Page 3 of Thin Ice

"I know I didn't have to." She started the car. The heater came on full blast. "Seatbelt."

"I'm twenty."

"Seatbelt."

I put on the seatbelt.

The road home ran along the west side of the lake, and the lake showed up in pieces between the trees — flat, white, quiet. Frozen out past the coves already, early this year. A couple of ice shacks sat out on the north end. Snow lay on everything, muffling the world until the loudest sound in it was our tires.

Summer, this road was a parade. Boat trailers and Range Rovers and kids in swimsuits walking the shoulder with towels around their necks. December, it was ours. The rentals, the year-rounders, the plow guy. The lake in winter belonged to the people who actually lived on it.

Across the water, the north shore houses sat dark. Big glass boxes and stone piles with their docks pulled and their lights off, waiting for owners who wouldn't think about them again until May.

One of them was his.

Peninsula Point stuck out into the lake about two-thirds of the way up the far shore, and the Harrington house sat on the end, stone and glass, the biggest thing on the water. Dark tonight. One small light burning somewhere low in it.

Tomorrow it wouldn't be dark.

"So," my mom said, eyes on the road. "When does that boy of yours get in?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Good." She nodded at the windshield. "I'm setting a place for him Christmas Eve."

Not a question. Not an offer. A fact.

"Mom."

"What."

"His family stuff is complicated right now. I don't know what his Christmas even looks like yet."

"Liam." She let a beat go by. "I didn't ask what his Christmas looks like. I said I'm setting a place. Whatever happens, he knows there's a plate on this side with his name on it."

I looked out the window.

"The place gets set either way," she said. "That's all."

We headed past the inlet, over the small bridge, then into our neighborhood. My mom swung left onto our road, and then there it was. Home. It was a small cape with peeling grey paint and white trim. The front door, the one we never used, was painted green with a fake gold knocker on it. We always used the side door because it was next to the driveway.

We got out and went in.

Same crack in the second porch step. Same storm door that needs a hip check. Same smell inside: heat from the baseboards, old coffee, the ghost of every cheap dinner ever stretched across that stove.

I stood in the doorway with my duffel and looked at the house the way I'd never looked at it before.

The kitchen table was to the right of the door in a little nook. The kitchen opened out to the tiny living room. Carpet worn into a path between the kitchen and the TV. Popcorn ceiling that had been there forever, yellowed near the light fixture. The couch with the blanket folded over the arm, and not for decoration. A bookshelf with my mom's paperbacks and a framed photo of me at eight holding a fish with both hands.

My room down the hall. Twin bed, dresser with a drawer that needed lifting, medals thumb tacked straight into the drywall because frames cost money.

I stood there and saw all of it and thought: he's going to stand here. In this doorway. And he's going to see every square foot of what I actually come from.

I put my bag down and went to help with dinner.

Dinner was American chop suey, which cost about four dollars to make and tasted better than anything I'd eaten at school.

My mom ate across from me at the kitchen table, still half in her work clothes, and let me get most of a plate down before she started.