Chapter 8
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Ada had pulled her hat down over her ears. She had taken off her boots and pulled her knees up to her chest with her stockinged feet on the dashboard, the way a person sat in a car when she trusted the driver enough not to perform posture, and Wes drove and tried not to take it as a credential.
Somewhere south of Bath, the highway went down to two lanes and the radio went out and Ada said, “Tell me about the youth program.”
“Why.”
“Because I am asking you to.”
“Okay.”
He told her about the youth program.
Saturday-morning skill sessions and Tuesday goalie clinics and Thursday-morning skate-and-shoot.
He told her about Riley, in particular, because Riley was the kid who lived in the front room of his head, and the only kid he was — he had to admit it — measurably allowed to favor.
The grandmother in the running car at five-thirty.
The chipped black stick. And, after a moment, the spare set of pads he had handed Riley at Christmas with an excuse that was a polite lie.
“How big are they,” Ada said.
“A size too big.”
“Riley tape them?”
“Riley taped them. With hockey tape. Carefully.”
“Wes.”
“I know.”
She did not say anything for a long moment. The salt grass on the right of the road went on for a mile.
“Do they have a parent in the picture,” she said.
“They have a parent. Singular. The parent is a person who does shift work and is doing everything they can. The parent comes to Saturday games when they can. They sometimes can’t.”
“And the grandmother brings Riley to morning practice.”
“Yes. In her car. With the heater on a magazine. She did not used to wait in the car. She used to come in. She broke her hip in October and she will not come up the steps until the steps are dry. The steps are not dry from November through March. I told her once that she could come in through the side door. She told me, very politely, that she would think about it. She has not thought about it.”
“Mm.”
“That is not anyone’s fault. That is the geometry of being eighty-one and not wanting to fall in a building you have been in before.”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“How long are you going to be able to keep the morning ice.”
He did not answer right away. He kept his eyes on the road. He thought, briefly, of his promise to Frenchie — I will come to you first if I am not good enough for this — and reminded himself that this was not the thing he had been thinking of when he made it.
“That depends on Marin Pell,” he said. “And on the bridge funding. Joanna told you.”
“Joanna told me.”
“I figured.”
“She told me on day one. Which is a thing I have not been allowing myself to think about as much as I should have been.”
“Mm.”
“How long had you known.”
“I have known,” Wes said, “since November. Joanna told the staff in early December. I asked her then if she’d let me run the program off-schedule for free, without ice time, just on the lobby floor for stretches and chair drills if it came to that.
She told me she would think about it. We are at the she will think about it stage. ”
Ada did not say anything.
The sedan rolled along. The harbor side of the road went past a small fishing dock. A man in a yellow jacket was carrying a bucket. A black dog was running ahead of him at the kind of pace that meant it could not see what was in front of it.
“Wes,” Ada said. “I am going to ask you a personal question.”
“Okay.”
“Why didn’t you say no.”
“To what.”
“To Marin. To Pete. To the campaign. You knew, in November, that the morning program might be cut if we couldn’t fund the year.
You knew Marin’s deliverables were going to involve a couple story.
You knew Pete was going to land on the woman in town the campaign happened to need.
You knew you’d have to volunteer to keep the campaign from imploding on Theo.
You knew. And you knew you’d have to be photographed with a person you weren’t dating, and you’d have to be a public face for six weeks, and you do not — you do not strike me as a man who has spent his life looking for public faces. ”
“No.”
“So why.”
He drove for a beat.
“Because,” he said, “if the morning ice goes, those kids do not skate. There is no other rink. There is no other program. There is no other coach. The kids who would lose the morning ice are not kids whose parents can drive them to Bangor or Portland for the rest of the season. Riley would lose the morning ice. I would not be able to fix it from the lobby floor. I told Joanna I would try. I would try. I would not succeed. So when Pete walked into the lobby and said Tidemark money is on the table, the question was not do I want to be on camera for six weeks. The question was will I do this for the building. The answer to that question was yes. The question to do I want to be on camera for six weeks, I have not technically answered yet. I will let you know in March.”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“That was the longest sentence you have ever said in front of me.”
“Halloran.”
“Yes.”
“You did ask.”
She laughed. He liked her laugh in the car, he had decided, the way a person liked a weather pattern they did not get often.
It was a brief shower. It made the road bright.
It made him drive five miles slower for the next three minutes because he did not want to break the spell of having made it happen.
“All right,” she said. “Here is what I’m going to do.”
“Go.”
“I am going to go home tonight, and I am going to take a notebook out of my bag that I have not opened in three weeks, and I am going to spend Sunday writing out an actual plan for an actual skating-arts program at Harbor Ice. Adult beginners. Adaptive skating. Choreography for the kids who like the music more than the racing. A gala one year that is — that is not about me performing. I am going to put numbers on it. I am going to bring it to Joanna in a month, after the campaign, when we have the bridge money, when the building has air. I want the morning program to keep going and I want to be part of the reason the building has air, not because I’m photogenic but because I have a thing I am good at and I have been pretending I did not have it. ”
“Ada.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say something.”
“I was going to say good.”
She looked over at him.
“That counts as something,” she said.
“I retract it.”
“Don’t retract it.”
“Okay.”
She turned to look out the window. The salt grass had given way to a long stretch of low spruce and the spruce, in the slate-gray light, looked like a set of small dark animals leaning against each other in the cold.
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for telling me about Riley.”
“Anytime.”
“Don’t say anytime.”
“Why.”
“Because I will hold you to it, and the next thing I’m going to do is ask you about whether Riley needs a different pair of pads, and I think we both know how that ends.”
He laughed. He laughed real, this time. He laughed the way he had not laughed in two years, which was a thing he registered and then chose not to think too hard about.
He turned the heater down a notch, because she had warmed up.
He kept driving.
They got back to Mercer Bay at three in the afternoon.
The sky over the harbor was bruised purple along the western edge, and the wind off the bay had started to do the thing it did when a snow front was four hours out.
He dropped her at the porch on Pillsbury Street.
He carried her bags up the steps. He did not come in.
They did not, by their own rule, do hugs in the parking lot for no reason.
He did, at the door, stop and look at her.
“Halloran.”
“Berglund.”
“Tomorrow’s day off.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t come to the rink.”
“Wes.”
“Come Monday. Tomorrow, sleep. Write in your notebook.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Sorry.”
“That was suggestion-shaped. I’ll allow it.”
“Thank you.”
She unlocked the door. She turned back.
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“You did a thing this morning.”
“What.”
“In the car. With the heater. The dial moves the airflow up. You moved it. You moved it because I was cold. You did not say anything about it. You just moved it.”
He stood very still.
She looked at him for a long second.
“Don’t apologize,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to.”
“Don’t. I noticed it. I am telling you I noticed it. That is the entire content of this sentence. I am not asking for an apology. I am telling you the noticing happened. Goodnight, Berglund.”
“Goodnight, Halloran.”
She went inside.
He went down her porch steps and across her gate and back to the sedan, which he had to return to Bree before sunset.
He did not think about her for a while. He drove the sedan back to the lot.
He returned it. He walked the four blocks home through the gathering dark.
He went upstairs to his apartment and changed out of the shirt he had been in for a day and a half and stood at the kitchen counter making himself something resembling dinner from a can of soup and a piece of toast and a hardboiled egg.
He thought, with his hands in dishwater at the sink, about the line I notice you.
He thought about it for a beat, then for a minute, then for the rest of the evening.
He had been very good, since coming home, at not letting himself think about being noticed.
He was going to have to be careful with this.
He looked at his hand in the soap.
He turned the water off.
He went to bed at nine. He was up at four.
The next morning, when he came back into the rink, the lobby thermostat had been adjusted overnight by no one.
It read sixty-three. The Barn was still cold.
The east wall was still leaking. The kettle in the dressing room was still on its base.
The Tidemark folder, which someone had left out, had been put away.
The campaign was on. The town was talking.
It had not yet, he reminded himself, even started to be the hard part.