Page 126 of Knottingley Ever After
“It is my grandfather’s cabin.”
Her arm slowly lowers. The pointing finger curls back into her palm. The wide-eyed indignation reorganizes itself, in real time, into something a little quieter, a little more attentive, the small private clocking of a woman who has, in the past nineteen hours of road tripping with a captain, learned how to read the difference between when he is being casually informative and when he is, with measure, opening a door.
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
She follows me up the porch steps with the careful quiet of a guest who has, for the first time since I met her, decided not to mouth back.
The cabin is, as my grandfather built it in the spring of 1971, a low brown timber-frame structure set back forty feet from the small private inlet of the lake, with a long covered porch on the south face and a wide deck wrapping around to the back. The wood-stain has aged to the soft greyed-out brown of a coastline at low tide. The chimney is brick, original. The front door is the slab of unpainted cedar my grandfather hand-routed his own initials into on the day he hung it, and that has, in the fifty-four winters since, taken on the slow honest patina of a thing that has been touched by many hands and loved.
Iris stops at the foot of the porch.
She is, in the small angled afternoon light slanting through the trees, looking at the cabin in the precise way I was hoping she would look at the cabin, which is the small reverent look ofa person who has just realized she is being shown something the man showing it to her does not, in fact, show very often.
“Captain.” Quiet. “You brought me somewhere that is genuinely serene to you.”
Yes.
Yes. I did. We are not, however, going to make a whole monologue out of it. We are going to absorb the moment, open the door, get the bags inside, and get the woman in front of you a shower.
“I come here,” I tell her, fishing the keychain out of the deep pocket of my jeans, “whenever things get loud enough at the house or in the building that I need to be brought back into alignment. Grandfather offered the keys to me when I made captain my sophomore year. I have used the cabin, on average, twice a season since.”
“And you brought me.”
“I brought you.”
Push down the small embarrassed thing your sternum is doing about that, Kavanagh. You are a captain. Pinky is going to spend the entire forty-eight hours making jokes about it. Brace for the jokes.
“For the record,” I add, swinging open the front door and stepping aside to let her in first, “my grandfather is also aware of you.”
Iris stops, halfway across the threshold, with her overnight bag still in one hand and her eyes the round wide grey of an Omega receiving information she did not prepare for.
“HUH?”
“Mm.”
“HOW?”
“One, there is the small ongoing trending phenomenon on TikTok that has resulted in your face being the home page of the platform’s sports-hashtag stream for two weeks running. He is,on the platform himself, an unlikely user. He has the app on the iPad my eldest sister loaded for him at Christmas. Two, he has remained, in his quietly nosy retirement, deeply involved in the operational politics of college hockey, which means he watches our games, reads our scouting reports, and has, on the matter of his own grandson’s captaincy, opinions. Three, he is a major sponsor of the Knot-Pucking League Organization. Which, I will warn you in advance, means that the first question he is going to want to ask you when you eventually meet him is going to be about KPLO development funding.”
“KPLO.”
“KPLO.”
“Henderson at admin name-dropped it once at the housing desk in passing. I went looking for it on the website. There is, in the public-facing internet, almost nothing about it. Which struck me as, ah. Suspicious.”
“It is not suspicious. It is intentional. The organization keeps a low public profile for strategic reasons that I will gladly walk you through later, but my grandfather is one of the founding sponsors and a quietly significant funder of the merit scholarships that financed, among others, the airplane ticket that brought you to Minnesota.”
I have just delivered a piece of information that is going to land in her in approximately three seconds.
Three.
Two.
One.
Iris’s mouth opens. She does not, in the end, find words. She shuts it again. She tips her head against the door jamb. She closes her eyes for a small breath the way a person closes her eyes when she is filing a thing she will need to come back to.
