Page 105 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Same tan brick underneath. Same parking lot with the long crack running diagonal to the entrance, repaired once and split again because the freeze-thaw never agreed with the concrete; maintenance crews kept patching it anyway.
I pulled into a space near the door and sat for a second with the engine off.
It was nine-forty. The marquee by the road still read PUBLIC SKATE SAT 1-3 in magnetic letters that had not been changed on Tuesdays since 1994. Somebody had taken the K out of HOCKEY on the side of the building and never put it back.
I told Ranger to stay. Got out. Walked across the lot with my handsin my jacket pockets and something tight in the back of my throat.
The front desk was a man my age who had not aged kindly. He looked up from a laptop that had seen better days and blinked at me twice before his face changed around recognition.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. Not loud. Like he did not want to embarrass either of us. “Evan?”
I nodded.
“Jimmy Duarte,” he said, and I felt the name catch up to the face.
Two years older than me. Goalie. Quit at sixteen when his knees gave up. I had forgotten he was here.
“Heard you were doing all right.”
“Some days.”
He did not push. That was the thing about this town, now that I was standing in it again. Nobody pushed. They let you arrive at your own pace.
“Public skate’s at one,” he said. “But the ice is yours till eleven-thirty if you want it.”
“How much?”
“Get out of here.” He waved a hand. “My rink, my discount. Skates?”
“In the truck.”
“Boards are unlocked. Coffee in the booth if you need it.”
I thanked him and walked back out for my bag. Ranger gave me the look he gave when he wanted to come in and knew he could not.
I left the window cracked and told him I would be back.
The locker room was empty. The lights were the same fluorescent tubes that had been there when I was nine. The rust around the drain in the middle of the floor had not changed in twenty-five years.
I laced up in silence.
The ice was clean.
Somebody had resurfaced it for the morning session that never happened. Not my father. Somebody younger. Somebody who would not know who my father had been unless helooked it up.
The mineral smell hit me at the gate. Engine exhaust, resurfaced ice, and the cold air that only exists inside rinks.
I stepped onto the ice, and my body knew before my head did that I was not going to do drills.
Just laps.
I pushed off from the boards and let my edges do what they wanted to do. Crossovers out of the corner. Backward to forward in the neutral zone. The transitions I had done ten thousand times, done without thought, done in a body that belonged to a four-year-old and a thirty-three-year-old at the same time.
On the first lap, I noticed the building.
On the second lap, I realized I was not noticing it.
By the fifth lap, I was just skating.
