Page 13 of Home Ice

I considered my answer. “Harvest nights,” I said. “You run the combine after dark when the moisture’s right. Everything’s loud and warm inside the cab, and it’s black in every direction except for your headers lighting up the crop rows. My dad ran one machine, and I ran the other, and we didn’t talk on the radio unless something broke. It was the best five hours of the year.”

“Quiet. Really dark. So different from the city. Okay, menu. What do you like?”

I opened mine and read it. Four years of high school French was a big help, and the parts I didn’t know were the parts that made me curious. There was a duck thing with cherries I’d never heard of and would have eaten out of pure curiosity, and then, near the bottom, walleye. I hadn’t seen walleye on a menu in Chicago yet.

“What do you recommend? You know the place.”

“Nope, I’m not making you eat what I like. What do you like?”

“The duck thing,” I said. “With the cherries. I’ve never had that.”

“Good choice,” Max said. “I’m having the walleye.”

Dinner was two hours and felt like it took about twenty minutes. Max’s walleye showed up looking like it’d gone to a fancy school. It was a gold-seared fillet on a green sauce with three kinds of tiny vegetables arranged around it, but it was a quarter the size of what we pulled out of Last Mountain Lake fried in butter in a dented pan.

When I mentioned that, Max put his fork down and made me describe the dented pan in detail. “My followers die for stories like that.”

The duck came sliced and fanned out under a dark red sauce, cherries cooked down to something between fruit and syrup. I resisted the temptation to take a photo and send it to Mom. It tasted like somebody had worked on it all afternoon. We had ducks on the farm, and my grandmother roasted them. This was different, like the duck had gone pro. I ate all of it, including a smear of something orange I couldn’t identify.

Max was funny. It came naturally to him. He told me about the worst video he ever posted: a tile-regrouting tutorial in which he gradually and visibly regrouted his own hand into the wall.

“Eight million views in the first week, Rafe. It was my most successful work. Who cares about real craftsmanship?”

He asked what nobody had warned me about in the NHL.

“Hotel pillows. Yeah, everyone says travel, but they mean pillows. Varga thinks there’s a conspiracy behind it.”

Max asked real questions. I gave him full, honest answers, a lot more than in the past four months of media scrums.

When our server had cleared our plates, Max checked his watch. “Okay,” he said, standing. “Showtime.”

I stood beside him, and he placed my hand around his waist. I was surprised how firm and muscular it was. “Three steps, and then Dmitri will take us home.”

The sidewalk was the easiest thing anyone had asked of me all day. The door swung, the cold hit, Max tucked in against my side laughing at something I hadn’t said, and I pulled his body tighter against me. One step, two, a flash from across the street turning the wet pavement white for a beat, three. Done. I let go, and Max stepped ahead to get the car door like a gentleman.

“Flawless,” Max said, pulling his door shut. “Dmitri, he’s a natural.”

“Noted,” Dmitri said. “Bears traded up in the draft, by the way, I have concerns—“

“Later, Dmitri.”

As we reached my building, Max looked up from his phone. “Oh,” he said, “one more thing. I have to grab a box from my brother’s shop tomorrow. My building’s lobby has a package thief. It’s a whole saga, so don’t get me started. Please come with. It will be ten minutes. It’s close to your practice, and there’s a bakery on that block that will change your life.”

“Sure,” I said.

Chapter four

Niko

The trick to laying out dovetails is listening to the wood. It’s already made most of the decisions for you. The walnut I had on the bench Thursday had a run of straight, tight grain down the middle of the board. That meant it wanted the tails spaced wide and confident. I struck my lines with a knife, sawed the first two tails, and settled into my work.

My phone buzzed on the end of the bench.

I finished my cut. The phone buzzed again, then three more times in a cluster, like an insect trapped under glass.

I picked it up.

Max: we’re coming by after his practice. 2ish. box retrieval, ten minutes, in and out