Chapter 10
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The morning after Family Skate Night, Wes was on the ice at five-twenty with eight kids and a brand-new problem.
The problem was visible from forty feet away, when Wes had stepped off the staff hall corridor and into the rink.
The problem was sitting on the bench inside the rink with their arms crossed and their face under their helmet doing the small careful furious thing that was, in nine-year-old terms, the closest cousin to crying.
Riley.
Wes set his coffee down on the boards. He pushed open the gate.
He did not skate over. He walked the perimeter of the boards on the back side of the rink at a pace specifically calibrated not to suggest urgency, which was a pace he had learned from Coach Frenchie thirteen years ago, the night Wes himself had taken a slap shot off the throat in juniors and had needed Frenchie to come to him slow enough that the world stopped spinning. Wes walked slow now.
He sat down on the bench next to Riley. Not too close. He left half a stick-length between them. He looked, briefly, out at the ice.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, Coach.”
“How’s it.”
Riley shrugged.
“Helmet on or off,” Wes said.
“Off,” Riley said.
Wes pulled Riley’s helmet off, very gently.
Riley had a sweaty patch of hair sticking up at the back of their head from sleeping on it wet, and a small chapped patch on the side of their nose, and Riley was, indeed, not crying.
Riley had, however, gotten as close to crying as Riley got, which was a stage Wes had learned to recognize: the eyes red-rimmed and the bottom lip extremely steady and the jaw locked at a small private angle.
“What’s up,” Wes said.
Riley did not answer for a beat.
“My grandma said,” Riley said finally, “that the morning ice is going to get cut.”
Wes did not, for one half-second, breathe.
He breathed.
“Where did your grandma hear that,” he said, gentle.
“Her friend in the office at the rec center said her cousin who is on the city council said. She didn’t think — Coach, she didn’t think you were going to tell us. She told me last night because she wanted me to know first. From a person. Not from a — not from a flyer.”
“Okay.”
“Is it true.”
Wes thought, fast, about the four or five sentences he was about to choose between. He thought about the sentences for two seconds. Then he chose.
“It is not yet decided,” Wes said. “It is on the list of cuts that the rink would make if our sponsorship campaign does not come through. The campaign is going well so far. Joanna is — Joanna is doing the math every day. Your grandma’s friend is one degree of separation away from a person who has been in a meeting.
The thing she heard is real. It is one of the possibilities. It is not yet the decision.”
“Oh.”
“I am telling you this because you are nine and you are about to ask anyway. I am not telling you to scare you. I do not want you to carry it on your own. I do not want you to have to keep it from your grandma. You can tell your grandma I told you. You can tell her I told you that we do not know yet, and we are working on it, and that if it does happen, the morning practice is going to look different, but I am not going anywhere and the kids are not going to lose me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, Coach.”
“Now go work on your butterfly.”
Riley put their helmet back on.
Riley sat for one more second.
“Coach,” Riley said.
“Yes.”
“If they cut the morning ice. The lady at the office at the rec said it was because the morning ice costs a lot of money. If they cut it. Will it cost a lot of money to bring it back.”
“Yes,” Wes said, very quietly.
“Okay.”
“Go.”
Riley got up. Riley got on the ice. Riley skated, gravely and small, to the post on the far side of the rink and began to set up the puck stack the way Wes had taught them.
Wes watched for a beat. The other kids were already in the corner running through the warm-up drill that Wes had written on the dry-erase board in the dressing room.
They were nine and ten and they were doing it because Wes had told them to.
He stood up.
He went and skated his loops.
He was, by the end of practice, a slightly different version of the man he had been when he walked into the Barn at five-fifteen.
He skated the kids through the practice he had planned.
He did not change a thing. He did not pull the morning short.
He did not give Riley a speech. He stood at the post and let Riley work through the puck stack in twelve-puck blocks and gave Riley the gentle, professional, ungentle critique he gave every kid every morning, and Riley accepted it the way Riley accepted everything, which was with the small dignified frown of a person carrying a stick painted black to hide the previous owner’s name.
At the end of practice, Wes did the thing he had been planning to do since five-twenty.
He went into Joanna’s office.
Joanna was at her desk. She had a coffee. She had a stack of insurance forms. She had a small pink eraser in her hand that she was using, with controlled fury, on the back of a printed spreadsheet.
“Wes,” Joanna said, without looking up.
“Joanna,” Wes said.
He sat down in the chair across from her without being asked.
He did not start by talking. He waited until she finished the line she was erasing.
He had learned, a long time ago, that you did not interrupt Joanna Mendez when she was doing math in pencil.
He waited. The eraser finished its line.
The pink rubber crumbs fell on the desk.
Joanna put the eraser down. Joanna looked up at him.
“I have a request,” Wes said.
“Go.”
“I would like the morning ice time decision to be — I would like the decision about the morning ice time to be discussed with me before it is finalized. Even if the answer is yes, we are cutting it. I want the conversation. I do not want to read it in a flyer. I do not want, also, the youth program kids to read it in a flyer. I would like to be the person who tells them, when there is a decision. Either way.”
“Wes.”
“That’s the request.”
Joanna looked at him for a long beat.
“Done,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I should have offered. I am sorry I did not offer.”
“You have other math.”
“That is not an excuse.”
“Joanna.”
“Yes.”
“I have one other ask.”
“Go.”
“If the morning ice does get cut, I would like the rink to — I would like the rink to give me the announcement timeline before it gives the public. I want a window of forty-eight hours so I can call the parents myself. Each of them. Personally. Before the flyer goes up. I will write a script with you. I will not — I will not say anything you have not approved. But I want the parents to hear it from me before they hear it anywhere else.”
“Wes Berglund.”
“What.”
“Done. Done before you finish the sentence.”
“Thank you.”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“There is a third ask. There is a third ask in your face. It is the third ask you have been wanting to ask me for fourteen months. You are going to ask it now or you are going to walk out of this office and not ask it for three more months. Ask it now.”
He almost laughed.
He sat back.
He looked at the ceiling. He let the look at the ceiling go on for one full breath.
“All right,” he said. “When the dust on Tidemark clears. When we know whether the bridge is signed. I would like — I would like the youth program to be on the budget line. I would like it formally allocated. I would like a stipend that is a number you can plan against, even if the number is small. I would like the program to have a named role on the staff roster. I would like that role to be mine, or to be someone else’s if you decide it should be someone else’s, but I would like it to exist and to appear on the page.
I have been running the program on goodwill for four years.
The goodwill is fine. The goodwill is not a plan. I am asking for a plan.”
He stopped.
He waited.
Joanna did not, this time, look at him.
She looked, instead, at the framed photo of her late husband on the sailboat on her desk.
She looked at it for a long count.
Then she pulled a fresh sheet of yellow legal paper out of the drawer in front of her, picked up her good pen, and wrote, across the top, in her square neat handwriting: YP role and stipend — Wes B. ask, January.
She underlined it twice.
She looked up at him.
“Done,” she said.
“Joanna.”
“You wait for the campaign math to clear, and then you and I sit down and we do this for real. With Marin’s number in front of us. With Frenchie at the table because Frenchie should be at the table. We do it once. We do it right.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Wes Berglund.”
He stood up.
He went out of the office.
He went, on his way back to the equipment closet, past the lobby. Ada was at the front desk. She was in her canvas jacket and a knit hat the color of red wine and she was holding a paper cup of tea and she was, when he came around the corner, just looking up because she had heard his footsteps.
She did not say anything.
She did not need to.
He could see the small careful question in the angle of her chin. Are you all right. The question was professional. The question was also, somehow, not entirely professional.
He nodded once.
She nodded back.
Neither of them said Berglund or Halloran.
He went into the equipment closet. He closed the door behind him. He stood for a beat with both hands flat on the metal shelf, breathing, and let his face be the face that he had not let it be in front of Riley or Joanna or Ada.
Then he ran his thumb over the small careful sticky note he had been writing on yesterday, on which he had written, in his all-caps lefty print, the words YOUTH PROGRAM — ASK J.
He crossed it out.
He stuck the sticky note inside the door of the supply cabinet. The cabinet door had three layers of sticky notes inside it now, from four years of trying to remember small things he had not said out loud.
He shut the cabinet.
He went back out into the building, because that was what he did, and there was a leak in the east wall that was going to need its bucket changed before the morning was much older.
That afternoon Marin Pell’s office sent a single email to Joanna, copied to Pete and to Wes and to Ada.
The email had a subject line that read: campaign update — week 3 numbers.
The body of the email read:
We are pleased with where the campaign sits at the three-week mark.
The wharf walk-and-talk drove a 22% lift in the regional Tidemark engagement audience over the prior 30-day average.
The donor reception generated three follow-up site visit requests and one inbound from a regional bank’s CSR office.
We have noted with particular interest that the youth program reels — Coach Berglund’s morning practice clip and the Family Skate Night candids of children skating with the Pilots — are outperforming the couple content by a factor of roughly 1.
6 in shares and 2.1 in saves. Cass is being asked to weight more of next week’s coverage toward the youth program.
We will pass through revised shot lists in the morning.
— Marin
Wes read the email three times.
He read it once for what it said. He read it twice for what it implied.
He read it three times for what it implied about Marin Pell, which was that she was not building a couple campaign at all.
She was building a community campaign that had a couple at the front of it, because the couple was load-bearing for the first three weeks of a six-week story.
Marin was as smart as Wes had hoped, which was almost more troubling than if she had been a heavy.
He forwarded the email to no one.
He did not forward it to Ada.
He did, however, walk down the corridor to the lobby that afternoon, where Ada was teaching her three o’clock private lesson to Glenn the forty-six-year-old, and he stood for one minute at the edge of the boards and watched Glenn fall like a soft potato.
Glenn fell. Ada laughed. Glenn lit up like a marquee. Ada said again, and Glenn fell again.
Wes did not interrupt.
He walked away.
In his pocket, his phone buzzed.
It was a text from Coach Frenchie, who had not, in five years of knowing Wes, ever sent him a text message that contained any character other than a letter or a period.
The text said: good for you, kid.
Wes did not know whether the text was about Joanna, or Riley, or Ada, or Marin’s email, or whether Frenchie was simply, finally, after thirteen years, saying it about the whole of him.
He put the phone away. He went to skate.
The sky over the harbor was the color of a clean dish.
He could see all the way to Tidewater Island, which was the color of a clean dish too.
On a shelf in the rink office, where he had left it, sat a maintenance notebook in his all-caps lefty print — twelve lines of small, plain, unsensational notes among the bucket counts and thermostat readings, written down only because he was the kind of man who wrote things down before he forgot them.
He did not think about the notebook. He had no reason to. It was just one more thing he kept.
He skated his loops.
The east wall, when he passed it on his way off the ice, was still leaking, and the bucket was still under it, and Wes emptied it as he went by, the way he had been emptying it for four years, without ceremony.