I put my hand on the back of the kid’s net. The mesh was cold. It was the right temperature. It was exactly what I needed.
I did not, I would think later — when I was lying again in Maple Sutton’s grandmother’s bed in Maple Sutton’s grandmother’s apartment in a small house on Birch Street in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota — I did not, in that first long minute with my glove resting on the cold steel mesh of a hockey net, quite believe that I was allowed to be back.
But the net held my hand up. And the ice held my skates. And the kid in the crease turned around and saw me, and dipped his head once, the way a young goalie dips his head when an old onewalks up behind him. The way a student dips his head when a teacher enters the room.
It was not a smile. It was something that happened in the body, before smiling. It was acceptance. It was belonging.
I let it happen.
3
MAPLE
Mira Halpern walked into my diner at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning carrying two coffees and a smile that meant she had questions.
One coffee was hers. Black. From the gas station out on Highway 93. The paper cup had that distinctive greenish tint, the kind you only see at places that have not updated their supplies since 2015.
The other coffee was, allegedly, mine. Also black. Also from the gas station. Also, conspicuously, not from my diner. The gas station coffee at the 7-Eleven on 93 has a reputation in Frostbite Falls as the worst coffee in the county that you can pay actual money for, and Mira knew that, and she walked it across my counter and set it in front of me with the focused care of a woman placing a chess piece. Deliberate. Intentional.
“Drink it,” she said.
“No.”
“Drink it. I want you to know what disappointment tastes like before I ask you what you have been doing with your life.”
I drank it.
It was bad.
It was bad the way a lake is wet. Bad the way the sky is blue. Fundamentally, categorically, no-arguments-here bad.
“So,” Mira said.
“So,” I said.
“Booth four. We’re having a conversation.”
I had been on my feet since four-thirty. Dale, my morning cook, had called in at five with the croup his grandkids gave him, which meant I had been doing the griddle and the counter and the register and the dishwasher all by myself for two and a half hours. The wave of breakfast regulars had finally thinned out around six-forty-five. My hands smelled like onions from the hash browns. My apron had butter on it. The only thing keeping me upright was a steady drip of caffeine and a stubborn refusal to look across the parking lot at the apartment over my garage.
I had not seen Knox Kovak since yesterday morning, when he had eaten my pie at this counter and tipped me twenty dollars and walked out like he had not just rearranged the furniture in my chest.
I had spent the last twenty-four hours pretending that absence was the same thing as relief. That not seeing him meant it hadn’t happened. That the cold coffee he’d drunk was not still sitting on the warmer, growing a film on top.
Mira had been my best friend since we were eleven. She knew the difference between relief and avoidance. She knew me.
“Booth four,” she said again. “Now.”
I followed her.
Mira sat down on the booth side facing the window. She made me sit on the side facing the kitchen, which is what she always did when she planned to interrogate me, because that side of booth four has the squeaky vinyl and you cannot fidget without making a noise. She wanted me trapped in the truth.
She put my fake coffee on the table next to her real coffee. She folded her hands. She had painted her nails since Monday. They were a deep burgundy. The color of honesty.
“Maple Joan Sutton.”
“Mira Halpern.”
“You look like a woman who has not slept.”
