31. Epilogue – Frankie
One year later
Opening night at Altitude Center smells like fresh ice, and this year I know what that means.
We got married in October, where everyone could see, which turned out to mean the Pines, closed for a Sunday, forty people, Donna crying into the coffee urn, Cami officiating with her glasses off, Micah as best man delivering a toast that was eleven words long and leveled the room.
Fabio wore a bow tie for four minutes, which the marriage license should probably mention was the hardest negotiation of the entire year.
My father, who walked out when I was nine and never looked back, was not there, and I did not wait for him to be.
That sentence took twenty-three years, and by the time I could write it, it cost nothing.
Down at ice level, the ceremony is chaos of the best kind.
Rory wears the C now, and wears it the way Nick taught him without ever once saying it, which is to say he stood at the blue line during the video tribute crying so openly that the jumbotron cut to him and eighteen thousand people made the sound of a city adopting a son.
Micah, in his final season, one more year between the pipes because the new kid isn’t ready and keepers keep, skated the framed 19 to center ice himself.
And my husband, silver at the temples in a good suit, stood on his old ice in street shoes, upright, clean, whole, holding a microphone he barely needed to say four sentences, and the banner went up into the dark with his father’s name stitched under his own, LACHANCE and LACHANCE, because he asked, and the club, which learned some things last year about the difference between a myth and a man, said yes before he finished the sentence.
My new book came out Tuesday.
It’s called Seat 3B, and it’s by Frankie Delaney, no initials anywhere on it, my actual face on the actual jacket, and it opens on a delayed red-eye and a man who tells a terrified stranger that wings are supposed to flex.
It is not Mile High 2. That book stays dead, per a vow I keep like other people keep the sabbath.
This one was written with permission, at our kitchen table, the subject reading pages over my shoulder with his coffee, vetoing nothing, correcting my faceoff terminology, and the whole advance went to the recovery network whose desert facility gets no name from either of us, ever.
The dedication is one line: For the man in the window seat, who let me keep the chapter.
And the whole city has read it in a week, and the whole city already knew, and there is a woman in Ohio, God love her, back in her bathtub, fully clothed, sobbing at chapter one, because the silver fox was real, he was real the whole time, I said so with my name on it, and this time nobody had to investigate anything.
I told them myself. Ask me anything. The file on me stays open forever.
The acknowledgments page took me longer than any chapter. It’s in the back of the book, but I read the last page first for twenty-three years, so I know for a fact some of you flip there before you commit. Here’s what you find:
Thanks to Cami Boothe, first reader, last word, who took her glasses off at every moment that mattered.
To Becca Kaplan, who sold everything I wrote and stood by the one thing I wouldn’t.
To Marisa Sullivan and the book club that took me back.
To Donna, for defending the booth. To Micah Beaulieu, keeper, of everything.
To Rory Locke, who was right: doing it alone is worse.
To Sharon, green and judgmental, eleven books of service, retired with honors to a shadow box over my desk, and to Réjean, her successor, who was a person first. To Fabio, three legs, no secrets, who published the truest thing I ever wrote by stepping on it.
And to Nico: I met you on a plane, and this is what I did.
Every word since is the making of amends. You finish what you start. We started.
He read it in manuscript at the kitchen table and didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he got up and went down the hall, and I found him in his father’s room, sitting on the bench, holding the page, and the room had something alive in it again, and neither of us said a word, because some rooms you just stand in together. Museum rules, except we live here.
The anthem’s starting. He finds me at the glass, ice level, where the seats are ours now, season tickets under both names, two gold squares on a wall that still carries half the city’s handwriting, and he hands me a plastic cup of wine and keeps the club soda, and Rory wins the opening draw clean and my husband makes a low satisfied sound like a man whose work survived him, and I clap at the right time, mostly, and Marisa two seats down flags the one icing I miss, some things are sacred.
“Happy?” he asks, somewhere in the first period, not looking at me, watching the kid run his old lane, his voice gone soft at the bottom, the way it only goes at home.
Twenty-three years I read the last page first. I checked every ending before I risked a single middle, skipped ahead in books, in love, in my own life, certain that the only safe story was a spoiled one.
And here is what I finally know, at ice level, in the open, my name on my books and his ring on my hand and this enormous honest life arriving one unspoiled page at a time: the ending was never the point.
The ending is just where the acknowledgments go.
“Happy,” I say, out loud, where everyone can see.
I don’t check how it ends. I already know. I’m in it.
The wedding happened. You’re invited.
An October morning, forty chairs at center ice, a bench from Trois-Rivières where the altar should be, and a best man’s toast that was eleven words long and leveled the room.
Read Chapter One on the next page