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Below us, all the players had cleared the ice. I searched the bench for Kyle. He sat at the end, taping the top of his stick.
I held Noah tighter and whispered to him. “It’s okay, little guy.” I bounced up and down on my tiptoes and made a song of it. “It’s okay. We’re gonna watch Uncle Kyle play.” I repeated the words so many times that the girls next to us started to sing along and make faces at Noah. His crying wound down. With his head resting on my shoulder, I sank down to the bench and swayed back and forth. By the time Sharon and Cameron returned, Noah slept soundly in my arms, covered by his small blanket.
“You’re a miracle worker,” Sharon said. She bit into a hot dog loaded with mustard and relish. “I had a craving.”
My chest tightened as I connected her words to her pregnancy.Just be happy for her.
The players skated onto the ice. As the national anthem played, Cameron extended a huge tub of popcorn toward me, and I took a handful. The salt stung my tongue. The game started with Kyle winning the face-off. Three minutes later, he scored on an assist from Luke. The crowd erupted. Noah stirred but didn’t wake. Cameron poked me in the side. “Uncle Kyle scored that for me!”
In the row behind Kyle’s team’s bench, two women wearing cute hats with pom-poms screamed his name. I squinted down at them, trying to figure out who they were, but couldn’t place them.
Three minutes before the first period ended, the other team scored a goal. A horn blasted, waking Noah, who started to cry. “I’ll take him,” Sharon said.
I shook my head and slid him down to my knees. Bouncing my legs up and down, I sang a song my dad used to sing to me: “Noah climbs up the mountain.” I lifted my knees higher. “Noah gets to the top of the mountain. Noah slides down the mountain.” I opened my legs and lowered him to the ground.
Noah giggled. “’Gain,” he said.
We played the game until the period ended. All the players skated toward their benches. When Kyle and Luke stepped off the ice, the women with the hats approached them. The men laughed at something the woman in the red hat said. She placed her hand on Kyle’s forearm, and he quickly moved it away, looking up into the stands in my direction. My stomach flipped. “Do you know who the woman in the red hat is?” I asked Sharon.
She peered down. The woman’s head tilted toward Luke as she listened to something he said. “Probably Luke’s latest fling.”
I let out a deep breath.
When play resumed, I kept my eyes on the two women. They spent more time looking at their phones than watching what happened on the ice. At the end of the second period, with the game tied two to two, they got up to leave. Red Hat waved toward the ice. Luke pointed his stick at her in acknowledgment, and Kyle raised his hand as if he was about to wave but looked in my direction and lowered it. I reached for more popcorn. It was time for him to come home.
Kyle’s team won four to two. At the end of the game, while they celebrated on the ice, Sharon, the boys, and I made our way down the concrete steps to the team’s bench. By the time we descended to the ground floor, some of the players had left for the locker room, but Kyle waited by the bench, clutching his helmet. He had been overdue for a haircut when he left, and he still hadn’t had one. Because his hair wasn’t cropped close to his head, the gray strands that were just starting to mix with his dark hair were more pronounced than usual.
He kept his focus trained on Cameron, then glanced at Noah, who was in Sharon’s arms. Kyle’s eyes widened, and his head jerked backward. I knew exactly why. He had noticed the small bump in Sharon’s stomach. It was hard to miss under her tight-fitting, zipped-up ski jacket.
By the time we reached him, he had a white-knuckle grip on the helmet and kept rolling his shoulder as if he were trying to work out a kink. Cameron flung himself at Kyle, who placed his helmet on the bench and scooped up the boy. “Your goal was nasty,” Cameron said.
“That was for you, champ.” Kyle had turned so that his back was to me, Sharon, and Noah.
“Ky, Ky,” Noah babbled, extending his arms in Kyle’s direction.
Kyle rotated back toward us and deposited Cameron back on the ground. His eyes met Sharon’s as he took Noah from her. “So you’re ...” He glanced in my direction and stopped. His Adam’s apple danced as he took a few hard swallows.
“She’s having a girl.” I hoped my voice was steadier than it sounded to me.
“Congratulations,” Kyle said, his tone more appropriate for saying something likesorry for your loss.
“We’re excited.” Sharon folded her arms across her belly as if she were trying to conceal evidence.
“They’re naming her Sharon.” I knew this would get a reaction from him because he thought Sharon was vain.
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” Sharon snapped. “What’s the big deal.”
Kyle raised one eyebrow. Nostalgia overpowered me as I remembered him trying to teach me how to do that when we were first dating. We’d been sitting on his black leather couch. The eye under the eyebrow I wasn’t trying to raise kept closing. “You look like you’re having a seizure,” he’d said. I bet him dinner I could learn.After a month of trying, I made him manicotti to pay off the bet. It was the first time I had used a recipe from my parents’ diner to cook him something.
Most of the crowd had left, and the rink was quiet, except for a few bangs coming from the locker room.
“Cameron wanted to see you play,” I said.
Kyle nodded. I felt like a teenage girl pretending not to have a crush on a boy instead of a wife talking to her husband of seven years.
A small popping sound came from Noah. Kyle’s face contorted, and he extended the baby away from him. “Someone needs a diaper change.”
