Page 106 of The Grumpy Defenseman
The way he had taught me. The way he had wanted me to be able to, on any ice, anywhere, for the rest of my life.
At the far end, I stopped.
This was where he had started his Zamboni passes. Every night at nine-fifteen, when the last session cleared out, he took the machine into the building like a man taking communion. He began his first overlap right here.
I had watched him from the penalty box a thousand times. Five years old. Seven. Ten. Fifteen, still doing it sometimes on nights when he got off the dock late and I did not have school in the morning.
I had never noticed until today that my own skating traced the same ovals.
Twenty-five years of muscle memory, and the patterns my body had organized itself around without asking me were the patterns of a man driving a three-ton machine in slow, careful circles, making the surface new again for someone else to use.
I stood at center ice for a minute.
Ranger was probably watching me from the truck through the window.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, to noone.
Out loud.
Because saying it in my head did not feel like enough.
Then I skated off.
Jimmy Duarte was on his laptop when I came through. He did not look up. Small-town men knew when to let you have it.
“Tell your ma I said hi,” he said as I walked out.
“I will.”
I sat in the truck for a minute before I started the engine.
Ranger put his chin on my thigh. I scratched the spot between his ears he liked.
The parking lot was empty the way it had been empty a thousand mornings when I sat in my father’s car waiting for him to come out, helmet in my lap, the heater going full blast because he always started it for me before he went back in for his bag.
First thing was done.
The harder thing was ten minutes east.
I turned the key. Put the truck in gear. Pulled out of the lot and pointed us toward the cemetery.
Evan
The cemetery was on the east side of town. Ten minutes from the rink, the way everything in Clearfield was ten minutes from everything else.
Ranger walked ahead through the gate and sat at the foot of the stone before I arrived, a detail he could not have known in advance but somehow did anyway.
Dogs.
The stone was simple. Gray granite. His name. The dates.The line my mother had chosen, which I had argued with her about and lost, and which was absolutely right now that I was standing in front of it again.
JAMES ROBERT McKINNEY
1955–2014
He kept the ice ready for the next ones.
She had been right.
