Chapter 23
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It was a Saturday in late April and the lobby was at sixty-three degrees because Wes had set it at five and the kettle in the staff kitchenette was on because Wes had filled it at five-fifteen and the lobby door had been unlocked at six-thirty because Wes had unlocked it at six-thirty and the cello version of the waltz was playing softly through the lobby speakers at sixty-five percent because Ada had put it on at six-forty-six in the kind of small private ritual she had decided, somewhere in March, to keep keeping.
She was on the lobby bench in her coat with her thermos.
She was doing her warm-up.
The eight-second descent her physical therapist had drilled into her hands like a piano scale was now, after three months of having a man in the building who paid attention to where she was sitting, more like a six-second descent because the bench had been moved forward two inches that winter so that her right knee did not have to clear the back rail.
The bench had been moved on a Sunday morning in early March, after Wes had asked.
He had asked the way he asked most things: in the lobby, with his coffee in his off hand, in the voice of a man who had decided to risk being wrong out loud rather than be right in his head.
He had said, Halloran. Would moving the bench out two inches help your knee, or would that make the lobby wrong.
She had been, when he asked, halfway through her warm-up, with her thermos beside her. She had thought about it for a beat. She had said, Berglund. It would help my knee. The lobby will live.
He had said, all right.
He had said, I’ll do it this morning, after class. I’ll move it slow. If, when you sit on it tomorrow, the lobby is wrong, I’ll move it back.
She had said, Berglund.
He had said, yes.
She had said, thank you.
He had moved the bench that morning, after her class, with a hand on each end and a careful eye on the line of it against the wall.
He had moved it the slow two inches. He had stepped back.
He had looked at the bench, and at the wall, and at the lobby door, and at the spot where her right knee would be at six-forty the following Tuesday.
Then he had nodded, once, to himself, and walked back to the equipment closet.
She had sat on the moved bench on Tuesday and her right knee had not clicked.
She had stood up, looked at the bench, laughed once quietly to the ceiling, and gone to teach her class.
That had been March.
This was a Saturday morning in late April.
The Tidewater ferry, this morning, was already out of the harbor mouth, because the year had turned far enough that the ferry now ran a six-fifteen schedule.
The light over the bay was a thin clean spring gold.
The salt grass along the parking-lot fence had begun to lose the gray of February and to remember the green of last June.
The lobby bench, today, had on it: Ada in her coat, her thermos of tea, a folded piece of paper, and Wes Berglund’s goalie mask.
The goalie mask was on the bench because Wes had set it down beside her when he had come in from the rink to refill his coffee, and he had not, in coming out, picked it back up.
He had said, I’ll grab it on my way back to the dressing room, Halloran, and he had walked to the staff kitchenette to refill his coffee and he was, when Ada looked up, walking back toward her across the lobby in his work jeans and his old practice sweater, with the coffee in his off hand.
He stopped at the bench.
He looked at the bench.
He looked at his mask on the bench beside her right hand.
He looked at her.
He said, in his neutral goalie voice, “Halloran. Are you holding my mask hostage.”
“I am not.”
“Halloran.”
“I am admiring it.”
“Admiring it.”
“Yes.”
“Halloran. This mask is older than two of my drills.”
“I know.”
“I am — I am going to — I am going to pick the mask up and walk to the dressing room. Are you going to let me.”
“Berglund. Sit.”
He sat.
He sat on the bench beside her, with his coffee in his hand and his goalie mask between them and her thermos between her knees.
He did not, in sitting, lean toward her.
They had, by April, learned the small public posture they were going to use in the lobby of the Barn during operating hours.
The posture was the posture of two coworkers who happened, also, to be the rest of each other’s lives, and the posture worked.
She picked up the folded piece of paper.
She held it out to him.
He took it.
He looked at it.
He looked at her.
“Halloran.”
“Yes.”
“What is this.”
“Open it.”
He opened it.
It was a single small unlined sheet of paper. On the paper, in her small slanted handwriting with the particular sharp uptick on her t, were two sentences.
The first sentence said: Wes Berglund. I have been a person in love with you for closer to five months. I have made up my mind.
The second sentence said: Will you have dinner at my mother’s house on Friday.
He read the paper twice.
He looked up at her.
He did not, immediately, speak.
His face did, in the lobby, in front of the front desk, in full view of a learn-to-skate parent who had just come through the door in a puffy coat, the small careful thing he did when his face was about to do a thing he did not want it to do in public, and he held the face hard enough that the learn-to-skate parent did not notice.
He folded the paper in half.
He put it in the inside pocket of his coat.
He said, very low, “Halloran. Yes.”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“That is — that is the second sentence.”
“Yes.”
“You did not answer the first.”
“Halloran.”
“Yes.”
“The first sentence is the entire reason I have built my life around being in this building at six in the morning for the last two years. Halloran. I love you back. And yes — I will have dinner at your mother’s house on Friday.
I will have dinner at your mother’s house on every Friday for the rest of my life, if you and your mother will have me. The first sentence is also yes.”
She did not, in the lobby, in front of the learn-to-skate parent in the puffy coat, cry.
She did not, in the lobby, perform anything.
She did, after a beat, set her hand on the bench between them, palm down, on top of his goalie mask.
He set his hand on top of hers, palm down, very lightly.
The hand was warm. So was hers.
The learn-to-skate parent in the puffy coat walked past the front desk without looking at either of them, because the parent had been raised in this town and knew, instinctively, that two people on the lobby bench at six-fifty-three on a Saturday morning with a goalie mask between them were doing a thing that was not, today, for her.
Ada turned her hand over under his. He took it.
They sat for one minute in the small clear light from the high front window.
Then Ada picked up her thermos, took her hand back, stood up, said, “I have a class at seven, Berglund,” and walked across the lobby to the AV cubby to start her playlist.
He sat on the bench for another full beat, with the goalie mask beside him and the small folded piece of paper in the inside pocket of his coat.
Then he picked up the mask.
He went to the dressing room.
The Saturday morning practice was at seven-fifteen.
Riley was at the boards at seven on the nose, because Riley was always at the boards at seven on the nose.
The chipped black stick was in their hand.
The taped-up too-big pads were on their legs.
The grandmother, in the red knit cardigan, had brought a thermos of soup for Ada in case Ada was cold after her class, and was, in this moment, on the lobby bench drinking from a paper cup of decaf Bridget Halligan had quietly handed her ten minutes ago because Bridget had decided, by April, that Riley’s grandmother was now a fixture of the building, and fixtures of the building got decaf at the door.
Wes did not, that Saturday, do anything particularly different.
He ran his morning practice. He worked Riley through the flopping butterfly. He gave the kids the small clean notes he always gave them. He stood at the post.
Ada taught her seven-thirty class.
Beck — the eater of scarves, who was, by April, no longer eating his scarf — was working on a slide stop.
Mira, with her dinosaur sticker still on her left knee pad, was working on a forward crossover.
The Theo in the back of the class — the six-year-old Theo, who was unrelated to the other Theo and who Ada had, by March, stopped flinching about — was working on his soft potato.
The little army of mittened soft potatoes were, in their twenty-week careers, very good now, and Ada was, by the end of the spring term, going to start them on the easier kinds of edges.
Glenn the forty-six-year-old came in at nine for his Saturday morning private lesson in his Sunday sweater, and Ada — who, in the kitchen at home, in front of Wes, in her own apron, on a Thursday night in late March, with a glass of wine on the counter — had told Wes that Glenn was the kindest person who had ever paid me to teach him to fall, set her thermos down at the boards and turned, very smoothly, into Glenn’s hour, and Glenn fell, and Glenn lit up, and the morning kept being a morning.
The east wall, at ten-fifteen, was leaking.
Riley’s grandmother, at ten-thirty, was still on the lobby bench with the empty cup of decaf and a paperback novel she had brought because she had decided, this spring, that she might as well sit inside the warm lobby and read while Riley finished, instead of in the cold car with the heater on a magazine.
The grandmother was reading a romance novel set in Ireland with a green cover.
Bridget Halligan, walking past her with a tray, had asked, Mrs. Henderson, is it any good, and Mrs. Henderson had said, Bridget Halligan, in my opinion, the female lead has not yet earned the kiss on page eighty-two, but I am going to read on out of charity.
Bridget had said, carry on, ma’am, and walked on.