Page 88 of Full Contact

“You didn’t see it.”

“I don’t have to. And you blocked a shot with forty seconds left, so you’re right too.” He found the cord. “I’m staying out of it.”

Kelsey set out lunch while she moved on to the penalty kill. I defended it. She asked whether I’d like to see her notes, and I said I’d seen her notes on the distribution list, and she said I’d seen some of her notes.

Josh stood waiting in the doorway. “You have to see something else first.”

I ducked under the frame of his bedroom door, which I’d hit with my forehead the Christmas he was four. He had clay animals living on a shelf above his desk: a lopsided turtle, a dog with one ear, a coiled snake, and a gap where a fish had been before he gave it to me. Beside the gap sat a frog I hadn’t met. It was glossy green, with bulging eyes and a mouth wide enough to hold seven pencils.

“Mrs. Alvarez said it was the best mouth in the class,” he said.

I laughed. “She’s wise.” I photographed it with the rest of the collection and sent it to Mark.

Trier: The fish in my bathroom has competition.

Mark: Does the frog have room for an electric toothbrush?

I held my thumb up beside the frog’s mouth to measure.

“What are you doing?” Josh asked.

“Measuring. Mark wants to know whether the frog holds a toothbrush.”

Josh tilted his head to the side. “Is Mark placing an order?”

“He might be.”

“Is he the cat guy?”

“He’s the man I’m dating,” I said.

Josh nodded and turned the frog over to inspect his name scratched into the bottom.

“What color does he want?”

***

After lunch, Russ grabbed his keys and stood by the front door. “Porch bulbs,” he said. “Two strands are out.”

“We have bulbs,” Kelsey said.

“Not the right ones.”

She turned to me. “Every year he finds something, an excuse to go to the hardware store.”

I grabbed my coat. “I’ll keep him company.” Through the years it had been a furnace filter, a hose clamp, and a particular kind of hook. The hardware store on Glenstone closed at three on Christmas Eve, and we had always made it in time.

Russ drove a newer truck, with heated seats he was proud of. A thin rain had started, not cold enough to turn into anything. He parked in his usual row near the cart corral and turned off the engine. For a minute neither of us reached for the door.

“Kelsey’s going to ask you about him,” Russ said.

“I assumed.”

“I’m just saying. She’s been saving questions up.”

Inside the store, Russ walked right past the light bulbs to the weatherstripping aisle and spent ten minutes examining door sweeps. We came out with a door sweep, a package of picture hooks, and a four-pack of porch bulbs. They turned out to have the wrong base.

Russ set them on top of the refrigerator beside a coil of hose clamps from some previous year. “We’ll exchange them.”