Chapter 22
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By the end of March, the campaign was, very quickly, a thing that had happened.
The Bay Beacon did not, in the end, run the long-lens sidebar.
Marin Pell’s agency partner sent Joanna a final week-six report on a Tuesday, with the bridge contract attached as a clean PDF, and Pete Donatelli read the closing sentence — Tidemark looks forward to a future referencing relationship with Harbor Ice Rink as a community story benchmark — aloud to himself in the lobby three times with increasing delight before he printed it and pinned it to the corkboard with the youth-team photos.
Marin sent Ada, separately, a short personal email at six on the morning the agency report went out.
Ada — your speech is on the agency reel for the year.
I will not be sending you the reel. I will not be sending the reel to Tidemark.
It is the agency’s, and only the agency’s, because I do not want it on a sponsor deck somewhere where you cannot say no to it.
You can have it if you want it. I do not think you will want it. Thank you. — M
Ada did not, in March, ask for the reel.
She did not ask for the reel in April either.
The bridge contract — one operating year of Tidemark Outfitters funding for Harbor Ice Rink — was countersigned by Joanna on a Wednesday afternoon in her own office, with Pete in the corner crying without restraint, with Frenchie in the other corner saying we are not crying about this, Donatelli, with Joanna’s late husband’s framed sailboat photo on the desk facing the right way for once.
The morning youth program was, by the first week of March, formally on the rink’s operating-year budget.
It had a stipend.
The stipend was small.
The stipend, on the page, said youth program coordinator — W.
Berglund, stipend, season one, and it was a number Wes could plan against, and Wes — when Joanna pushed the printed budget sheet across the desk to him on a Friday afternoon — looked at the page for a long beat with both hands flat on the desk, and said, very quietly, thank you, Joanna, and signed it.
Joanna underlined the sentence on her yellow legal pad — YP role and stipend — Wes B.
ask, January — twice with her good pen, and then drew a small careful checkmark in the margin.
Theo Carmichael, at a Pilots practice in early March, took Wes aside in the dressing room after a Tuesday skate.
“Wes. Lewiston has called. I do not know yet what I am doing with that. I am telling you first because I think I owed you the first telling.”
Wes nodded.
Theo nodded back.
“Thank you, Theo.”
Theo clapped Wes once on the shoulder, briefly, the kind of clap a man gives a man when he wants the gesture to do the work that words won’t, and walked out of the dressing room into the rink corridor.
They had not, in the conversation, mentioned Ada.
They had not needed to.
Theo’s future, after that, was a thing Theo would have to decide with Frenchie and Joanna and the season in front of him.
Wes’s future, for now, was the same crease, the same backup line on the roster sheet, and a new youth-program title on a budget page that had his name on it because he had asked.
He kept it.
Ada brought the notebook to Joanna in mid-March on a Tuesday afternoon at three.
She brought it to Joanna’s office. She wore her usual jeans, her usual sweater, her usual canvas jacket. She set the notebook on Joanna’s desk between them. She sat down.
“Joanna. I would like to propose a new program at Harbor Ice.”
Joanna picked up the notebook.
She read it in silence for fourteen minutes, with her good pen in her hand, while Ada sat in the metal chair across from her with both hands in her lap.
At the end of fourteen minutes Joanna closed the notebook.
“Halloran.”
“Yes.”
“This is the director of skating arts line item.”
“Yes.”
“You have been holding this for fourteen months.”
“Yes.”
“You did not bring it to me before because.”
“Because I needed to know I was bringing it to you because I had built it, not because I was being handed it as a romance prize. The program is a part-time stipend. I have written the math. I am qualified to build it. I am asking to be allowed to build it.”
Joanna was very quiet for a long beat.
Then Joanna said, in her plain weary sturdy voice, “Halloran. The job is yours.”
“Joanna.”
“I have been waiting for fourteen months for you to ask me for it. I am proud of you for bringing it to me with math. I have not, in twenty years at this rink, had a member of my staff bring me a fourteen-month-old notebook with math in it. The job is yours. I will draft the offer letter this afternoon. We start April first. I am going to cry in a minute. Please leave my office.”
“Thank you.”
“Get out.”
Ada got out.
She walked, in her coat, in her flat boots, down the staff hall, past the equipment closet — the door of which was closed, because Wes was in there hand-replacing the rubber seal with a flathead screwdriver and a single small swear word she could hear through the door — and into the lobby.
She did not knock on the closet door.
She would tell him tonight, at her kitchen table on Pillsbury Street, where he had, by mid-March, eaten twice a week for three weeks in a row.
She sat on the lobby bench.
She drank her tea.
She watched the ferry come back from Tidewater Island.
She did not, on the bench, cry.
She had stopped, in the last month, performing the not-crying-in-public the way she had performed it for two years.
She felt the small kept stone under her sternum.
The stone had moved, again, in the last month.
It weighed less than it used to.
She drank her tea.
The ferry came home.