Page 12 of Thin Ice

I'd lost Elias while speaking to the team representative. I found him in the front room with three of the old players and a younger woman I took for a daughter. Walt Petranek had the floor.

"So, it's October, banner's going up that night, and this kid walks in—first-rounder, hands like you wouldn't believe, head like a paint can—and dumps his bag in Vern's stall. The whole room goes quiet. Vern comes in with his coffee. Looks at the kid. Looks at the bag. Doesn't say one word. Just stands there and drinks his coffee. Kid's getting dressed, and he starts to feel it, the way you feel storm clouds moving in. Takes him ten minutes. Ten! Finally he looks up and says, 'Am I in your seat, sir?' And Vern says—"

Petranek grabbed a chair back to steady himself. "Vern says, 'Son, you're in my seat, but it's your team now, so take it.' The kid moved so fast he put his elbow through the drywall."

The group erupted in laughter. Elias said something short and listened a long time. Then he said something short again.

Ask, listen, ask. Give them all the attention and none of yourself. Those men would go home and tell their wives about the easy tall fella at Vern's, and they'd be unlikely to know anything about him.

He's me.

I didn't get to watch for long. Elias's phone must have buzzed, because he touched the daughter's arm and slid out of the group, and I tracked him to the side door and the gangway.

I ended up in Eileen's kitchen—small and yellow, with a parish calendar on the wall. She hadn't forgotten the cookies. They were on the counter. Through the window over the sink, I watched him in the shade between the houses, phone to his ear, back half-turned. His shoulders tensed.

By the time he came back inside, it had all smoothed over. "Everything alright?" I asked when he reached me.

"Home office in Seattle," he said. "Nothing interesting."

When I returned to the front room, Eileen had finally broken free of a cluster of relatives. She nodded toward the kitchen, and I followed.

"Sit," she said. "You're standing like Vern stood, all the weight on one leg, like the floor's not level."

I sat. She stayed on her feet.

"Thank you for coming. You didn't have to, today of all days. Half the city wants a piece of you this week."

"I told him I'd look in on you."

"You coming today, he'd have expected it. He stopped worrying about me a long time ago. He'd watched you show up too many times to wonder whether you'd be here."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She gave me a small, tired smile. "He liked how you played. Said you played the right way, which from Vern was the highest compliment." The smile thinned. "But these last months he saw something different. A few weeks back he turned to me in the middle of a game and said—" She stopped. Weighed whether to continue. "He said that boy's leg is gone. Look how he's hiding it."

We were both quiet for a moment.

"He wasn't being unkind," she said. "Worried is what he was. He said he knew that skate, because he did the same thing his last two years, hid a bad wheel from the whole building, and it cost him the rest of his life on that hip." She looked into my eyes. "He wanted to tell you himself. Kept meaning to, on one of your visits, and kept deciding it wasn't his place. But he didn't want you doing what he did, playing on it till it was ruined, and all the damage that came from favoring it."

I looked at the coffee I wasn't drinking.

An old man dying in a chair in Dogtown had seen it. He wasn't the only one. The trainers saw it every morning; that's what the quiet adjustments to my program were. The coaches saw it; that's why my shifts had gotten shorter in back-to-backs and nobody said why.

"He should've said something," I told her. "I'd have wanted him to."

"I know. That's why I'm saying it for him." She placed a hand on my shoulder. "You don't owe this city your body, Nolan. Vern would tell you the same if he could. He'd tell you to find out how bad it really is. Nobody who needs you playing is ever going to ask that, so you'll have to."

I didn't have an answer to that. So I reached up, placed my hand over hers, and held on for a second.

She patted my hand and then took both of hers back as she became a hostess again. She told me to go rescue that tall friend of mine before the Petranek boys talked his ear off.

***

We didn't talk for the first few blocks of the drive home. Elias stopped at an intersection to let a kid on a bike wobble across in front of us. He waited until we were back in the park to ask his question again.

"How's the hip?"

He wanted more than creaks. I couldn't use that again.