Chapter 3
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Wes Berglund woke up at four-twenty in the morning because his alarm broke and the silence woke him before the alarm could.
He lay in the dark for ten seconds, listened to the wind shoulder the storm window, and got up. He was a man who, when forced to choose between feeling sorry for himself and putting on his pants, had been choosing pants without comment for a decade.
He made coffee. He stood at the kitchen counter in his apartment over Frank Nakamura’s hardware store on Eames Street and drank the coffee leaning against the sink. The apartment had one good window, which faced the harbor. The harbor was the color of an old nickel. The sky was a shade darker.
He thought about the boy in front of him today, who was nine and small for his age and was about to find out that his goalie pads were too big for him.
Riley had been on Wes’s morning ice since the program started.
Riley had a stick that had been spray-painted black to hide a previous owner’s name.
Riley had a parent — singular — who worked the kind of shift where you came in to fold laundry at two in the afternoon and went back out at six in the morning, and so Riley got dropped off at the rink by their grandmother, who waited in the car with the heater on a magazine until the morning practice ended.
Wes had given Riley a pair of his own old practice pads at Christmas, claiming, with a goalie’s affectless honesty, that he had been planning to throw them out and had been waiting for a kid to take them off his hands.
He had not been planning to throw them out.
They had not been waiting for a kid. They had been Wes’s spare set since junior and they had still smelled, faintly, like the laundry detergent his mother bought when he was sixteen.
The pads, predictably, were too big.
Riley had not said anything about the pads being too big. Riley had simply taped them. With hockey tape. In ugly, careful loops up the back of each calf and around the ankle, like a kid binding their own splints.
Wes had not said anything either. He had nodded once and said, “Solid wrap, kid,” and that was the most he had said about anything in two weeks.
He finished his coffee. He rinsed the mug. He put on his coat. He went down the back stairs into the hardware store’s cold loading bay, started his truck — which started, which it usually did, which he was unreasonably grateful for every time — and drove the eight blocks to the rink.
The Barn at four-forty was the version of the Barn no one but Wes and the heat ducts ever saw.
He unlocked the staff door. He flipped the four switches that brought the lobby up to half-light.
He checked the equipment closet thermostat.
He set the rink humidifier. He went into the dressing room, turned the kettle on for Joanna because Joanna was going to be here in forty minutes and Joanna ran on a kettle, and then he sat down on the bench inside the rink and laced his skates and went out and started to skate slow loops to warm up.
Skating alone in an empty rink before sunrise was, Wes had decided when he was nineteen and home from his second junior season, the closest thing he was going to get to prayer.
The ice in the dark hummed under him. He could hear his blades.
He could hear the rink hum its rink hum.
He skated easy figure-eights against the boards and then loops down the middle and then his pad-on, pad-off goalie shuffle that he did because it was muscle memory and because it kept him in his body.
Outside, somewhere, a snowplow on Main Street complained at the air.
He thought about three things, in this order:
He thought about his older brother. He thought about Henrik in front of him in a basement in junior, holding up a worn-out catching glove and saying, try this, kid, the dummy mitt is going to make your hand mad.
He thought about Henrik in front of him on the front porch of their mother’s house, telling him he had quit again, this time for good, this time, no, listen, Wessie, this time.
He thought about the call from the Lewiston police.
He thought about not skating for three months after, and then about skating for ninety minutes a day every day for a year after that, and about how here he was, ten years later, still skating before sunrise, still doing the thing the dead brother had loved, still, in some way, holding the line for somebody who wasn’t here to ask him to.
Then he thought about Riley’s gear.
Then, after that — because his brain made him, and because he had been making peace with the fact that his brain made him — he thought about Ada Halloran’s coffee.
He had given Joanna Mendez exactly one sentence of warning two years ago, when Ada moved home and started teaching learn-to-skate, and the sentence had been: I don’t know her.
It was true. He had not gone to school with her.
She had been five years younger and a thousand miles ahead of him in any room they had ever been in.
She had left for Toronto at fourteen and come back at twenty-eight, and the woman who came back was not the kid he had vaguely registered in his pre-junior childhood.
The woman who came back was a careful, watchful person who taught small children to fall like potatoes and who walked across the lobby at a slight, deliberate tilt that he had identified about six weeks in as a hip-and-not-a-shoe problem and had filed away without comment.
He knew her coffee because he had been at the Penalty Box one morning when she had given the new barista her order, and the barista had written it on a sticky note for the wall — oat milk, two sugars, hot — and Wes had read the sticky note when he was waiting on his own black drip three days later and had remembered it the way he remembered everything.
He had not engineered being at the Penalty Box that morning. The Penalty Box was inside the rink. He was at the rink at the same time as Ada five mornings a week.
He knew her warm-up music because she played it through the lobby speakers before her early classes and the music wandered out into the rink corridor, and on a quiet Thursday a year and change ago he had stopped on his way to the equipment closet because he had heard the same eight bars three times in a row, and had stood in the hallway long enough to figure out it was a slow waltz on a piano.
He had not stopped because of Ada. He had stopped because he had no idea why a learn-to-skate teacher was looping a waltz on a Thursday at sixty-five percent volume.
He had figured out, eventually, that she did her own warm-up to it before her class warm-up. That she stood on the cold lobby floor with the speakers playing low and her hand on the bench and counted lyrics in her head and stretched her right hip out by inches.
He had not asked her about it. He had not mentioned it to anyone. He had walked the long way around to the equipment closet for two years, instead of the short way, so that he would not interrupt her.
He knew which kid in her Saturday class she pretended not to favor because Mira’s father had come into the equipment closet last fall looking for a smaller helmet and had been about to cry and Wes had walked him through helmet sizing and then through the proper way to thank his daughter’s teacher, which was don’t pity her; thank her, and Mira’s father had thanked Ada the next Saturday by handing her a sleeve of homemade banana bread and Wes had watched, in his peripheral vision, the way Ada had held the banana bread and the way Ada had touched Mira’s shoulder while she ate it standing at the front desk.
He had filed all of that. He had not, he was reasonably sure, done anything with it.
He had not, he was certain, done anything creepy with it.
He had simply been in the building. He had simply listened when she spoke.
He had simply, on a small number of occasions, fixed the thermostat before she got there because he had figured out — by being in the building — that she was always there before anyone else.
This was the part of his life he had not planned to ever speak aloud about.
This was also the part of his life that had walked up to him in the lobby yesterday afternoon, looked him in the eye, and said terms.
He skated three more slow laps. The sky outside the rink’s high small windows was turning the color of dishwater. Somewhere outside, a gull yelled.
The staff door clicked behind him.
He looked up. It was Riley. Riley was early, again.
Riley was always early. Riley’s grandmother was apologetic about it and Wes had told the grandmother twice in two months that Riley being early was not a problem, was, in fact, the opposite of a problem, and the grandmother had said, that’s nice of you to say, Mr. Berglund, but I know it’s a problem, and Wes had then stopped having that conversation, because it was not the kind of conversation that improved by being repeated.
“Coach,” Riley said.
“Riley,” Wes said.
He skated to the boards. Riley was already at the bench, in their coat, in their too-big pads, in their handwrapped tape, holding the chipped black stick.
“Coach,” Riley said. “Question.”
“Shoot.”
“If we make travel, do we have to go to Bangor on a school night.”
“Probably.”
“My grandma can’t drive that far at night.”
“Okay.”
“So if we make travel —”
“We have,” said Wes, “a long time to think about that. The travel roster doesn’t get cut until April. You let me think about it. I’ll think about it. You worry about your butterfly.”
“Okay.”
“And get on the ice, kid. You’re losing time.”
Riley grinned, briefly, and put on their helmet, and got on the ice.
Wes did not say what he had been thinking, which was: we’ll get you to Bangor, Riley. We’ll get you to Bangor if I have to drive you myself.
He had learned a long time ago that you didn’t say a thing like that to a kid until you knew the thing was true.
By six, the morning program was on the ice and Wes had three kids in butterflies, two in shuffling drills, and Riley working through a stack of pucks at the post like a small grim accountant.
By six-thirty, the parents were starting to drift in to watch.
By seven, the morning program ended and the kids dispersed back to school.
By seven-fifteen Wes was off the ice, in the dressing room with his pads in his lap, beginning the long quiet ritual of stripping them off and stowing them.
Pete Donatelli appeared in the doorway with his hair sticking up on the right side.
“She said yes,” Pete said.
Wes did not lift his head.
“Tell me what she said,” Wes said.
“She said yes. She said she wants to meet with you alone first. She said terms. She said —”
“Pete.”
“What.”
“How did you ask her.”
Pete drew himself up to his full height, which was five-foot-six and a half.
“I asked her,” he said, with dignity, “in the order you instructed me to ask her. I led with Tidemark wants a couple story, Theo is the wrong choice for ten reasons, here is a different choice, the choice is up to you. I did not lead with fake-date. I did not lead with Wes thinks. I led with Joanna and I have a proposal and your sign-off is everything.”
“Good.”
“And she said yes.”
“And she wants terms.”
“And she wants terms.”
Wes pulled the strap on his left pad and set the pad aside on the bench.
He looked at it. The leg pad was twelve seasons old and had a long gouge across the front from the Bristol County playoff series where Sully had taken a wrist shot off a defender’s stick and the puck had sailed into Wes’s leg with the speed of a small angry car.
He had not replaced the pad. The pad still worked.
He felt, briefly, the strange surge a goalie sometimes got at the start of a third period, which was something like all right, then.
“When does she want to meet,” he said.
“This afternoon. She suggested the Penalty Box. I told her the Penalty Box is going to have ears, and she said — and I quote, Wes, you’ll like this — I’m aware of the ears, Pete, that’s why I picked it.”
Wes laughed. It came out small, but it was the first laugh he had had in a week, and the sound landed in the dressing room like a coin on a table.
“All right,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be there at three.”
“You’re sure,” Pete said.
“I’m sure.”
“You realize the optics.”
“Pete.”
“What.”
“Optics are your job. Go do them. Leave my optics alone.”
“Yes,” Pete said, faintly. “Yes, all right.”
He started to leave. Then he stopped, half-turned, and said, “Wes.”
“Yes.”
“This is going to be a thing, Wes. You know that.”
“I know,” Wes said.
He sat on the bench for a long time after Pete left. The dressing room smelled like rubber, sweat, and very faint bleach. The clock on the wall ticked through the seven-fifteen mark and the seven-twenty mark and a long stretch of his life he was not yet ready to count.
His brother surfaced again first — all the times Henrik had told him say what you want, kid, before they cut it out of you, and how he had not, in fact, listened.
Then Riley, and Bangor.
And last, a woman in a sapphire dress he had never seen but had read about, once, on a long-ago website, because Mercer Bay had thrown her a homecoming reception three months after her injury and someone in town had emailed the link to everyone, and he had clicked it the way you click anything anyone sends you in a small town, and he had read it once and closed the tab and not opened it again.
That was all he had clicked.
That was the worst of it.
He told himself that, sitting on the dressing-room bench, the way you told yourself that the leak in the east wall was just the east wall until the day it wasn’t.
The kettle in the corner pinged. Joanna had come and gone for her water already; the kettle was just shutting itself off for the next cycle. He stood up, put his pads on the rack, and went to face the rest of his day.
In four hours he had a coffee at the Penalty Box.
In four hours he had terms.