I pretended to think, finger to my chin, eyes up to the ceiling. “Um, ice cream? Kittens?” I looked down at her and grinned. “Or ma-a-a-y-be…kissing Sammy?”
“Eric!” she shrieked, covering her face with her hands. I could see the blush coloring the tops of her ears.
I laughed, my bad mood totally blown away. “Aw, it’s okay,” I said, putting my arm around her and pulling her close. “Don’t tell anyone but”—I bent down to whisper in her ear—“I like kissing boys, too.”
She giggled now, shoulders shaking. “You’re bad,” she said smacking me lightly on the arm. “Skate with me. Nadia told me to warm up.”
That meant we had about five minutes before her coach showed up and before I needed to get started with my day. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend those minutes. “You’re on,” I said. “Race you!” I took off before she could reply.
“Cheater!” she yelled as she chased after me.
Two hours later, I was sitting in my office contemplating vendor invoices, taxes, and payroll and wishing I was back on the ice with Grace. Or playing again. Or, hell, why not wish I was fifteen years old again with my mom still alive, the world spread out like a banquet in front of me, and my whole life ahead of me?
Why not wish for the moon while I was at it?
My office was on one end of a walkway that hung suspended over the ice rinks below. A bar with some ancient pinball machines and a few booths was on the same level. The official name of the bar at the rink was Between the Sheets, but everyone just called it Sheets.
There was a full bar along the short side of the room with more barstools. Three wide-screen televisions over the bar silently played hockey games. Cracked red vinyl booths lined the long wall and a random collection of Formica tables and uncomfortable metal chairs filled in the center of the room. The tables were rearranged at random to fit the needs of the various social groups frequenting the place. Two cocktail table arcade game consoles stood between the doors for the bathroom.
Sheets had been a popular watering hole when I was in high school, due in no small part to the bartender’s lackadaisical approach to checking IDs and the five-dollar buckets of beers.
Sadly for the under-twenty-ones of La Crosse, I was much stricter. No way was I getting shut down for serving kids. Was it too early to have a beer of my own, though? Probably. I’d grab one on the way out.
In my office, two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, giving me a view of both rinks and the lobby. Sighing deeply at the contrast between my actual present and my imaginary future, I walked over to the window that overlooked the smaller rink.
Both rinks were open. One was open for a public skate session that seemed popular with the too-young-to-drive crowd. There were swirling colored lights and an eclectic music playlist that switched between country, classic rock, and what I assumed were the pop hits of the day.
A portion of the ice was marked off with orange safety cones. Judging from the balloons tied to the glass and the hand-drawn poster board signs taped along the boards, it was a thirteenth birthday party for the alliteratively named Mattie Mae.
Some poor schlub in a polar bear costume was trying to run some kind of red rover game on the ice. It had to be my imagination, but I thought I could smell the stench of the inside of the costume from my view twelve feet above the ice.
The second rink was much less crowded. Reserved for freestyle skating, it held a handful of figure skaters and their coaches. Paying for ice time in fifteen-minute increments, they practiced their footwork and drilled the technical aspects of their sport over and over.
A handful of young girls and one boy practiced with their coaches. These were my bread and butter. Kids with serious goals, the Olympics or Worlds. Homeschooled, these kids spent most of the time at the rink.
Later in the day, after school, the hockey kids would show up. From the peewees trying to find their feet to the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds on the travel team. I liked watching them. For the most part, they had realistic ambitions. By the time a player hit that age, they knew if they had any chance of going pro or not. They were smarter than I had been back then.
Smarter than I was now, probably.
I’d bought the old ice rink against my father’s advice. It was the rink I’d grown up skating on, and it felt like home. It had seen its glory days around the same time I had, but I thought it had potential. I could save it. Make it better than it had been. Make a place kids wanted to hang out and teens wanted to bring their dates. Maybe even one day attract a minor league club. The league kept expanding and every new top tier team needed a couple of development clubs underneath them to nurture talent. Why not La Crosse?
My desk phone rang. “Hey, Boss,” said a voice rough with decades of cigarette smoke and cold indoor air. Vinny, my Zamboni driver and all-around handyman. He’d come with the rink.
“Vincenzo, what’s up? Good news, right? You found a winning lottery ticket in the locker room?”
He chuckled more sincerely than my lame humor deserved. “Close. I think the refrigerator unit is going on The Pond.” The Pond was our half-sized rink, used for small groups and individual lessons.
“You think?” I asked, hoping against hope. If Vinny said it was going, it was going.
“I know,” he said. “It’s been holding on for a couple years now but even I can’t repair the pump anymore.”
“Great.” The pump was responsible for forcing the thousands of gallons of brinewater through the pipes embedded in the concrete slab that kept the ice frozen. No pump, no water. No water, no ice. No ice, no business. “Okay, I assume you know the people to call.”
“Ayup. You want me to get some quotes?” Vinny asked.
That would probably be the smart thing to do, but it also sounded like work, and truthfully, how many different companies were there that could fix that kind of refrigerator unit? Besides, Vinny probably knew a guy. “No. I trust you. If you trust the firm, that’s good enough for me.” And good enough was what we aimed for here at Casa Smallman.
The alien-face stress ball my mother had given me in high school fit perfectly in the palm of my hands. One of its antennas had ripped off years ago and there were cracks in the green vinyl, but its yellow eyes still bulged out satisfyingly. It would be fine. Everything would be fine. Vinny would get the pump fixed under budget. The rink would flourish.
I’d find a great boyfriend who wasn’t Ryan. Maybe he’d be a professor at the university. We’d buy a small house and a cat and a dog that didn’t like each other. We’d have brunch with my parents on Sundays and argue about where to spend the holidays. We’d go on a vacation in the summer to someplace semi-exotic like Bali or the Galapagos.
We’d argue about whether or not to have kids until the day we realized it was already too late and then eventually we’d stop having sex and get divorced when he left me for a grad student who was pregnant with his baby.
Vinny pushed the door of my office open. The door would have slammed except for an excellent hydraulic piston at the top. “You wouldn’t leave me for a pregnant grad student, would you?” I asked him as the door hissed slowly closed.
He pulled off the ancient USS Sanctuary baseball cap I’d never seen him without. “Dunno,” he said, scratching through his enviably thick gray hair. “Does she have her own Harley or do I have to share?”