Chapter 6 #2
“The second thing,” she said, “is that I am going to tell you what is on the table if this does not work, and I am only going to tell you once, because I do not want to give you the weight of it every day, and I also do not want to lie to you. I owe you the math, because you said yes.”
“Joanna —”
“Listen, Ada.”
Ada listened.
“If Tidemark does not sign the bridge in February,” Joanna said, “we go to a reduced operating year. We cut hours. We let go of one front-of-house position, possibly two. We cut the rink down to forty hours a week instead of seventy. We lose two of the four learn-to-skate weekend sessions. We lose the morning youth-program ice time. That is the first thing that goes. Wes’s morning kids.
The reason is that the ice time before seven a.m. is the most expensive ice time we run, because of compressor cycling, and it is the time that produces the least revenue.
If we are cutting, that is the first cut. ”
Ada set the brioche down on the kitchenette counter.
“How — how soon.”
“If they pull, we publish the schedule change in March, effective April. Wes’s morning kids would lose ice time five weeks from now.”
“Riley.”
“Yes.”
“Joanna.”
“I know. I am telling you because I want you to know what we are protecting and I want you to know that we are not protecting it without a cost, no matter what we do. The cost is real either way. I am asking you to be — I am asking you to be careful with yourself, because the math is heavy, and I did not want you to be carrying the math without knowing what it added up to.”
Ada nodded.
She did not, in the end, cry in the kitchenette.
She had been very good, since coming home, at not crying in kitchenettes.
She picked up the brioche and pulled off a corner and held it out to Joanna.
Joanna took it. They ate the brioche together, standing in the cold light of the staff kitchenette, listening to the kettle on the counter come up to a boil.
“Joanna.”
“Yes.”
“I will not let you lose Riley’s morning ice.”
“Ada —”
“That is not a promise to the rink. That is a promise to you and to me.”
Joanna closed her eyes for a second.
“Thank you,” she said. “And — Ada — for the record. The campaign performing well is — that is you. That is you and Wes. You walked outside this morning and you held that man’s hand in the cold for six seconds, and you let yourself look at him like he was a real person, and the town has been talking about it ever since.
The town does not need much from you. The town just needs you to be honest about the bits you are willing to be honest about, and to keep the bits you are not willing to be honest about behind a door. ”
“Joanna.”
“What.”
“Have you been to therapy.”
Joanna laughed. It was a tired, real laugh. “I have been to therapy for fifteen years, Ada. I am the way I am with therapy. Imagine me without.”
Ada laughed too.
She left the kitchenette with the bag from her mother under one arm and the math from Joanna in her chest and Wes Berglund’s face from this morning sitting, neatly and quietly, on a shelf at the back of her mind where it had not asked to be put.
She had a four o’clock private lesson with Glenn the forty-six-year-old.
Glenn had brought her a thank-you Christmas card three weeks late and was very nervous about it.
Glenn had also, since the Reporter photo had gone up, written her a text that said not my business but I think it’s a great photo of you and a great photo of you both, and she had, with surprise, found that she did not mind it.
She skated with Glenn for forty-five minutes. Glenn fell. He fell like a soft potato. He had been listening to her instructions for a month. She told him so. Glenn lit up like a marquee.
After he left she stood at the boards in the empty rink and watched the ice. The Zamboni was sitting at the gate. The rink lights were dimmed to half. The walls of the Barn held in the cold the way old wood always did.
Riley, she thought.
Riley taping pads in the dressing room. Riley’s grandmother in the running car in the parking lot at five-thirty in the morning. The row of small backs against the boards on Saturday mornings, the ones she pretended not to favor in her own learn-to-skate class.
And her notebook. The long unwritten page that began with the words Skating Arts at Harbor Ice — the one she had been keeping for a year and had not shown anyone, and which she had not, before today, allowed herself to think about as part of the math.
Maybe, she thought.
Maybe, after this.
If the rink survived the campaign, maybe she could — maybe she could go to Joanna with the notebook.
Not as a romance prize. Not because Wes Berglund had ordered her coffee with oat milk and two sugars in front of a photographer named Cass.
But as a thing she had been quietly building toward for a year because the rink had been keeping her alive and she had wanted, very privately, to keep it alive back.
She stood at the boards a long time. The ice did not answer her, because the ice never answered anybody. The ice only ever asked you to come stand on it.
Behind her, far off down the corridor, she heard the soft clatter of a wrench being set down on a counter.
Wes.
She did not turn around.
She let the sound be a piece of the building.
Then she went home.