Page 83 of Home Ice

Two nights later the Ironhawks played Columbus, and I watched the whole thing from a stool with the phone propped against the tool tray. The fans responded to Rafe the way they had since the arrangement with Max had been revealed. Chet talked around it the first period, and by the second he gave up and named it. “You can hear the response every time Mikkelsen touches the puck,” he said, “and I’ll be honest, I’ve been in this booth a long time, and I don’t understand this town tonight.”

He scored in the second on the play Chet called the fake bump. Rafe skated to the bench with his head level while Heath hit him on the helmet. He set up two more goals in the third, and they won by two. The crowd went home having consistently booed the best player in the building.

My phone buzzed.

Max: watched the game. your boy had himself a night

Max: that’s it. that’s the whole text. no agenda. checking in on my hermit brother

I sent my response:

Niko: He’s not my boy. Good game though.

I stared at the dots while Max typed on the other end. Then they stopped, and no message arrived. When it finally came, the message was brief.

Max: I think I read it wrong. Send again.

I didn’t send an answer. That would tell him he read it right.

***

A chair arrived the following morning.

The woman who brought it introduced herself as Ruth Kowalski, and she carried it up from her car herself, hooked over one arm, waving me off when I came out to help. It was a kitchen chair, oak, factory-made sometime around World War II, with a saddle seat and a steam-bent crest rail.

“My father’s chair,” she said, and set it down between us on the shop floor. “I want it fixed properly, and I’ve been told you’re the man who fixes things properly. It has been repaired in the past, and I know it’s wrong.”

I crouched and looked closer. There were screws run up through the seat into the leg posts, four different kinds from four different decades, slotted and Phillips both. There was a length of wire twisted around the stretchers under the seat, tightened with pliers until it bit into the wood. Under all the mistakes, the original joinery was there: mortise and tenon, cut by a machine but cut correctly.

“He fixed it every time it wobbled,” Ruth said. “Every time, for as long as I can remember. It sat at his end of the table, and when it wobbled, he’d turn it over on a Saturday and get the drawer out of the basement, the junk drawer, and do something to it. My mother wanted to leave it on the curb thirty years ago. I never let her.”

“He never re-glued the joints.”

“He didn’t know what he was supposed to do,” she said. “He drove a delivery truck. Nobody ever showed him what made a chair a chair. He knew screws and wire.” She touched the crest rail. “I’ll pay whatever you charge to bring it back.”

I told her I needed a week. She said, “Thank you,” and left the chair with me.

I got it up on the bench and started in with a screwdriver. Every screw was a wound. Every wrap of wire was an attempt at bandaging. I backed out the screws and laid them in a coffee can. At the tenth one, I realized something.

The man wasn’t fighting with his chair. He was figuring out how to keep it.

I sat back on the stool and looked at what was actually in front of me. It was four decades of blunt repairs aimed at keeping the chair at the end of his table. It meant something to him, and it outlived him. As furniture repair, it was a disaster, but the man’s devotion to it was flawless.

I heard Rafe in my head. Sure. Yeah. Whatever works.

I understood his words the way I first understood the screws; they were careless damage. In reality, they were an attempt at making something durable with the only tools he had.

I’d bet the shop that nobody had ever taught Rafe how to respond to a man he wanted. He didn’t know he could say, “I’m scared,” and have the joints hold. All he had in his junk drawer was the smooth answer.

The chair wobbled because the repairs were wrong, but the chair was still around because the man refused to let it go.

Being right about Rafe was one of the worst things I’d ever done. It cost me him, and I’d spent days now justifying putting us out by the curb.

I sat with the chair between my hands and tried to figure out what to do next. A text wasn’t right. It would invite a response, and Rafe would have to guess again at the best words.

I revisited my response to Max. It makes it a product I can never take off the shelf. That was true, but wasn’t permanence the whole point? That’s why Ruth wanted her chair fixed.

After setting the screwdriver down, I picked up my phone and called Max.