Fifteen
The drive to The Penalty Box is quiet. Whistler’s still sleeping under a fresh coat of powder that caps the bike racks like marshmallows, and the air has that sharp, pine-and-cold smell that only happens the week before Christmas.
I keep both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, and I do not think about two nights ago.
About any of it.
Inside, the garland along the backbar glows soft gold, threaded with Wolves burgundy and gold ribbon.
Delilah had dragged the boxes of decorations up from the basement two days ago, set on infusing some holiday spirit into the pub.
She’d even wrestled a five-foot tree into a galvanized bucket, which now throws little Christmas-light constellations across the rows of bottles, and set up a donation bin for the local toy drive by the front door.
On the middle shelf, the crystal decanter Gabriel brought sits front and center.
I unboxed it last night, after the bar emptied and there was nothing left to do but stand alone in the silence.
The decanter is classic, heavy, and undeniably expensive—the perfect prop to prove to the tourists and the media that our Wolves partnership is thriving.
And it has to thrive. We’re two and a half months into our three-month probation.
If we don’t lock in the permanent contract for the rest of the regular season and the playoffs, this bar goes under.
A municipal suspension right now would kill the deal instantly.
I stare at it for approximately three seconds before I flick the sound system on and crank The Strokes loud enough to rattle the floorboards. Then I do what I always do when my territory is threatened: I fortify.
Starting in the kitchen, I aggressively scrub the grease traps. I focus on the physical drag of the brush across steel rather than the way my right hand, the one he held while his thumb traced slow, burning circles across my knuckles, seems to have developed a long memory.
Stop.
I scrub harder.
By 7:30 a.m., I’m balanced on a stepstool in the back hallway, trying to tape the frayed wiring of the flickering emergency exit sign, when the front door jingles.
“Either you’ve lost an earring or you’ve completely lost your mind,” Delilah announces over Julian Casablancas’s vocals, kicking the door shut with her heel. She’s balancing a cardboard tray with two coffees and a paper bag that smells like butter and heat.
“Just checking the sightlines,” I lie, stepping down and wiping my dusty palms on my jeans.
“Uh-huh.” She sets the breakfast down on the bar and gives me a once-over. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Ham and cheese croissant,” she says, sliding the bag toward me. “And coffee from the Bean. Black, just like your soul.”
I haven’t had an appetite since the courier dropped the envelope the day before yesterday, but my stomach physically hollows out at the smell.
I wash my hands, dry them on a tea towel, and pull the croissant from the bag.
The pastry is still warm, flaking apart over the bar top.
My teeth sink into melted Gruyère and salty ham, and I suppress a groan.
“You’re a lifesaver,” I say before taking a gulp of dark roast. The bitter heat grounds me.
Grinning, Delilah peels off her mitts, her cheeks pink from the cold. “You’re welcome.” She winks, taking a bite of her own breakfast and chewing as she surveys the room. “Are we hosting Christmas or the World Juniors? Because you’ve polished the taps so much I can see my childhood.”
“The bylaw inspector,” I say, wiping a stray crumb from my mouth and reaching for my maintenance notebook. “The notice said within seventy-two hours. Today is day three. They’re coming.”
The notebook page looks like a battlefield of highlighters and sticky notes, each one representing a known fault line in this building.
COMPRESSOR. brEAKER PANEL. And, the latest: DEAD WOLF.
The mechanical wolf hasn’t so much as twitched since its backup battery fried during the blizzard—during the moment that I am not dissecting right now, that is filed and locked and staying locked.
“Okay. Triaging,” she says, brushing her hands off and checking her watch.
“It’s almost eight. Reza is definitely awake.
You do the books, I’ll call him. I know he quoted us sixty-two hundred for a new compressor we can’t afford, but I’m going to beg him to come over and do a patch job.
Just enough to keep the walk-in humming if the inspector points a thermometer at it. ”
I exhale into a smile that feels slightly more human. “Thanks, Lilah.”
She softens, studying my face. “You know what this place is, right?”
“The source of my quarter-life crisis?”
She side-eyes me. “Home ice. Your dad’s woodgrain. Your fingerprints. People come in from the cold and know exactly where to hang their coat. They aren’t going to take it away over a flickering bulb, Ivy.”
My throat tightens. I nod once. “Yeah.”
Before we open the doors to the public, I pull my phone out, kill The Strokes, and reluctantly switch the audio to the mandated “Holiday Tourist” mix—a playlist I put on before Christmas to keep the après-ski crowd spending. Michael Bublé croons from the corner speakers.
The place smells like orange peel, cinnamon, and Ulf’s simmering chicken stock. The mechanical wolf wears a knit scarf I looped around its neck this morning, trying to make the dead, unapproved “amusement device” look more like a festive mascot and less like a liability.
I pause in front of the cash register, my hand resting on the scuffed, nicked wood. I look at the framed photo of my dad tucked behind the till. His smile offers the same steady warmth it always has, and an ache twists behind my sternum the way it always does when I wish he was here.
“What would you do, Dad?” I murmur.
No answers. Just the ticking clock.
Reza arrives just after the lunch rush, slipping in through the back door in his worn canvas jacket with his toolbox in one hand and a thermos of his wife’s tea in the other. He takes one look at my face and sets the thermos on the nearest table.
“Dokhtar,” he says—daughter in Farsi—in that quiet, even way he has when he’s about to tell me something I need to hear without making me feel small. “Let’s see how much time we can buy this compressor.”
I take him to the walk-in. He crouches in front of the unit, humming to himself, running a weathered hand along the casing.
He knows exactly how bad it is; he’s the one who gave me the replacement quote months ago.
But right now, he assesses the current damage with the patience of a man used to keeping old things alive.
“You’ve been running it hard,” he says.
“I’ve been running everything hard.”
He glances up at me with his patient brown eyes. “Patch today. But Ivy, you will need the new compressor before spring. This one is tired.”
“I know.” I crouch down beside him, passing him the channel-lock pliers when he reaches without looking. “Can you keep it breathing until January?”
He makes a noncommittal sound, which from Reza means yes, probably, don’t push me.
We stay like that for a while, with him working and me handing over tools without being asked, the way I did as a teenager when I’d follow him around on my dad’s maintenance days and pretend I was learning carpentry instead of absorbing the company of a man who had no agenda except fixing what was in front of him.
By the time he packs up, the compressor is humming steadily enough, the breaker for the exit sign has been re-wired with proper gauge, and a patch of the cracked kitchen exhaust duct is sealed with high-temp tape that will hold through spring if God’s feeling generous.
I pull the emergency rate from the safe in the office—cash, because Reza doesn’t trust e-transfers and I don’t have the bandwidth to argue—and press it into his hand with a thermos of Ulf’s brandy-infused glogg replacing the tea he came with along with a tin of Birgitta’s homemade pepparkakor to bring home to his wife.
He waves off the thanks before I can articulate them. “You are exactly like your father,” Reza says, tucking the thermos under his arm. “He would patch a sinking boat with tape just to keep the doors open one more day. He just forgot to teach you what to do when the tape finally gives out.”
I watch him go out the back door.
He didn’t forget. I zip my hoodie against the cold bleed from the alley. He just figured I’d have time to learn that part on my own.
The holiday cheer feels like a thin veneer over a live wire. Every time the door opens, my pulse spikes, expecting a clipboard.
The axe falls at 4:15 p.m.
A man in a heavy parka steps in, carrying a rugged tablet.
His badge reads Raj Kumar, Resort Municipality Bylaw Reza’s patch holds, and the reading clears the threshold with a margin I don’t love but will take.
Next, he requests the fire-safety permit for the mechanical wolf before moving to the back hall.
When he finally stands beneath the repaired exit sign, the bulb mercifully decides to cooperate, shining a steady, unbroken red.
He asks questions in the clipped, practiced shorthand of someone filling in fields on a form. I answer. He nods. He asks again.
I hover two steps behind him, my hands shoved deep in my pockets so they’ve got somewhere to be, but his manner gives me nothing to brace against—no flicker of aggression, no moment where the form feels like a weapon.
By the end, he’s almost conversational.
“General compliance is in good shape for a building this age,” he says, lowering the tablet.
“There are items I’ll need to flag, but nothing that reads as an imminent safety crisis.
Kitchen temperature margins, rear signage wiring, occupancy placard for the front entrance, and the mechanical device will need an updated permit and proof of recent inspection. ”
“My handyman was here today on the compressor and the breaker,” I say. “And I can print the occupancy placard right now.”
“That’s fine—you can submit documentation with your formal response.
” He pulls a business card from his jacket and slides it across the bar.
“I’ll have the preliminary report filed with the municipality by Monday.
They process the findings and issue the formal notice from there, with your compliance deadlines. Standard procedure.”
“We’ve operated safely like this for over two decades,” I say. “You know we’re not a hazard.”
He meets my eyes with the steadiness of a man who has heard this exact sentence before. “I’m sure you have. My job is to document current conditions against current code. The rest isn’t up to me.” He pockets his pen. “Happy holidays, Ms. Hayes.”
I watch him go.
Then I retreat to the office and pull a marker from the desk. I start a whiteboard list in tidy, block letters:
1) WALK-IN COMPRESSOR.
2) EXIT SIGN / brEAKER.
3) OCCUPANCY PLACARD.
4) WOLF BATTERY/PERMIT.
The caps make it look doable. Caps make everything look doable.
I print the occupancy placard from the municipality and slide it into a cheap plastic sheet protector. I tape it to the front wall. Four items are on the list. One tick.
The bitter taste doesn’t leave.
We survive the dinner push. Between orders, I run on adrenaline and muscle memory—pulling pints, calling orders, keeping the till moving.
The Christmas-light constellations bounce across the ceiling.
The toy drive bin overflows. The bar smells of pine and spilled beer and the particular warmth of too many bodies.
Late into the evening, the air thick with the smell of fried food and low, anxious energy, every TV in the room is tuned to the Wolves game in Edmonton.
I’m wiping down the bar when the crowd around me shifts, groaning in that collective, sinking way that means something’s gone wrong on the ice.
“And that’s going to be a costly penalty for Gabriel Castellano,” the play-by-play announcer says, cutting clean through the noise.
The camera cuts to Gabriel skating toward the sin bin, his jaw locked, his expression the particular blank fury of a man punishing himself.
“Two minutes for slashing late in the third. The Wolves simply cannot afford these unforced errors.”
I stop. The cloth sits still in my hand.
Unforced errors.
I look at the crystal decanter on the backbar. At the bylaw notice clipped to the office board. At the toy drive bin that my father’s regulars have been stuffing since Wednesday. At the checklist with its one small, hard-won tick.
I start wiping again.