17. Delia
DELIA
He called me the night before and asked if he could come by early.
Not the Grant who would have closed a restaurant for the evening or flown me somewhere I hadn’t asked to go.
Not the man who sent flowers to apologize or hired someone to fix a problem I could have fixed myself.
He asked if he could stop by the rink at six, before the morning session, and bring coffee from the machine in the lobby because he knew I drank it even though it was terrible.
It was the smallest thing he could have asked for. That was why it cost him.
There was nothing impressive about bad coffee at six in the morning. There was no transaction he could point to, no gesture someone else would see and admire. Just him, asking to show up early to a building I ran, with nothing to offer except his presence.
I said yes.
He was waiting outside when I unlocked the side door. Two cups in a cardboard tray, steam rising in the cold. He didn’t try to carry them in like he was doing me a favor. He just held them while I flipped the breakers and turned on the lobby lights.
“Thank you for letting me come,” he said.
I took one of the cups. The coffee was as bad as I remembered. I drank it anyway.
“I have something for you,” he said.
He went back out to his car and came in carrying a bag I recognized. The pro shop logo on the side, Linden Street address printed underneath. He set it on the bench by the boards and stepped back.
I knew what it was before I opened it.
My old competition boots. The ones I’d kept in the back of my closet for seven years, edges sharpened every season even though I never put them on. I’d told myself it was maintenance. That it was practical to keep them ready in case I ever needed them.
I pulled them out of the bag. The leather was still good, but the mounting was new. The blades caught the overhead light, edges clean and true.
“I had them remounted,” Grant said. “And sharpened.”
I ran my thumb along the edge the way I used to. The way my first coach taught me when I was twelve. You could feel it if the hollow was wrong, if the angle was off, if the person who’d done the work didn’t know what they were doing.
The edge was perfect.
“You didn’t have this done at a shop,” I said.
“No.”
I looked up at him. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“Linden Street,” he said. “The counter. I went in after hours and asked the man there to teach me. It took a while.”
“How long?”
“A few weeks. Evenings, mostly.” He hesitated. “I ruined a blade the first time. Paid for it myself.”
I turned the boot over in my hands. The mounting screws were seated perfectly, no stripped threads, no gaps. Someone who didn’t know what they were doing would have cracked the sole or angled the blade wrong. This was careful work. The kind that took hours.
“Why?” I said.
“Because you had them sharpened,” he said. “For seven years. Every season. And you never used them.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had an answer for that.
“You took me to that counter once,” he said quietly. “You had two pairs done. Yours, and a men’s pair you had fitted for me. I never thanked you for that.”
My throat went tight. I remembered that afternoon.
The way I’d stood at that same counter and watched the man measure the blades, the way I’d told him what size Grant needed, the way I’d paid for both pairs and walked out with the bag and a stupid kind of hope that we might use them together someday.
I set the boots down on the bench before I could say something I wasn’t ready to say.
“Put yours on,” I said.
“What?”
“Your skates. The men’s pair.” I stood up and went to the office, pulled the bag out from under the desk where I’d shoved it weeks ago. I brought it back and dropped it on the bench next to him. “Put them on.”
He stared at me.
“You want me to skate.”
“You asked to come early,” I said. “I’m here. So are you. Put them on.”
He opened the bag slowly, like he thought I might be joking. He wasn’t joking. Neither was I.
It took him three tries to lace them properly. I didn’t help. When he finally stood up and wobbled toward the gate, I was already on the ice in my old boots, the ones he’d given back to me with perfect edges.
He stepped onto the ice and immediately grabbed the boards.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said.
“I know.” I skated a slow circle around him. “Bend your knees. Not like that. Actually bend them.”
He bent his knees. His ankles rolled inward and he clutched the boards harder.
“You’re going to fall if you hold on like that,” I said.
“I’m going to fall if I let go.”
“Then fall. You’ll get up.”
He looked at me like I’d suggested he jump off the roof.
“Delia.”
“Let go of the boards, Grant.”
He let go. His arms windmilled and he went down hard on his hip. I skated over and held out my hand. He took it and I pulled him up.
“Again,” I said.
“This is humiliating.”
“I know. Again.”
He let go of the boards a second time. He made it four feet before his skates went out from under him. I caught him by the elbow before he went all the way down.
“Bend your knees,” I said. “Stop locking them.”
“I am bending them.”
“No, you’re not. You’re standing like you’re about to sign a contract. This isn’t a boardroom. Bend your knees.”
He bent his knees. He took two shuffling steps forward and didn’t fall. I stayed next to him, one hand hovering near his elbow, not touching but ready.
“There,” I said. “That’s better.”
He looked at me, surprised. Then he looked down at his feet, lost his balance, and grabbed my arm.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was a forty-four-year-old man clutching my arm in the middle of an ice rink at six in the morning, looking utterly lost, and it was the funniest thing I’d seen in months.
He started laughing too. Quiet at first, then harder, the kind of laughter that shook his shoulders and made him lose his balance again.
“I’m terrible at this,” he said.
“You really are.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I really am.”
He took another step, then another. I let him hold onto my arm until he found something like balance. When he finally let go and managed six steps on his own without falling, I felt something that had been locked tight in my chest start to loosen.
When we came off the ice twenty minutes later, my hands were freezing. They always were. I pulled off my gloves and wrapped both hands around my coffee cup, already gone cold. I lifted it toward my face, ready to press my palms against my own cheeks the way I always did.
Grant reached out and took my hands before I could.
He looked at my face first. Not at my hands. At my face, like he was asking permission for something he didn’t have words for.
Then he took both my hands in his and held them.
His palms were warm. The scar across his left palm was rough under my fingers, the cut from the skate blades all those years ago.
The new marks were there too, the ones from thirty-one hours in the machine room I knew he’d lived in.
His hands were wrecked and warm and steady.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
I just noticed that I hadn’t had to warm my own hands.
Later, we sat at the table in my office with my purchase file spread out between us. The ledger I’d kept by hand for three years, every deposit logged in careful rows. The city’s valuation letter, the building’s specs, the zoning documents I’d been trying to make sense of on my own.
Grant read through it all without touching anything.
“You have the deposit,” he said. “And the carnival fund is solid. The city’s valuation is three-ten. You’re short, but not by much.”
“I know.”
“The gap isn’t the problem. The problem is the case. The city council doesn’t care about the gap. They care about whether you can prove the building won’t be a liability five years from now.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at me. “You need a structure. Revenue projections, maintenance schedules, a sustainability model that accounts for off-season months. The kind of case they can’t say no to because the numbers are airtight and the plan is sound.”
“I’ve been working on that,” I said.
“I know. I read your file.”
I went still. “When?”
“The day I left the letter,” he said. “I sat on your study floor and I read the whole thing. I’m sorry. I should have asked first.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He’d read my ledger, my numbers, the three years I’d saved in careful rows because nobody else was going to save them for me. He’d seen all of it before he ever touched a single machine in the basement.
“Why didn’t you put your name on any of it?” I asked. “The work you did. The deal you burned. Why didn’t you make sure I knew?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“A gesture is for being seen,” he said finally. “That wasn’t what this was.”
I believed him. I didn’t know why, but I did.
“Will you help me build the case?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And the money—” I started.
“Is yours,” he said, without looking up. “All of it. I know the terms. Not a cent.”
He pulled the valuation letter toward him and started making notes in the margin. I pulled the revenue file toward me and checked his numbers against mine. We worked in silence, passing pages back and forth, his structure and my figures lining up like they’d been waiting to fit together all along.
For the first time in seven years, we were building something that belonged to both of us.