Page 42 of Home Ice

“Then repeat back the last thing I said.”

“Not one thing you can point a camera at.”

“That’s—okay, word for word.” A car door shut on his end. “So here’s where we are. Everything we’ve filmed with Rafe so far has been on sidewalks. That’s fine at first, but now people want something at home. They want to see a couch and a man in his kitchen, looking like he makes food there.”

“So shoot his kitchen.”

“I’ve been in Rafe’s kitchen. There’s a coffee maker and a toaster. The entire apartment is like a very nice hotel room where nobody has ever checked in.” I heard wind noise, and then Max moved away from it. “I’ve solved the problem. There’s a place on Elston that rents furniture for still photos. I picked out a console table, six feet long, made of reclaimed barn wood. It’s gorgeous. On camera, you’d swear the boards came out of a barn built in 1890.”

“And where did they come from?”

“A shop on Elston.”

“And how old are they?”

“Niko.”

“When did they make the piece, Max?”

He exhaled into the phone. “It looks like 1890.”

I picked the gauge back up.

“I can hear you doing the face.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You didn’t have to. It’s a prop, Niko. It sits in the back of a shot for eleven seconds. Nobody’s marrying it.” A beat. “Okay. If it’s so bad, what if the piece in that shot was one of yours?”

“No.”

“You don’t have to be in it. Your face and name would never appear. We don’t tag—“

“No.”

”—it’s a beautiful object sitting there doing what beautiful objects do—“

“Max.”

He stopped.

I ran the gauge down the board and struck my line. The shop was quiet.

“Okay,” he said. “Elston, it is. The shot is Thursday at ten a.m. He’s got a game that night, so we’ll be out by noon.”

“Thursday,” I said.

“Love you.”

He hung up.

I stood there with the gauge in my hand and looked across the shop at a console set against the north wall under a drop cloth. It had been there for four years.

I built it the winter I turned twenty-four, out of a walnut slab I bought before I could afford it. It had a waney edge along the back. I’d priced it twice and then took it off the floor when customers showed interest. Max had asked to feature it more than once. I told him no every time.

Nobody was marrying the barn wood piece, but two million people would look at it in the room with Rafe and decide what kind of life he led at home. It was furniture built to be a prop, but Rafe was real.

I pulled the cloth off the console.