Another pause. Longer. Frank Amato pauses the way he positions on the ice — deliberately, because he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Tuesday. Ten a.m. I’m in Chicago for the week.”
“I’ll be there.”
Tuesday is forty-one degrees and Lake Michigan is trying to remove the city from its foundation, which feels appropriate. Frank’s hotel is downtown, a pleasant lobby place, the kind of hotel that doesn’t need to announce itself. He’s waiting in the lounge when I arrive. Black sweater. Reading glasses on the table. Coffee already in front of him.
He looks up when I come in. Doesn’t stand. Doesn’t smile. But his expression is different from the first time we were alone in an official capacity. More waiting than verdict this time. I sit. Order coffee I won’t drink because my hands are doing something inconvenient. “You’re going to ask me something,” Frank says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“About Antonia.”
“Yes.” I put my hands flat on the table the way I’ve watched him do when he wants to settle something. “I want to marry her. I’ve known that for a while. Long enough that it stopped being a question I was asking myself and started being a thing I was organizing my life around.” I hold his gaze. His eyes are the same green as hers and just as difficult to read. “I’m not asking for your permission. She doesn’t belong to anyone, and she wouldn’t want me to ask it that way.”
“No,” Frank says. “She wouldn’t.”
“I’m asking because you’re her family. Because she spent her whole life trying to measure up to something you built, and she’s already past it, but she doesn’t know that yet. And because...” I stop. Work through the next sentence. “Because Iwant you to know first. Before anyone else. Because I think you’ve earned that.”
The lounge is almost empty. Someone orders at the bar. Music from somewhere. Chicago outside the glass, doing what it does. Frank looks at his coffee. Then at me. “She told you about her mother.”
“A little.”
“Twelve years,” he says. “Since Lucia died.” He says her name with the particular care of a man who uses it rarely because it costs him. “Antonia was twelve. After that, she decided she wouldn't need anything she couldn't provide herself.” He pauses. “I let her.” I say nothing. This is his sentence to finish. “That was a mistake,” he says. Flat. Clean. The same honesty he deployed at Elena’s dinner table about the wrong call twenty years ago.
I nod.
“She needs someone who shows up,” he says. “Consistently. Not dramatically.” His eyes come to mine. “You didn’t leave her when the league discovered the photograph. She told me. She doesn’t know she told me, but she did.” His mouth curves fractionally. “She explained that you handle difficult situations with patience.”
“I was waiting,” I say.
“I know what you were doing.” He picks up his coffee. Sets it down. “I have one question.”
“Okay.”
“The penalty you took in the Vegas game. The provocation about Toni. Youreacted.”
I don’t flinch. “Yes.”
“And then you stopped.”
“Yes.”
“Could you have stopped it from the beginning?”
I consider the honest answer. “No. Not that night. Not that particular thing.” I hold his gaze. “But I learned from it.”
Frank Amato looks at me for the three-second assessment. One. Two. Three.
Then he says, “Buy the ring.”
I buy the ring.
Not complicated. Toni doesn’t want complicated. I know this the same way I know her coffee order — by paying attention for long enough that it became knowledge I didn’t realize I’d collected. She wears one chain, her mother’s. Small hands. She doesn’t own anything that announces itself.
The stone is a green tourmaline. Pear shaped. The same shade as her eyes when she’s not managing them.
The jeweler asks if I want it engraved. I say yes. She asks what. I think about it for a moment. Then I say:I’ve got you now.
The night I propose, I take her to the rink. Tuesday at seven p.m. The practice rink is freshly resurfaced, nobody there except Gerald at the east entrance
