Chapter 9 #2
Ada had thought, in advance, that Family Skate Night would feel like a normal Friday at the rink turned up two notches.
She had not understood that it would feel like a small carnival.
Within the first ten minutes there were forty children on the ice.
Within twenty there were sixty. Parents stood at the boards with paper cups of cocoa.
The Pilots had been encouraged to come, and four of them had — Sully, two defensemen Ada did not know by name, and Theo Carmichael, who arrived at six-fifteen alone, in a charcoal coat, and shook Joanna’s hand and nodded politely at Wes and went to the corner with Frenchie and did not come within thirty feet of Ada.
She watched him for one beat. The watching was professional. She did not feel anything in particular. She turned away.
Wes did the family skate the way Wes did everything: by being in the building.
He spent the first hour at the boards holding small humans up by their armpits and helping them step onto the ice.
He spent the second hour in slow loops around the rink, with a different child on each loop, holding their mittened hand at the height of his hip and skating, with infinite patience, at the pace of a six-year-old.
He did this with such uncomplaining competence that he became, by minute thirty, the most popular man in the room.
By the start of the second hour, a small line of children had formed at the gate to skate one loop with Coach Berglund.
Ada was three loops in with her own line of children when Cass tapped her on the shoulder.
“Photo,” Cass said.
“With.”
“With Wes. With the two of you. We’d like a couple of the night. Marin wants a centerpiece for the Monday post.”
“All right.”
“Center ice.”
“All right.”
Ada looked across the ice. Wes was just finishing a loop with a four-year-old in a pink coat. He caught Ada’s eye. He skated over.
“Photo,” he said.
“Photo,” she said.
“Cass have a posture in mind.”
“Cass has a posture in mind. We are going to skate one slow loop together. We are going to do it in the middle of the rink. We are going to hold hands.”
“Got it.”
“After,” Cass said, “I am going to ask you to pause and look at each other in the middle. We are going to do the same lookat we did Thursday morning at the rink. If you can do that, that is the shot.”
“Got it,” Wes said.
They went.
Center ice in a half-full rink with sixty children skating around them was not, it turned out, intimidating.
It was easy. Ada had been on much more frightening ice in much more frightening company.
She skated next to Wes for one slow loop.
She held his hand. They did not perform.
They skated. Wes was a strong skater the way a backup goalie was a strong skater — controlled, easy, conservative in the legs, no flourish at all — and she paced him without thinking about it, the way she paced any partner on any ice.
Her right hip did not click. She did not, for one minute and twenty seconds, think about her right hip at all.
They stopped at the center.
They looked at each other.
She held his eye.
A child two feet to their left — Beck, the eater of scarves, who had taken to skating with the absolute confidence of a boy who would either run a hedge fund or rob one — let out a small, completely unimpressed eww, which prompted a round of giggling from his pod of fellow six-year-olds, which prompted Wes to laugh on the inhale, which prompted Ada to laugh, which Cass got on camera.
“That,” Cass said, lowering her camera. “That is the shot. Thank you.”
They skated to the boards.
There was a man waiting for them at the boards. He had a small old-school point-and-shoot camera around his neck, and a press lanyard from a paper Ada did not recognize, and he was smiling in the kind of careful way that meant he was about to ask for something other than the photo he was holding.
“Wes,” he said. “Ada. Hi. I’m Doug, from the Bay Beacon. I’d like — could I get one of you two — could I get a kiss? On the boards? Brief? It would be — the picture editor wants —”
Wes did not, for a half-second, react.
Then Wes turned, slightly, and put his back against the boards. He kept his hand loosely curled at his side, the side that was not toward Ada. He smiled at Doug. He did not, technically, make any unkind expression.
“Doug,” Wes said. “We’re not doing the kiss tonight.”
“It would only —”
“We are not doing the kiss tonight,” Wes said, again, evenly.
“It’s family night. There are sixty kids on the ice.
We are going to keep the photos family-night-shaped.
Cass over there has been doing the campaign photography.
If you want, she can send you the candid from a minute ago, which we are happy to have on the wire.
We are not doing a kiss for camera in front of the youth program. Thanks for understanding.”
Doug looked, for a beat, like he was going to argue.
Then Doug looked at Wes, who was leaning against the boards in his coat, six-foot-three of polite refusal, and Doug decided not to argue.
“All right,” Doug said. “Cass — Cass, hi, can I —”
Cass intercepted Doug. Cass took Doug six feet down the boards and began, in her gentle thermos voice, to explain who she was and what the campaign was and what permissions Doug could and could not have, and Doug listened, and Wes turned, very slightly, back toward Ada.
He did not say anything.
He did not touch her.
He did not gesture.
He did not look at her with any expression at all.
He just stood at the boards next to her in his coat, breathing evenly, and waited for her to choose what came next.
She said, very quietly, “Thank you, Wes.”
He said, very quietly, “Yes.”
Beck, who had been watching from three feet away with the air of a person attending a play he had not paid for, said, also, can I have a cookie now, and Ada said yes, and Beck went to get a cookie, and the moment was over.
Marin Pell, fifteen feet down the boards, had seen the entire exchange.
Ada did not, that night, see Marin again. But on Monday morning, by way of Joanna, a note arrived from Marin: Pulling the Beacon press request from the campaign rota. Going forward, only Cass at family events.
The note had, beneath it, the small careful handwriting that Marin used for personal notes: Good work, both of you. Better than the kiss would have been. — M
Ada read the note three times.
She put it in her notebook.
She skated on her own for forty-five minutes after closing, in the empty rink, with the overhead lights at half and the cello version of the waltz playing low through the lobby speakers down the hall.
Her right hip clicked once at minute four and did not click again.
She did not, that Friday night, allow herself to think about the equipment closet on Tuesday. She thought about the fact that she had not had to bear weight in the public moment of the family skate, and that the absence of that had been, in its way, a small clear gift.
She skated until her legs were warm.
She went home.
She slept.