“I’ll be by you every step of the way.” I positions myself behind her and put both hands at her waist. “Don’t push yet. Just stand.”
She stands. Tests her weight. Her ankles wobble slightly and she grips my forearms.
“There,” I say. “Feel the blade. Let it settle.”
She takes a breath and adjusts. I feel the moment her weight centers and her grip on my arms loosens fractionally.
“Now push,” I say.
She pushes off her right blade and glides six inches and laughsagain, delighted, her breath a small white cloud in the cold air. Again, she pushes off the ice. Longer this time, her left blade finding its edge, her arms dropping slightly as her body remembers what her brain has been trying to calculate.
I skate alongside her with one hand at the small of her back, light enough that she can feel it but not enough to carry her weight. Slowly, it activates in her: that muscle memory that doesn’t fully leave, that knows ice even after years away from it.
By the time we reach the center of the lake she doesn’t need my hand anymore.
She pushes off into a long glide, the pink of her hair bright against the white mountains and the gold light and the mirror-flat ice beneath her, and she looks back at me over her shoulder with her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright.
That now-familiar satisfaction moves through me, the one I get when I’ve done something to make my wife happy.
Now I just have to keep doing it for the next sixty-odd years or so.
“I remember,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “You do.”
I push off and join her.
We find a rhythm without discussing it, long easy strides, her hand sliding into mine, the ice smooth beneath us. The cold air is sharp in my lungs and our breath comes out in matching clouds. The only sounds are the clean scrape of our blades.
She skates close, her shoulder against my arm.
The snow on the peaks goes from white to peach as the sun drops. The pines at the lake’s edge stand heavy with snow, branches bowed under the weight of it.
“It’s so quiet up here,” she says. “So peaceful.”
“At least until the Rhodes’s arrive,” I tell her with a smile. “We can swim here in the summertime. The ice skating’s good through February.”
“Have you been coming here all your life?”
I nod. “Mom used to bring us here with our skates the second it froze over. All us kids and my dad. She’d pack hot chocolate and those hand warmer packets you crack to activate. We’d be out here for hours.”
Lila is quiet for a moment, her blade finding its edge on a long curve.
“She skated?” she asks.
“She was the best skater in the family. Not even close.” I think about my mother out here, turning backward to face us on the ice, gliding and twirling effortlessly with a smile on her face. “She made it look like nothing.”
“Like you. You skate like you were born on ice. It’s really something.” She squeezes my hand. “I would give anything to have met her,” she says softly. “I bet she was extraordinary.”
“She was,” I say. “She really was. And I’ve spent so long thinking she was gone, but the truth is, there’s some of her in all of us. Walker got her musicality. Tanner got her way with words. Josie got her backbone and her caretaking side.”
Lila smiles at me. “And you got her fighting spirit. Her fierce devotion to the ones she loved.”
“I hope so.”
I look off into the distant mountains, at the clouds going over the sun. There’s a hot pressure behind my eyes. Talking about Mom to Lila feels natural. Feels good. There’s pain, yes, but it’s mingled with so much love.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Lila says gently. “If it’s too much.”
