Page 26 of Home Ice

“I will not tell her that.” He got on the bus.

It was close to midnight by the time I got to my hotel room, hung my suit, and put my shoes under the desk with the toes even. The group chat was busy: Trier’s catsitter shared a photo of the cat asleep inside one of Trier’s boots, and Varga announced he’d found the correct steakhouse in Winnipeg.

I brushed my teeth, set the alarm and the backup alarm, and turned the lamp off. Before rolling over for sleep, I pulled up the text I’d sent. I want to see the drawer. Thursday work? There was no response.

***

Monday morning, seven fifteen, waiting on the airport bus, I finally looked at the hotel bar. I’d walked past it four times.

The bar was made from a twelve-foot board with no seam in it anywhere. It was reddish-brown, close to the color of the sideboard in Niko’s shop.

It had stripes, too. The stripes were in the wood, not painted on. They ran across the grain in bands about a finger wide, half dark and half light. I took two steps to the left to get out of a bellman’s way, and the stripes reversed. The dark ones went light and the light ones went dark, all the way down the board.

I stood there and moved back and forth like an idiot to make sure I’d seen it.

“Sir?”

“Sorry.” I got out of the way.

On the charter, I had my window over the wing, and the card game was starting in the back before the door closed. I pulled my phone out somewhere around ten thousand feet.

I started typing: hey, question about wood. saw a bar in the hotel lobby, one whole board, and the grain was in stripes, and when I moved the stripes

I read the words back and deleted them. It sounded like a man explaining why he was texting.

Trying again: random question but is there a reason wood would look striped and then

I deleted that, too. People only said random question when it wasn’t that.

Finally:

Rafe: Hotel bar in Dallas was one board, twelve ft, reddish. It had stripes running across the grain, light and dark. I moved two steps and every stripe flipped, dark to light. Is that a finish thing or is it in the wood?

I hit send.

The answer came in less than five minutes.

Niko: Not a finish. It’s in the wood. That’s ribbon stripe.

Niko: In most trees the fibers run one direction, up. In some species they spiral, and the spiral reverses itself every few years of growth. So you get a band that grew clockwise, then a band that grew counterclockwise, then clockwise. Interlocked grain.

Niko: When you quartersaw a board like that you cut across all those bands and expose them side by side. Half the bands have their fiber ends pointed toward you and half have them pointed away. The ones pointed toward you throw the light back. The ones pointed away swallow it. That’s your light stripe and your dark stripe. Move, and you change which half is pointed at your eye. That’s why they flipped.

Niko: It isn’t color. Nothing about the board changed. You did.

I read it twice.

Niko: Sapele, probably, or African mahogany. That reddish brown and 12 ft with no glue line, somebody spent money. It’s miserable to work. Half the board runs against you no matter which direction you push, so a hand plane tears it out every time. You scrape it or you sand it and you make your peace.

Niko: And it’s on a bar for a reason. Ribbon only does that when someone walks past it. Hang it on a wall and it just sits there.

I don’t know what answer I expected to get. Yes, that’s the wood most likely. Instead, Niko gave me a picture in my head of a tree reversing itself every few years for a hundred years, on the chance that somebody would eventually cut it the right way and put it in a hotel where people walked past every day.

The card game got loud enough over Kansas that Coach Markel turned around. Varga lost a hand he described as unlosable and came up the aisle to sit on my armrest.

He looked at my phone.

“You’re smiling at your phone,” he said.