“I know, Coach Maria.”
“You’re doing great, buddy.”
“I know.”
The ache lived where it always lived, just under the sternum, low and patient and harsh. I leaned on the rail and I watched six small people in puffer jackets find their feet on the ice, and I told myself, that this was enough. That this was, in fact, more than enough. That I was lucky to have it.
Most Saturdays, I almost believed it.
“Big finish, tinies. Big finish. Hands up—hands up, Theo, both hands—andbow.”
They bowed. They bowed like four-to-seven-year-olds bow, which is to say they bent abruptly at the waist and most of them kept going and Hannah went down on one knee on purpose because Hannah had decided last week that she was a princess and princesses curtsied, thank you very much. I clapped from behind the rail. I always clapped at the end.
“That was beautiful. All of you. That wasbeautiful. Off you come. Slow, Theo. Not stopped! There you go, buddy.”
They came off in a ragged little line and I held the door for them, hand on the latch, body angled so that if anyone tipped on the threshold I’d catch them. Nobody tipped. Nova thanked me on the way past—she always thanked me even though she was just six years old—and the rest of them piled onto the bench in a heap of puffer jackets and Velcro and the high thin voices kids use when they’re proud of themselves and trying not to show it.
I knelt on the rubber matting in front of Theo and got to work on his rentals.
“Were my eyes up, Coach Maria?”
“Your eyes were up, buddy. Mostly.”
“How much mostly?”
“Like seventy percent mostly.”
“Is seventy good?”
“Seventy is excellent for a Saturday.” I worked the lace out of the bottom hook and started the long unweave. The rentals were Riedells from, I was guessing, 2009. The eyelets were warped. You had to know them. “Next week we’ll go for seventy-five.”
“What about a billion?”
“Billions’s a goal for next week.”
I got the second boot off, set it neatly under the bench, and stood.
The knee clicked. Of course it clicked. No one heard, of course, especially as the playlist had cycled toA Whole New Worldand Hannah was singing along, badly, into Theo’s helmet.
The lobby door wheezed open and the mothers came in with the paper cups from The Daily Grind, the ones with the kraft sleeves. They came in their puffers too, the adult version: long ones, in navy and oatmeal and one good camel, and they collected their small ones with distracted competence.
“Mae, jacket. Hannah, where’s your other glove. Theo, baby, did you have fun?”
“My eyes were up seventy percent!”
“That’s wonderful, sweetheart.”
“It’s excellent for a Saturday. Coach said.”
I helped where I could. Found Hannah’s glove, which had migrated under the bench. Re-Velcroed the strap on Mae’s helmet that Mae had Velcroed wrong. Said the small warm things mothers liked to hear, which were variations onshe did so well todayandhe’s getting so much strongerandhonestly, just a delight, and I meant all of them. I never said anything to a parent about their kid that I didn’t mean. It was the one rule I had carried over from before, when an awful lot of people had said an awful lot of things to me they hadn’t.
The lobby thinned. Mae went. Hannah went. Theo went, with a backwards wave from his mother’s hip that I returned from behind the bench. The door wheezed twice and the rink got quieter.
Kate Linden was still there. Nova’s mom.
Kate was—and I want to be fair about this, because Kate was a good person and I liked her—the kind of mother who hung back. The kind who let the others clear out first. The kind who waited. She was forty maybe, or close, with the kind of jaw and the kind of posture that told you, before you’d known her thirty seconds, that she had skated, and skated seriously, and skated long enough ago that her body was now angry about it in the same quiet way mine was. State level, I’d been told. She sold real estate now. She had brought Nova to me on a Saturday in September two years ago and she had not, in two years, missed a single class.
She was standing by the bench with her camel coat folded over her arm and her empty paper cup in her hand, and her shoulderswere set in a particular way I had not seen them set before. Slightly forward. Slightly braced.
