Chapter 1 #2
Wes Berglund passed her in the hall going the other way. He had the coil of cable still over his shoulder. The wrench was no longer in his back pocket; she did not know what had happened to the wrench, and she did not need to know.
“Halloran,” he said again.
“Berglund,” she said.
He did not stop walking. He did, fractionally, slow. As if there was, briefly, in the middle of his walking, a passing thought about stopping. As if he had been about to say something and then chose not to.
She did not turn to watch him go. She did not need to. She had a meeting.
Joanna’s office was the size of a closet and smelled like coffee that had been brave too long.
There was a metal desk, a metal filing cabinet, a coat rack, a framed photo of Joanna’s late husband on a sailboat, and a printer that had not worked since November.
The printer’s blinking light had been part of the room’s furniture so long that Ada had stopped seeing it.
Pete Donatelli was already there, which was bad. Pete being early was the canary in the financial coalmine.
“Ada,” he said. “Ada, Ada, Ada. Take a seat. Don’t take a seat. Take a seat. Joanna, where do you keep the — okay, I’ll stand.”
“Pete,” Joanna said gently, “drink water.”
He drank water. He was holding a paper cup of water and a folder and his phone and a fourth thing that was either a granola bar or a deeply private memo, and the moment he tried to use his hands for two of those things at once, the fourth one fell.
The folder stayed up.
The folder was the point.
Joanna pulled out her chair, sat carefully — Joanna also sat carefully, Ada noticed; the cost of a long career on cold concrete was a body that needed to be lowered, not dropped — and put both palms on the desk.
“Ada,” she said. “You know we’ve been juggling the operating budget.”
“I know,” Ada said.
“You know the city pulled the partial subsidy in November.”
“I know.”
“Tidemark Outfitters,” Joanna said, “has come to us with a proposal.”
The folder. The folder was navy and matte and had Tidemark’s anchor logo embossed in salt-white on the cover, which was the most Portland thing Ada had ever seen and also told her instantly that whoever had designed it had a budget she did not.
“Six-week sponsorship,” Pete said. “Real money. Real, real money. Operating-gap money. It bridges us through next September if we hit their deliverables.”
“Their deliverables,” Ada said.
Pete’s mouth opened. Joanna’s hand came up an inch, and Pete’s mouth closed, which was a magic trick Ada had been admiring for two years.
“Their campaign,” Joanna said carefully, “is called Real Harbor People. It is meant to celebrate the human side of working coastal towns. Tidemark wants — let me say this in the order Pete sold it to them in — a love story. A community story. Centered on the rink, on the youth program, on the kids, on the Pilots.”
She paused.
“They want a couple,” she said. “A real, local couple. Someone from the rink ecosystem and someone they can put on a sweater in a photograph and have parents at the Penalty Box pat each other on the back about.”
“Ah,” Ada said. Her voice came out very even. She was good at very even. “And — who.”
“That’s the meeting,” Joanna said.
“I’ll go first,” Pete said, which was a sentence no one in any building had ever wanted to hear.
“Hear me out. Hear me out. I have not lost my mind. The face Tidemark wants in this campaign is the face that says legacy. Says cold harbor, warm story. Says the rink is part of the town and the town is part of the rink. We have, in our roster, exactly one human being who looks like that on a poster.”
He stopped.
“Pete,” Joanna said.
“Theo Carmichael,” said Pete. “Starting goalie. Local boy. Camera-magnetic. And the woman we are pitching beside him is —”
“Stop,” Ada said. Quietly.
Pete stopped.
There was a small, terrible silence in the room. Joanna’s eyes met Ada’s directly. Joanna had not pitched this. Joanna had pulled Ada in to make sure she heard it from someone who was not Pete.
“Not him,” Ada said. “I’m sorry, Joanna. Not him.”
“Ada,” Pete said, and now his voice was not the on-stage Pete voice; it was the version of Pete that lived under the spreadsheet.
“I would not be asking — I would not. I know about — I know it ended. I know it ended badly. But you and Theo on a poster is the kind of story Tidemark wants to write a check to. It’s Mercer Bay.
It’s kid grew up here, came home, made good.
The cameras want it. The town will want it. Marin Pell is —”
“Pete,” Ada said.
She had not raised her voice. She was, in fact, smiling slightly, because she could not feel her right hip at all and she always smiled slightly when she could not feel her right hip, and that was the face Pete saw, and Pete read it, in the kind of way Pete always read a room, as encouragement.
“I will be plain,” Ada said. “I will not perform a couple narrative with my ex. I will not stand in front of Mercer Bay or Tidemark or Marin Pell and pretend that an old chapter of my life is the current chapter. If the rink is asking me to keep teaching, I will keep teaching. If the rink is asking me to fundraise, I will fundraise. If the rink is asking me to put on the navy dress and bring the room a glass of wine and sell forty-two memberships, I will. But I am not the woman in the Theo and Ada poster, Pete. That woman left the building.”
She had not meant to make a speech.
She had especially not meant to use the phrase that woman left the building. It had come out of her like something she had been keeping in a back closet for a while.
Joanna’s hand on the desk relaxed. Just a fraction. Like Joanna had been holding the desk in place.
“Got it,” Joanna said softly. “Okay. Got it.”
Pete had the decency to look, briefly, at the floor.
“Okay,” he said, more quietly. “Okay. That is — that’s a no. That’s a clean no. I hear you.”
“Thank you,” Ada said.
“But I have to keep solving the problem,” Pete said, and now he wasn’t really talking to her; he was talking to the carpet and to Joanna and to the navy folder, which was still sitting on the desk like a small, expensive accusation.
“Because Tidemark wants a couple, and Tidemark is the kind of money that bridges us to September, and I am — I’m out of moves, Joanna.
I’m out of moves. The starter said no before I asked, by the way.
I haven’t even sat down with Theo yet. I just know. ”
He drank his water.
He looked at Ada.
“I am sorry I led with that,” he said. “I am genuinely sorry.”
“It’s okay, Pete,” Ada said, and meant it, because Pete was not capable of cruelty; he was only capable of velocity.
“I have to go,” Joanna said, suddenly, to no one in particular. “I have to call the city. I have to call Tidemark and tell them we are working a different angle. Pete, work it. Work a different angle.”
“Working it,” Pete said.
Joanna pulled the navy folder toward her with two fingers, like she was tasting it, and put it in her top drawer.
“Ada,” she said, “go warm up. Take an extra fifteen between sessions. Drink your tea. I’m sorry you walked into that this morning.”
“It’s all right,” Ada said.
She did not ask Joanna, are we going to lose the rink. There was no point. Joanna was already saying it with her shoulders.
Ada walked out of the office and back through the hall. She did not pass Wes this time. She did pass the equipment closet, which had been propped open with a wrench. Wes’s wrench. He’d been adjusting the thermostat. The thermostat now read sixty-three, which was four degrees warmer than the room.
She did not know why she noticed.
She drank her tea on the lobby bench. The ferry was a small bright dot on its way back from Tidewater Island.
The light on the bay had gone from silver to a thin, hopeful gold.
The Barn smelled like cold metal and machine oil and somewhere, faintly, like the cinnamon her bakery-running mother left on every surface she’d ever touched.
In her bag was a notebook she had not opened in three weeks.
In the notebook were her ideas for a skating-arts program.
Adult beginner showcases. Adaptive skating with the rec center across the bridge.
Choreography classes for the kids who liked the music part more than the racing part.
Theater-on-ice, possibly. A gala one year that was not about her performing.
The notebook was not the kind of thing you took out of a bag in the middle of a Tuesday morning at a rink that might be closing.
She left it in her bag.
She drank her tea.
She watched the ferry come home.