Page 98 of Home Ice

He spoke first. “Good mor—“ and I didn’t let him finish before wrapping him in a hug.

After a quick kiss, he nodded toward the stairs. “Do you need anything from up there?”

“Coat, and it’s down here. That’s it.”

The truck was warm and smelled like Rafe. He pulled out onto the street and started talking. It wasn’t an excited flood. It was a simple recap of the past several hours.

Varga had claimed credit for the kiss in the team chat on the grounds that he had taught Rafe everything he knew about boyfriends. Heath shared the news that the puck he’d given the kid at the glass was already framed on the kid’s dresser, in a case meant for a baseball.

His phone buzzed twice on the console while he talked. He didn’t look at it.

***

I stopped two steps inside the door to Rafe’s apartment. The last time I was there, I’d carried a console up with him and left with a story untold.

How did that masterful tapestry get there?

Now there were more questions to ask. There was a bowl on the console. It was ceramic, covered in a blue-gray glaze, applied by hand. Beside the couch was a reading lamp I’d never seen.

The pieces had been carefully chosen. The sectional was still there, but scattered through the room now were objects Rafe wanted.

He watched me read the room and said nothing. He just took my coat and hung it beside his on hooks by the door.

When I stepped up to the console, staring at the tapestry above it, Rafe finally spoke.

“You asked me once,” he said, “why it was the only thing in here that looked like somebody cared about making it.”

I turned around. He was just behind me.

“I remember your answer. You said you just liked it.”

“That made it sound like I grabbed it at the airport.” He reached for my hand, and we both turned to look at the piece.

“I was fifteen,” he said. “I was on a church mission trip in Ecuador. It was two weeks, and it rained almost every day. I joked that we never saw the tops of the volcanoes.” He squeezed my hand. “The last full day we were there, they took us to a street market, and everybody wanted to walk it end to end. Three stalls in a woman was working a loom outside her shop. She had it tied to a post and the other end tied to her. She leaned against the tension, and the cloth just—came into existence. From colored strings.”

He stared at the intricate blend of colors while he spoke.

“Everybody else kept walking, but I stayed and watched the woman. She spoke little English, and I only knew the Spanish words picked up on the trip, so mostly she showed me. The red came from a bug that lives on cactus. She had a jar of them, dried and looking like gravel, and she crushed some in her palm with a little water to show me how her hand turned the color of a stop sign. She told me she’d been working on the piece on the loom for months.”

“How long did you stand there?”

“They came back for me,” he said. “That’s how long. Our youth minister thought I’d gotten lost. I’d been with the woman for two hours.” He took a breath. “Since it rained all the time, I hadn’t spent most of the money I brought on the trip. I spent almost all of it on a finished piece she had. I carried it, wrapped in paper, on my lap on the plane because I was nervous about damaging it in my bag.”

He leaned in and kissed my cheek.

“I’ve moved eight times since then. I lived with billet families during juniors, and then I moved here to Chicago. I didn’t care about anything else I brought with me or bought when I got this apartment. I put the tapestry up first in every place. I asked the families if I could put a nail in their wall.” His voice softened. “Nobody told me to like it. It doesn’t go with anything. I just saw it and wanted it and bought it.”

“Thank you,” I said, “for telling me.”

He nodded and looked lighter, having told his story.

“Rafe,” I asked, “what do you want?”

He looked back at me.

“I want you to leave your stuff here,” he said. “I want you to have a toothbrush in my bathroom. I emptied out a drawer in the bedroom last night.”

“There’s a spare key for you in the shop,” I said. “It’s been in the bench drawer for over a month now. I cut it after you squared my block plane. Now I know why.”