She grins back. “I never quit anything.” Simultaneously her best and worst quality. “Does this mean you’re saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Truth?” I ask her. She nods. “Driving Bertha is cool. It feels like controlling some huge, prehistoric beast.”
“I knew it!”
“But you seriously can’t go fast.”
“I won’t.” She waits for me to go on, but I don’t. I’m all out of excuses. Her smile gets bigger. “You’re saying yes.” I try to shake off my lingering misgivings.Please God help me.
“I’m saying yes.”
Maggie kicks her heels into the bed like a little kid and squeals. “It’s going to be so great. Just think about it, I’m going to be an official Zamboni driver! And...and...” She pats my knee in excitement. “Once we’re working together at the rink we can start coming up with your audition routine forStories on Ice!”
CHAPTER 19
Idrift across the ice, trying not to glance at Jeff’s office door every two seconds. Normally, I can forget everything when I’m skating, like the fact that Maggie’s job interview has been going on for forty-five minutes so far, but today I’m struggling. I stop, lifting my hand to chew on a nail before I remember that I’m wearing gloves.
Realizing it doesn’t matter if I look or not, I half spin so that I’m skating backward. The door is still closed. Gathering speed, I turn forward again, extend my arms out and raise my right foot behind me before springing up off the ice with my left. There’s a single heartbeat where I’m in the air flying before I pull my arms in to rotate, spinning two and a half times before landing backward on my right foot. I rotated too early, I felt it, but I still manage to keep from falling, though my hand does kiss the ice when I land. My nostrils flare and I’m ready to try another axel—maybe even a triple—when Maggie emerges from the office with Jeff at her heels, smiling.
My next axel jump is possibly the most perfect one I’ve ever landed.
Jason is laughing—he’s genuinely laughing a few days later—as I describe Jeff’s sour expression when he gave me my shifts back. “He had no choice, since he had to fire David.”
“And that guy just drove the Zamboni into thewall?”
I rest my forearms on the metal table in the visitation room. “David was supposed to be training Maggie, only nobody ever really trained him, so he wasn’t using the guide mark José made on the top on Bertha’s dump tank and he kept overlapping each pass on the ice by like a foot. And when Maggie, who’s had like two days of training, pointed it out to him, he shifted to tell her to—” I eye Mom next to me and soften the actual words David used “—be quietand pay attention. And that’s when he drove into the wall.”
Jason laughs again. “What an ass.”
“Jason,” Mom says with a slight reproof it her tone.
He’s still smiling when he raises an eyebrow at her. “Really, Mom? I’m wearing an orange jumpsuit for the next thirty years and you’re worried about me swearing?”
It’s a guess who goes paler after he falls silent, Mom or Jason, but they both go white as milk and I don’t feel far behind them. Finally, Jason leans back in his chair. “Well, I wish I could have seen it.”
It takes me a second to pick the story back up, and my words are a little jerky when I do. “David tried to claim she distracted him, but Jeff was watching, so...” I don’t relay how David started yelling about Jeff hiring violent little girls, or how Maggie had reached her fill by then and walked away to check on Bertha before David could say more. “Anyway, David was gone, and Jeff was all sweaty and red-faced by the time I got there,” I say, trying to bring the mood back to something lighter. “Bertha is still running and someone’s coming out to make minor repairs on Monday, so I’m back to working every day with Maggie while I train her. It’s been really fun having her there.”
“That’s good, Brooke, I’m happy it all worked out.”
“Yes,” Mom says. “We’ll are very glad.”
We don’t laugh anymore after that. I listen to Mom talk about things Jason already knows or updates on family members who live too far away for us to know very well. I think this is it then; another visit that includes a brief spark of life but ends with us huddled around ashes and memories that have grown cold.
Mom is talking about some cousin in Tennessee when Jason cuts her off midsentence.
“Mom, I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have made a joke about being here. I won’t do it again. But I need you to do something for me.” Mom becomes statue-still beside me, ready to do anything. “Enough with the stories about people I don’t know and never will know.” He turns to me. “Do you care if cousin what’s-his-face is building a cabin or a ranch house?”
“Um...” I say.
“No, you don’t.” Back to Mom. “I don’t even think you care. So tell me something else—something that I can hold on to when you leave. Tell me what’s going on at the library. Tell me what Laura is teaching Ducky to say. Tell me that you’re not just cleaning the ice at that rink, Brooke.” He lets his eyes shut. “Tell me something so I can forget that I’m here, just for a little bit. Please.”
Mom turns her panicked eyes on me, silently pleading. She can’t tell him what’s going on at the library, because she doesn’t work there anymore, and Laura barely speaks to anyone let alone the bird he gave her. And me—I can’t tell him that when I skate, I do it with the knowledge that I’ll never skate anywhere else.
Because of him.
Because of what happened the night he killed Calvin Gaines.
Because of words and reasons only he knows and won’t share. Saying they got into a fight falls so far short of explaining how his friend ended up dead by his hand.
