Page 23 of Home Ice

“Is there a mark?” Yiayia asked. “Inside the lid.”

“Yes,” I said. “There is.”

I’d found it four years ago, the week the chest arrived at the shop. It was burned into the underside of the lid, left of center, a little oval with a name in it and Racine, Wis. underneath. I’d looked the shop up that same night and learned they’d closed in 1961.

He’d been in my shop for two hours, and he remembered the chest.

When we finished eating, dinner broke up into stations. Ma washed the dishes by hand because she didn’t trust a dishwasher to get them clean. Max dried. Yiayia supervised from her chair. Dad grabbed a beer out of the fridge and leaned on the counter as he pulled out his phone.

“Theo sent this,” he announced. Theo was my uncle in Milwaukee. “It’s the boy. Your boy. Look at this.”

Max leaned over while he was drying a plate. On the screen was a hockey clip. It was Friday night’s Denver game. I watched over his shoulder as Rafe moved past defensemen to bury a shot in the net.

“Strong boy,” Dad said, approving, and drank. “He’s one of the fighters?”

“He’s—no, Dad, he doesn’t fight,” Max said. “He’s a skill guy.”

“Tall boy with broad shoulders like that, they teach them to fight.” My father had maybe watched a dozen hockey games in his life, all of them while Uncle Theo was visiting. “That’s why they’ll keep him.”

“He’s scored in six straight games,” I blurted out.

The kitchen was suddenly silent.

I lowered my voice. “He’s second on the team in scoring since December first,” I added. “They don’t put him in to play rough. They put him on the ice when they need a goal. He kills penalties too, which is unusual for a rookie, and he hasn’t taken a penalty himself since November. Over seven weeks. That’s the longest active streak on the team.”

My father looked at me over the phone.

“Since November,” he said.

“The twenty-third.”

Ma turned the water off.

Max stood there with the towel and the plate, mid-wipe. He was silent.

Ma asked the question on everyone’s mind. “How do you know that?”

I could have escaped the question by assigning it to Max talking about Rafe. Everyone would believe that. Max’s mouth never stopped, but that wouldn’t be me. I never gave evasive answers.

“I looked,” I said.

“You looked?”

“The scores are public, Ma. It’s not the archives of the Vatican. You Google it.”

“Every night?” Yiayia asked.

Max broke in. “The penalty thing is honestly funny because there’s a reason he doesn’t take penalties. We talked about it at dinner. He said, and I quote, ‘The penalty box is boring. I have to watch four other guys do my skating for me.’”

He was on a roll. He moved his hands as he continued talking. Ma laughed and returned to finishing the dishes.

Max had rescued me in front of the family without even glancing my way. When he finished the story, he folded the towel over the rack and tipped his head toward the back door. I followed him out.

My parents’ back steps had been the official location for brother business since before I could drive. Max sat on the second step. I sat down beside him, and the cold bled upward through the concrete.

Max said nothing about what happened in the kitchen. I’d been bracing for it, but he left it alone. He started talking about Rafe, not about me.

“He asked the driver’s name,” Max said. “That first night. Before we’d gone a block. It’s Dmitri. Rafe remembered it the second time we used the car. He asked about Dmitri’s nephew and his youth hockey team.” Max shook his head. “I’ve worked with so many people who just call every driver ‘boss.’”