Page 41 of Home Ice

“Everything. Big pots of it. Soup all winter.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Beef, mostly. She makes it Sunday and we eat it at least three more times during the week.”

Ma took that in with the spoon still in her hand. “Would she want the potatoes?”

“The recipe?”

“Yes.”

“She’d want it,” I said. “She’d make them next week.”

Ma set her spoon down. “I’ll write it out. It’s not a real recipe; you have to do it by feel, but I’ll write what I can.”

Max pointed his fork at me across the table. “Careful. You’re going to end up on the Christmas card.”

“He’ll be in the letter,” Ma said.

“How long to drive to Saskatchewan?” Gus asked.

“Twenty hours.”

“Twenty hours to go home?” He shook his head.

“About that. Fargo is halfway.”

“Do you stop in Fargo?”

“I stop for gas.”

“They don’t fly you?” Gus asked.

“They fly me most places. My truck’s mine, though. I drove it down in September and like to have it in both places.”

The questions kept coming, and I kept answering. Ma asked about the road trip food again, whether it was the same in every city, and I said, “Pretty much. The team sets most of it up ahead. It’s easy. I just eat what’s there.”

“He doesn’t,” Niko said.

He said it in a quiet voice, but it fell into the middle of a moment of silence. Everyone looked at him.

“He orders the thing he’s never had,” Niko said. “Give him a menu and he’ll find the one thing on it he can’t picture, and that’s the order. He got duck with cherries for the first dinner with Max because he’d never had it.” Niko stabbed a potato with his fork. “He’s not easy. He’s curious.”

Nobody said anything. Gus looked at Niko, and Ma looked at me.

I watched Ma as she made a decision. She lifted the pastitsio. “More?”

Chapter ten

Niko

“The apartment isn’t the problem,” Max said on the phone. “I want to be fair to the apartment. Rafe’s place is clean and bright, but there’s not one thing in it I can point a camera at.”

I had the shelf boards for the Ravenswood job stacked on the bench and a marking gauge in my hand. “Uh huh.”

“Are you working? You’re working. I can hear you not listening.”

“I’m listening.”