Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Max Stevens
I call Frank Amato on a Wednesday morning after the Guardians clinched the playoffs.
Not the league number. The personal one.
Toni gave it to me without realizing she was giving it to me the night she left her phone unlocked on my kitchen counter, and his name was right there in her recent calls. I saved it immediately. Professionally.
He picks up on the second ring. “Stevens.”
“Mr. Amato.” A pause on both ends. “I’d like to talk to you. Not about hockey.”
Another pause. Longer. Frank Amato pauses the way he positions on the ice — deliberately, because he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Tuesday. Ten a.m. I’m in Chicago for the week.”
“I’ll be there.”
Tuesday is forty-one degrees and Lake Michigan is trying to remove the city from its foundation, which feels appropriate.
Frank’s hotel is downtown, a pleasant lobby place, the kind of hotel that doesn’t need to announce itself.
He’s waiting in the lounge when I arrive.
Black sweater. Reading glasses on the table. Coffee already in front of him.
He looks up when I come in. Doesn’t stand.
Doesn’t smile. But his expression is different from the first time we were alone in an official capacity.
More waiting than verdict this time. I sit.
Order coffee I won’t drink because my hands are doing something inconvenient.
“You’re going to ask me something,” Frank says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“About Antonia.”
“Yes.” I put my hands flat on the table the way I’ve watched him do when he wants to settle something.
“I want to marry her. I’ve known that for a while.
Long enough that it stopped being a question I was asking myself and started being a thing I was organizing my life around.
” I hold his gaze. His eyes are the same green as hers and just as difficult to read.
“I’m not asking for your permission. She doesn’t belong to anyone, and she wouldn’t want me to ask it that way. ”
“No,” Frank says. “She wouldn’t.”
“I’m asking because you’re her family. Because she spent her whole life trying to measure up to something you built, and she’s already past it, but she doesn’t know that yet.
And because...” I stop. Work through the next sentence.
“Because I want you to know first. Before anyone else. Because I think you’ve earned that. ”
The lounge is almost empty. Someone orders at the bar. Music from somewhere. Chicago outside the glass, doing what it does. Frank looks at his coffee. Then at me. “She told you about her mother.”
“A little.”
“Twelve years,” he says. “Since Lucia died.” He says her name with the particular care of a man who uses it rarely because it costs him.
“Antonia was twelve. After that, she decided she wouldn't need anything she couldn't provide herself.” He pauses. “I let her.” I say nothing. This is his sentence to finish. “That was a mistake,” he says. Flat. Clean. The same honesty he deployed at Elena’s dinner table about the wrong call twenty years ago.
I nod.
“She needs someone who shows up,” he says.
“Consistently. Not dramatically.” His eyes come to mine.
“You didn’t leave her when the league discovered the photograph.
She told me. She doesn’t know she told me, but she did.
” His mouth curves fractionally. “She explained that you handle difficult situations with patience.”
“I was waiting,” I say.
“I know what you were doing.” He picks up his coffee. Sets it down. “I have one question.”
“Okay.”
“The penalty you took in the Vegas game. The provocation about Toni. You reacted.”
I don’t flinch. “Yes.”
“And then you stopped.”
“Yes.”
“Could you have stopped it from the beginning?”
I consider the honest answer. “No. Not that night. Not that particular thing.” I hold his gaze. “But I learned from it.”
Frank Amato looks at me for the three-second assessment. One. Two. Three.
Then he says, “Buy the ring.”
I buy the ring.
Not complicated. Toni doesn’t want complicated. I know this the same way I know her coffee order — by paying attention for long enough that it became knowledge I didn’t realize I’d collected. She wears one chain, her mother’s. Small hands. She doesn’t own anything that announces itself.
The stone is a green tourmaline. Pear shaped. The same shade as her eyes when she’s not managing them.
The jeweler asks if I want it engraved. I say yes. She asks what. I think about it for a moment. Then I say: I’ve got you now.
The night I propose, I take her to the rink. Tuesday at seven p.m. The practice rink is freshly resurfaced, nobody there except Gerald at the east entrance
Toni thinks we’re reviewing footage. I told her Coach Briggs wanted to run something past her.
I told her this with a straight face, which is the most impressive thing I have ever accomplished.
She walks in ahead of me in her work clothes — green blazer, badge clipped, clipboard tucked under her arm.
She looks at the empty rink. Then at me. Then at the rink.
“Where’s Coach Briggs?”
“Not here.”
“Max.”
“He had a thing.”
She turns. The clipboard drops slightly.
She reads my face with the efficiency she applies to everything — quick, complete, seeing past whatever I’m presenting straight to the actual situation.
Her expression shifts. “What are you doing?” I step past her and onto the rubber mat at the edge of the ice. Then I hold out my hand.
She stares at it. “We’re not in skates.”
“I know.”
“The ice isn’t—“
“Antonia.” Just her name. The way it sounds when I’m done performing and there’s no audience, and I mean it. “Come here.” She takes my hand. She looks at my wrist and realizes I’m still wearing the superstar bracelet.
“You kept it.” She smiles.
I shrug, “Christopher says the powers stop working if I take it off.”
I walk her onto the ice. We’re in shoes, both of us, and the surface is slick, and she grips my hand tighter, and I hold her, and we don’t fall because I will not let us fall, and she knows that.
The rink is empty. The overhead lights are at thirty percent, the pre-game setting before the crew comes in, and the ice glows.
The Gold Coast Guardians logo is at center and the boards are dark and the arena breathes around us that specific sound it makes when it's empty.
Alive. Like a building that knows what it's for. “I fell in love with you before I even knew your last name.” Her hand is in mine, and she’s watching my face, and the guarded expression is completely gone. “You know what the worst part was?”
“Of what?” Her head tilts.
“Thinking for two years that Rockford was the best thing that would ever happen to me.” I pause. “And then you walked back into my life, anyway.”
She blinks and tears roll down her cheeks. “Max”
“Yeah, okay, don’t look at me like that.
I have a speech.” She gives me a watery laugh.
“You built something here. Out of nothing except your own standards. And I watched you do it. I watched you bench me in front of the entire team and walk away without letting anyone see what it cost you, and I watched you hold your father’s opinion like it was the only metric that mattered, and I watched you sit in a parking lot for four minutes trying to decide if you were allowed to want something.
” I reach into my jacket pocket. “You’re allowed.
” She sees the box. Her hand tightens on mine.
“I’m not asking you to be less mindful,” I say.
“I’m asking you to be careful with me instead of against me.
” I open the box. The stone catches the ice light, it’s green, small, hers.
“I’ve got you, Antonia. I’ve had you since a service dock by a dumpster in October.
This is just making it official. Marry me. ”
“Max, you’re insane.”
“Correct. Marry me anyway.”
She looks at the ring. Then at me. “That’s from the dock,” she says.
“The inscription. Yeah.”
She looks at it for another second. Then she holds out her left hand. Steady. Deliberate. The choice made before she speaks. “Yes,” she says. “Obviously, yes.”
I put the ring on her finger. It fits. Of course it fits. I measured her mother’s chain three weeks ago while she slept. I am a man who pays attention.
She pulls me by the jacket lapel and kisses me in the middle of the empty rink under the ice lights, and somewhere in the building Gerald is almost certainly aware this is not a film review session, and neither of us cares at all.