsin first…
Shaking his head to clear it of the image of two high school boys driving down the highway to whatever destination was next on their life journey (which seemed to stretch as long as the pavement before the car), Mark replied in a hushed tone, "I know, and I've dreamed of going to the Olympics together for awhile. It's going to happen no matter how much you beat yourself up for our glorious moment."
"Yep." Bob nodded as if this simple gesture were all it required to disband his fears that he would be cut because of his broken ankle. "The future is there. It will happen to us."
"You can bet your bottom dollar on that." With a final grin, Mark slipped out of Bob's room and across the hallway into the one he shared with Rob, who was flopped on his bed, nose buried in A Tale of Two Cities.
"Mac, does your reading material always have to bring me unpleasant flashbacks of high school English?" inquired Mark solicitously, trying not to remember how boring Dickens' Great Expectations had made tenth grade English. After the torturous experience of reading that novel with its predictable plot and hackneyed characters rendered all the more unpalatable by Dickens' propensity for using four words where one would due, Mark had very low expectations of Charles Dickens in particular and classics in general. "Does reading Victorian literature really provide you with that many insights into the modern world to make up for the absolute tedium of reading it?"
"I'm sorry that Tubby the Turtle isn't everyone's idea of a scintillating read," Rob remarked waspishly, glancing up from his novel long enough to treat Mark to a look of pure condescension. "Stereotypes of dumb hockey players aside, some of us have graduated kindergarten, you see."
"Yes, when you graduate kindergarten, you sign a sacred pact that you'll never be spotted with a book that isn't at least a hundred years old in your hands." Mark's eyes expanded innocently. "You can't let anyone think for a second that you are anything less than well-educated."
"Listen, Mark." Rob slammed A Tale of Two Cities shut around a bookmark. "I don't read classics to impress anyone on this team, which is fortunate, because you uncultured idiots enjoy nothing more than poking fun at my reading material if it requires more than two brain cells to appreciate. No, I read classics since there are so many books written you could spend a lifetime reading and still only get through a fraction of them. I don't have a lifetime to spend just reading, so when I do read, I have to make sure the book is quality: a worthy investment of my time and mind. Classics are works that generations of scholars have identified as worthwhile. Even if some classics don't make exciting reads, they still exercise my brain. Since I don't have time to waste on books that don't stretch my mind, I stick to classics that have acknowledged literary merit."
Nibbling on his lower lip, Mark hoped for what was probably the thousandth time since he met the other young man that the fire that drove Rob McClanahan would not burn itself out. He was more afraid of that happening to someone like Robbie than to Rizzo or Buzz. While Rizzo and Buzz regarded life as fun, one joke after another, Rob defined it as a struggle, a marathon of challenges. To Rob, everything was a battle to do his best, which would never be quite good enough.
"All right." Mark offered his roommate his gentlest, most disarming grin. "Just remember to give your mind a rest and do at least one dumb thing every day, okay? Relax and go to a John Wayne movie from time to time. Stuff like that will keep you from going around the twist before your twenty-fifth birthday."
"Go to a John Wayne movie," repeated Rob slowly, testing the taste of each syllable on his tongue. "Is there even a John Wayne movie in theaters right now?"
"Don't know," Mark admitted, cheeks turning scarlet. "That's just what Dad always says when a player needs to unwind. I'm pretty sure that he never knows whether there's actually a John Wayne movie out when he tells a player to go see one, either."
"Still better advice than anything Herb could come up with." Rob's mouth twitched at the edges. "I'm reasonably certain that he defines the movies as a place where lesser mortals go to waste their time, which explains why they fail in so many ways."
"Speaking of time, we should get over to the supermarket," pointed out Mark, checking his watch. "We want to get there before it closes."
"Right," Rob agreed, rising and putting on a hat and gloves from his nightstand. "We've got to get some cereal for tomorrow's breakfast. I couldn't stomach the hotel's complimentary scorched toast two mornings in a row."
"Never trust a free meal." Mark tucked his own hat over his ears and tugged his gloves over his fingers. "If you ask me, we're just lucky to have avoided food poisoning."
"Don't speak too soon," muttered Rob, as, bundled in their down jackets, they exited their room and strode toward the elevator bank. Pressing the down arrow, he went on in a whisper as if he didn't want a stranger in the empty corridor to overhear his crude comment, "Probably one of us will be throwing up in the toilet this evening. I would swear in a court of law that butter was rancid."
"I almost broke a tooth the bread was so stale," Mark added, as the elevator arrived with a ding and they boarded it.
They spent the rest of the trip to the grocery store speculating on how old various components of the hotel's idea of toast were, but when they stepped into the supermarket with its gleaming aisles of fresh food, all thoughts of substandard meals were erased from their brains as fast as algebra faded from a student's memory during summer vacation.
"Are Cheerios fine?" Mark asked, jerking his chin at a box as they approached a cereal display.
"Yep." Rob grabbed the cereal off the shelf and dumped it into the basket he had grabbed from the stack by the door. "Brings back happy memories of bribes to be quiet in church and not humiliate my whole family before God and congregation. My parents operated under the somewhat questionable theory that if I was busy stuffing cereal into my mouth, I wouldn't be able to make enough fuss to be a serious distraction to the people in the pews around us."
"I built some amazing Cheerio skyscrapers when I was a little boy in church." Mark snickered, as they continued to the rear of the store where the refrigerators were located. Over the months of traveling around the country, playing minor league teams in preparation for the Olympics, he and Rob had discovered that, with creative packing, an ice bucket could fit a half gallon of milk, a bottle of orange juice, and a jar of jelly. All they had to do to keep the food from spoiling was change the ice regularly.
Grabbing milk and orange juice from the refrigerators and placing the beverages in Rob's basket, Mark finished, "I probably distracted so many people in the pews behind me from important sermons over the years that I should be more repentant than I am."
"Nonsense." Rob whacked him lightly with the grocery basket as they walked to the bread aisle. "The Bible says we're supposed to come to God as little children, doesn't it? It follows logically, then, that building and appreciating Cheerio towers is a vital part of the salvation process."
"You must be really hungry if you're ascribing religious significance to Cheerios." Shaking his head at his friend's folly, Mark reached out to take a loaf of Wonderbread from the shelf they were passing.
"Don't take that." Rob's lips thinned in disapproval. "It's flimsy and cheap. I wouldn't feed it to ducks in the pond back home."
"Excuse me." Mark stiffened as though ice had replaced his spine. On a whole, Rob's sophisticated tastes were admirable because they meant he had high standards for himself on and off the ice, but they could try the patience when he felt they gave him the right to pronounce on what was high-quality, what was cheap, and what was unpardonably gaudy. These rulings were made even more infuriating by the haughty voice—the one that made Mark feel like he could fall head first into the chasm separating the middle class from the upper middle class-in which Rob offered such judgments. Thinking that his roommate might be the nicest snob (but still a snob) in the entire world, Mark hissed, "For your information, my mom has bought Wonderbread for years, and it has served our family perfectly well, thank you."
"Calm down, Mark." Rob lifted a placatory palm. "Don't make that vein in your neck explode. Look, if this is about money, well, I can totally afford to get us better." Here, he waved at a shelf of whole wheat breads loaded with the grains that got stuck in teeth and supposedly made the breads more nutritious. "Money isn't an issue. We can get whatever we want. My parents aren't going to let us starve."
"I want Wonderbread." Gritting his teeth, Mark tossed the loaf into Rob's shopping basket. "You can eat it, or you can donate your half to children in Africa who are really starving. I imagine either would be a nice learning experience for you about how the rest of the world beyond your gated community lives."
"Fine." Rob stalked down the aisle and hurled a packet of assorted plastic cutlery—the kind that resembled real silverware that was designed to be used at the type of garden parties the McClanahan family probably hosted regularly on their elegant patio Mark had seen in some of the pictures Rob put on their dresser—into the basket. "Whatever makes you happy. Save a penny at the expense of taste whenever you like."
"Rob." Trying to soothe his own temper as well as his friend's, Mark deliberately evened his voice, smoothing out all the barbs that had lined his earlier words. "Wonderbread is fun, you'll see. You can roll the slices into these delightful little balls."
"I never play with my food." Looking like the poster boy for the perfect snot, Rob tilted his nose in the air, as if to state plainly by his disdainful gesture that, even as a toddler, he had understood that toys, not food, were for playing with. Since then, of course, he had never been caught so much as fiddling at his vegetables with his fork, because that was so undignified. "Playing with your food is so ill-bred."
Feeling as if he had been slapped in the face and realizing that his cheeks were flaming as if they had been struck, Mark froze. Marveling at how he could be so hot and so cold with anger and humiliation, he waved at the jars of jelly on the shelf beside him, asking as if this were the reason he had halted, "Grape or strawberry jelly?"
"Neither." Rob snatched a jar of raspberry preserves from the shelf on the opposite side of the aisle and deposited it into the grocery basket. "This is better quality and has more actual fruit in it. Jelly is just sweetened goop dyed purple or red, depending on the fruit it purports to be from. We can afford better, or at least I can."
Mark could feel the blood boiling in his veins, surging through his body and heating his brain. His mouth flew open, and he knew that he was going to say something terrible, because, for once, he was not going to bite his tongue.
"You are the biggest snob I've ever been unlucky enough to meet," he seethed in barely more than a whisper, resisting the temptation to stomp his foot or chuck a jelly jar off the rack at Rob's arrogant head. "Not just about food, but about everything imaginable."
Fumbling in his jeans pocket, Mark withdrew his wallet to yank out a ten dollar bill, which he thrust into Rob's fist, rapping out, "Here. This is for the milk, orange juice, and cereal. You can return the Wonderbread and get whatever bread is high-quality enough to suit your exacting standards. I'm going now, because I can't stand another second in your insufferable company."
Then, before Rob could recover enough from the shock of this tirade to retort, Mark spun on his heel and hurried toward the exit. As he stormed out of the store onto Main Street, he noticed that his vision was blurry like an unfocused picture with tears of fury, wounded pride, frustration, or a combination of those emotions. Overcome by the vortex whirling inside of him, he collapsed onto a bench, staring at a miniature Christmas tree in the store front across the road without really seeing any of its shining ornaments, glittering tinsel, or glowing white lights. That Christmas tree was too pure and beautiful to belong to a world that was home to a creature as irascible and as egotistical as Mark Johnson.
Massaging his temples, Mark told himself sternly that he was too old to have temper tantrums in supermarkets about not getting the foods he wanted. He should have just let Rob buy whichever food he wished (even if peanut butter and jelly became peanut butter and preserves), but the problem hadn't been what Rob wanted; it had been how he wanted it…How Rob wanted all the best food rubbed Mark's pride the wrong way, and, in the final analysis, Mark was just as arrogant as Rob…
Maybe you and Rob just spend too much time together, Mark thought, regulating his breathing in an attempt to regain mastery of his temper, although he recognized that was comparable to knotting the bag after the cat leapt out and scratched everyone's faces. When you are line mates and roommates, you can't help but grate on each other's nerves every once in a while even if you do like one another very much, and you know that you get tetchy when you don't have your alone time. That's not an excuse, because at your age, you should be mature enough to get the solitude you need before you have a public meltdown, but it is the truth, and, once you've had some time to yourself, Rob won't seem like such an awful person to hang out with all the time.
He was tugged out of his musings by Rob plopping down beside him with a rustle of plastic grocery bags.
"I wasn't trying to be a snob, I swear, Mark," Rob murmured so softly it almost melted into the powder sugar snow spiraling down around them, sprinkling the sidewalk, their bench, and their clothing, and transforming the whole scene into one that belonged on the front of some clichéd Christmas card.
"You don't need to impersonate something you are." Mark grabbed a handful of snow off the bench just to feel it smoosh through his gloved fingers.
"You certainly aren't the first person to accuse me of being a snob." Rob jammed his right fingers against his left palm with enough velocity that Mark could hear the knuckles crack like nut shells. "Loads of my friends from the U have told me that they thought I was a snot when they first met me, but, when they got to know me, they realized that I was the complete opposite."
When Mark provided no response to this revelation, Rob sighed and hedged onward, "What I'm trying to say is that snot is just an unattractive persona I fall back into when I don't feel confident at all on the inside. It's like when I feel stupid how I have to burst out with a snide remark so that everyone will believe the lie that I'm smart even though I really have a boulder for a brain. Or when I feel scared, I have to throw down some sort of gauntlet so nobody suspects that I'm having an internal nervous breakdown. I know it's horrible that I act that way, but maybe if I'm humble enough to confess that ugly side of me to you, you could find it in your heart to forgive me for being an arrogant jerk."
Gazing into Rob's ashen, anxious face, Mark swallowed. In many ways, it was as if he was seeing the real Rob McClanahan for the first time: the Rob whose engine was fueled more by a fear of failure than by a desire for success; the Rob who could exchange witty banter with some of the sharpest tongues Mark had ever met while feeling like a fool; the Rob who could read a thousand classics and still be afraid he was ignorant; the Rob who would do anything in an eye blink to help a teammate but who feared his teammates didn't actually care for him.
"I'm sorry, Robbie." The words spilled out as a whisper carried on the wind before Mark could stop them.
"Don't worry about it, Magic," answered Rob so thickly it sounded as if he were suffering from a nosebleed. Gathering up the grocery bags with a rustle, he feigned a slight smile. "I wouldn't want to be friends with someone as argumentative as me, either. No hard feelings, at least not on my side."
"That's not what I meant." Mark clutched Rob's wrist, and the other young man whirled around to face him. Biting his lip, Mark explained tentatively, "What I meant is that I'm sorry you seem to believe that whatever you do isn't good enough, and I apologize for calling you a snob. I know that you don't like to be teased about how much money your family has or about your intellectual interests. As your friend, I should never have gone out of my way to say something I knew would be hurtful to you."
"No need to apologize." Rob shrugged. "Friends have to be honest with each other even if the truth stings like cleaning a cut. Perhaps especially if it does."
"It wasn't the truth, though." Fervently, Mark shook his head. "You're a lot of things—some of them annoying—but a snob isn't among them. Snobs think they're better than everyone else, and you fear that you're a good deal worse than everybody else."
"I guess I don't have any secrets from you anymore." Rob's rueful manner suggested that he was trying to make a joke when nothing was really funny.
"No." Mark squeezed Rob's wrist gently. "And you don't have to be afraid that you're worse than most people because you're one of the smartest, strongest, and most dedicated people I know. Anybody would be honored to be your friend."
"I didn't come out here to get an ego boost." Rob gave a quarter moon smirk he had picked up from O.C. "I came out here to apologize. Look, Mark, sometimes I forget that I'm not in North Oaks. When people from my town go to the malls in Minneapolis or St. Paul, we go with a horde of friends whose job it is to critique every potential purchase of ours, while we return the favor for them. I tell them if the khakis they're trying on look cheap or the watch they're eyeballing is too tacky and ostentatious. They know if I say it to their face, nobody will end up whispering it behind their back, so they're grateful to have the frank feedback. In return, they tell me if the polo shirt I'm going to buy seems low-quality or if the belt I'm interested in is really quite gaudy."
"And if they say that?" Mark arched an eyebrow. "What do you do then?"
"Put whatever it is back right away and act like I was only joking about considering the purchase," replied Rob, all honesty. "I don't want its bad style branding me forever. I couldn't bear to look bad."
"Not even if you really liked whatever it was?" Mark's forehead furrowed into a frown that mirrored the one on his lips.
"Not even then." Rob shook his head. "I'm not saying that's right or admirable. It's just how my community taught me to be." Then, he gave a faint grin that contained more than a trace of revolt. "But I'm glad that you aren't like that, Magic, and I actually am looking forward to trying one of those Wonderbread balls you described."
"You kept the Wonderbread?" Mark stuttered, wondering why this small gesture seemed to mean the universe to him.
"Yeah." Rob's teeth flashed in a broad beam. "I got you some Skippy peanut butter, too. It's the smooth kind, because I know how much you hate crunch in your sandwich."
Understanding how much it must have cost Rob to refrain from purchasing whatever all-natural, gourmet peanut butter was on the supermarket shelves in exchange for the highly processed brand Mark preferred, Mark offered his own overture of reconciliation, confessing, "Preserves do taste better with peanut butter than jelly does. I think that the raspberry preserves you bought will be great."
"So, we've got peace between us just before Christmas." Rob pretended to wipe sweat from his brow. "What a relief."
"The Christmas tree in the shop window across the street does look more beautiful now that we're at peace," Mark commented, and, as Rob pivoted to study the tree, continued, "I love Christmas decorations, especially trees with all their breathtaking ornaments. Each ornament is beautiful, unique, and has to be handled with care."
"When my dad and mom got engaged, it was near Christmas, so one of Dad's presents for Mom was a set of soft-spun glass ornaments—a bride and a groom—so delicate that, when I was little, I thought they would break if I breathed on them too hard." Rob gazed into the star shining atop the Christmas tree across the road. "In the end, it was my golden retriever Sassy's tail that shattered the ornaments. She wagged her tail near the coffee table on which the ornaments were waiting to be hung on our tree, and the ornaments smashed on the floor."
"Could your parents get new ones?" Mark asked.
"They could." Rob cocked his head. "But they chose not to. Instead, they got the ornaments repaired, and that was better. You could see the fault lines where the ornaments had been broken, but that only made them more beautiful. Our family treasured those precious glass ornaments all the more because they had once been cracked but were now whole again."
Rob's eyes locked on Mark's, and, somehow, Mark sensed that they were not talking about ornaments any more, but rather friendships, and he thought that all those high school English classes about symbolism were worth it just so that he could comprehend what his cultured friend was saying to him in this moment. "I guess we do have to handle special things with care, Mark, but if they do break because someone is careless or stupid, we don't have to panic because they can be fixed and become more precious since they were almost destroyed forever."
"Handle things with care, but don't be afraid to take them off the shelf." Mark grinned. "Sounds like as good a philosophy as any to me."
"Good. That's enough of a heart-to-heart to last me for a century." Rob yanked Mark up from the bench with a sharp tug on his arm. "Come on. I'm going to get us a tree to decorate. Our hotel room is so bland and depressing. I don't want out teammates talking about how we have no flair for interior design, especially around the holiday season, and I promise that I won't call any tree you pick out cheap or gaudy."