Hook thirty-four was empty. Thirty-four is the size-one rentals, the black ones with a bootlace in the left skate where the real lace used to be, and nobody takes them, so they're always home by the time I count the board. I stood behind the rental desk at twenty past four on Tuesday with a pair of adult eights in each hand and counted the hooks again, left to right, like the number might come out different.
Owen's boots were under the corner table. Side by side, toes to the wall, his hat stuffed down inside the left one. That's how he leaves things when he's trying to look like he hasn't done anything.
Out on the ice somebody blew a whistle, twice, short.
I put the eights down on the desk. I walked, through the lobby doors and across the mat, and then I was at the glass at the south end.
The Squirts were in lines at the near end, twenty of them in jerseys down to their knees, gliding on one foot and wobbling. I found him in the second line by his stance, which is the stance of a kid who thinks he's doing it right: knees too straight, black rental helmet riding down over his eyebrows, gloves that belonged to somebody bigger. Skates the color of hook thirty-four.
Cody Hartzell was behind him on the ice in a Squirts windbreaker, whistle in his teeth. He had his right hand on the back of Owen's neck. Not squeezing, not that I could see. Just resting there, big and flat, under the helmet, right where the hood of a coat sits. He was tipping Owen forward from the neck a little at a time, like adjusting a lamp.
Owen was grinning. Of course he was. A man with a whistle was fixing his posture.
I hit the glass with my hand. The whole flat of it, once, and the sound went out across the rink like somebody dropped a tray in a cafeteria, and I hit it again, and again, harder, until the panel in front of me was jumping in its frame and the one beside it started, and then the next, and the whole end of the rink was rattling like a bus on a bad road. Twenty small helmets turned around.
Cody let go. He lifted his hand off Owen and held it up beside his own head, palm out, like I was somebody he'd been told to be polite to.
Then he skated over, slowly, backwards, the way they do, and stopped at the gate with a spray of ice, and took the whistle out.
"Everything okay, Mom?"
"Off the ice," I said. "Him. Now."
"Warm-up skate, buddy." He said it quietly and smiled at the kids over my shoulder at the same time, which is a skill. "Open ice, no roster, no pressure. I'd never put a kid on a list you crossed him off of. I hear you on that." He pulled the whistle back in. "Benny sized him."
"Mom!" Owen came across the ice in a glide that was mostly falling forward. "Mom, I was doing crossovers! Technically they're pre-crossovers, but Coach says I have the lean, and I've been on for nine minutes, and nobody even fell on me."
"Off."
"But you said no to tryouts and this is practice, so—"
"Owen."
He looked at my face and stopped. He skated to the gate with his head down, and I pulled it open for him and took him by the shoulder of his jersey and walked him off the ice onto the rubber.
Benny had appeared at the end of the bench with his thermos. He doesn't hurry, but he gets to where the trouble is.
"You gave him skates," I said.
"He asked for skates." Benny considered me. "You said no tryouts. Is skates the same as tryouts?"
"Benny."
"I'm asking. I wasn't told. Nobody said anything about skates."
Behind us Cody called out, easy, over the whole rink: "Easy on the glass, Nell. You'll spook the little guys." And he blew the whistle, and they all went back to wobbling, and I saw him wipe his right hand down the front of his windbreaker, once, slow, the way you wipe off a pen that leaked.
I sat Owen on the bench and undid his laces. His toes came out of the skates curled, white at the tips, and he flexed them at me.
"They pinch," he said. "But it's technically fine. They were the only ones on the hook."
\ \ \*
He went to the snack counter in his socks for his half a pretzel.
I stood at the end of the counter where I could see the ice through the open door and Cody's windbreaker going up and down the far boards. My hands were still stinging. I'd split the skin at the base of my thumb on the glass frame and not noticed.
Owen climbed onto the stool next to Benny, who was eating his soup out of the cup with the plastic spoon, and a mother with a stroller was waiting on a hot chocolate behind them. Dolores was wiping down the warmer with the gray rag, and she didn't look at him, and she put the pretzel on a napkin and slid it across.
"Coach Cody put his hand on my neck," Owen told the whole counter, "to fix my back, and then my mom hit the glass so loud Benny says the glass is a half inch thick, which is a lot, and everybody looked, and I wasn't even in trouble yet. And you know what else? Mom's going places with Garrett. Every day, I think. She says it's work, but she smells like his car, which is a tree and old French fries, and his heater only does the windshield. I was in it Thursday."
She went on wiping. She got the whole warmer, front and sides, and shook the rag out over the sink, and then she looked at me for the first time since I'd come over.
"Kid talks," she said. "You want him quiet, give him something to do. Not my job."
"I didn't ask you."
"Didn't have to."
She took the rag into the back. The door swung shut behind her.
I looked at the ceiling for a second, because it was a good thing to look at.
"Benny," I said.
"I know." He'd come up behind me. "You want me to take him to your mother's. Who floods at five-fifteen?"
"You."
"That's what I figured." He looked at Owen, who'd put his whole mouth around the pretzel. "Depends if she's got dinner. She always has dinner."
\ \ \*
I texted the number from the popcorn bag. I wrote: The list. Now.
I'd been going to wait until I wasn't shaking. He took less than a minute.
I will be in the Wegmans lot, far corner by the cart return. I will not come onto the rink property. Is that all right?
I read it with my coat half on. He had all the time in the world.
It's two hundred yards to the Wegmans lot if you go straight across Thirty-Eighth, which you're not supposed to. It was dusk, that gray-blue when the lot lights haven't decided yet. I went over the plowed ridge and between two idling cars, and one of them honked, and I put my hand up at it without looking.
The tan Grand Prix was at the back, past the last light pole, nose out, its exhaust going up straight in the dead air. I knocked on the passenger window and he leaned across and unlocked it from the inside with two fingers, like it might go off.
The car smelled like a sandwich. A green cardboard pine tree hung from the mirror, a year or two past its use. The heater was blowing hard at the windshield and not at me, and the back of my neck was still sweating from the glass while my knees froze.
"Thank you for coming," Garrett said. "You are bleeding."
He had both hands on the wheel, ten and two, with the car in park.
"It's fine. The list."
"Not today."
"You told your paralegal it wasn't for today. That was yesterday. This is today."
"It is not for today either," he said. "I am sorry."
"Cody Hartzell had his hand on my son's neck forty minutes ago."
I watched him take it. His hands stayed on the wheel, but the knuckles came up white all at once, like the wheel had gone hot. Then he took a breath and let them down one at a time.
"Is Owen all right?" he said.
"Don't you ask me that."
"Did he hurt him?" Garrett said.
"He held his neck. Under the helmet. He said he was fixing his posture."
"Where is Owen now?"
"With my mother. You know something about Cody. You stopped me at Tasha's, and don't you say you didn't."
"I do not want you alone with him," Garrett said. "That is what I know."
"Then what am I even doing here?"
"I am going to buy tea," Garrett said. "The hot water at the deli is free until six, and I have not eaten since breakfast. I will leave you in the car. The engine is on."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Then I will be eleven minutes." He got out, slowly, and shut the door without slamming it. I watched him go across the lot in his coat with his hands out of his pockets.
I sat there four minutes. I counted them on the dash clock, which was the only thing in the car that worked right.
The console between the seats was an old molded one with a plastic lid, and the latch had broken off. Somebody had wrapped a black binder clip around the front edge to hold it down. Everything else in the car had a gray film of road on it, but that clip was clean.
I had my house key out and under the edge of the lid. The clip came off with one pry and went on the floor.
\ \ \*
A parking ticket, folded in four: defiant trespass, Glenwood Rink. Two teabags in a sandwich bag. A roll of peppermints with three left. A rubber-banded stack of drugstore photographs, the kind that come out of the machine in the little paper sleeve, with the glossy white borders.
I took the rubber band off.
It was my own lot. It took me a second. Our lot from across Thirty-Eighth, from low down, like somebody had been sitting in a car with the camera on his knee. Tiny cars under the lot lights. Flash off, so everything was grainy, the color of old pennies.
My Ranger, three times. My Ranger with the door open and a small figure climbing in over the seat, in a hood, with a backpack going in after him. I had the print at the edge of my fingers, and it was bending, and I made myself keep hold of it.
Cody's pickup, black, with the Hartzell Marine and RV door magnets. Six frames, different nights from the snow on the roof, always backed in beside the light pole. Lorraine's Jeep. Benny's brown Grand Marquis with the one hubcap, and somebody getting into the passenger side with a grocery bag. My truck again.
Twenty, maybe. I fanned them out on my knee like a hand of cards.
Under them was an index card. It had been folded once and flattened. Garrett's capitals, in blue, even as a ruler: three lines. FAIRVIEW. GIRARD. And NORTH EAST, HAMMOND ROAD. The first two had a line through them, neat, with the pen going all the way off the end of each word. The third one he'd gone around twice in a circle. They were places. I didn't know what you did with places.
I put the card on top of the pile.
The driver's door opened. He was holding a paper cup of hot water with a teabag string over the rim and a white deli bag in his other hand. He'd been eight minutes. He stood there with the door open and looked at what I had in my lap, and the dome light came on, and for once he didn't have anything ready to say.
"You said you would be eleven minutes."
"The line was short."
"You've been photographing my son."
"I have not been photographing your son." He got in and shut the door, and the light went out. "He is in the frame because he is next to you."
"Then who? Who's it for? Me? Cody? You've got him six times."
He looked at the stack in my lap and didn't answer.
I threw the first handful at him. I didn't aim. They came off my knee in a spray of glossy squares, and landed in his lap, and on the wheel, and one stuck to his chest, and he didn't brush them off. He let them lie.
"I'm calling Kovach," I said. "I'm walking back across that road and giving her every one. You think she'll say that's popcorn?"
"No," Garrett said. "I think she will say it is a stalker."
"Good."
"And then you will have her photographs, and I will have a lawyer who tells me to say nothing, and you will not know what I was going to show you. That is your choice. I only want you to see what it costs."
"Don't tell me what things cost."
"I am sorry." He waited. "One thing."
"What?"
"Not the list. Something you can check, with somebody who cannot say I told you." He turned his head. "Ask Lou Moynihan where you waited before the lineup."
"In his office."
"For how long?" he said.
"Twenty minutes. There's a radiator. A cup of pencils."
"It is in your testimony. I do not know what else was in the room. Ask him what was on the desk."
"Why?"
"Because he is the one man who can tell you," Garrett said.
"That's all you're giving me. For the pictures."
"For you not calling her," he said. "Yes. It is all I can give you today."
I picked the glossy squares up off his lap and the wheel and his chest, one at a time, and squared the stack on my knee, and put the rubber band back on and put them in the console. I put the card on top. It went in crooked, one corner hanging out over the edge, and I knew it, and I let the lid come down.
He watched me do all of it without a word. When I was done he looked at the lid for a second, and then out through the windshield, where the heater had cleared its fan of glass.
"Thank you," he said.
"I didn't do it for you."
"No."
I got out. I didn't slam it either.
\ \ \*
By the time I was back across Thirty-Eighth the Squirts were coming off the ice. I sat in the Ranger with the engine off and watched them through the lobby glass, twenty kids in a line with their helmets under their arms, and Cody last, holding the door for every one of them, and putting a hand on every little back as they went by.
I dialed Lou's cell. He didn't answer on the first ring, which he always does. I'd wiped the blood off my thumb on my jeans and it had started again.
"Nellie," he said finally. Behind him was wind, a lot of it, a big flat sound, like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle.
"Where did I wait? Before the lineup."
There was nothing. There was just the wind.
"Lou."
"Where are you?"
"In my truck."
"Not on the phone, honey," he said. "Not on the phone. Come out to the shanty in the morning."