Kovach's phone rang five times and then her voice said to leave a message, the way it says it to everybody, like she's got a mouthful.
"It's Nell," I said. "Call me. Please call me." I sat there with the phone against my face in the Pleasant Ridge lot, with the engine running and the wipers going and the snow coming down slow and straight through the one light over the side door, and I couldn't think of the next word. "Call me," I said again, and hung up.
I sent her the picture of the page. I watched the little bar go across. Delivered. Four forty-four.
Then I sat there.
I want to say I thought about it. That I made a decision. I didn't. The clock on the dash said four forty-six, and I open at ten past five, and it takes eighteen minutes from up there to Glenwood if the lights are with you, and my hands put the truck in reverse because that's where they go at quarter to five. That's all it was. I didn't have anywhere else in me to drive.
\ \ \*
It had snowed two inches overnight. The Glenwood lot is supposed to be mine at ten past five. My tracks, my boots.
There was a gray car parked by the dumpster in Benny's spot. Snow on the roof, snow on the trunk, a hole scraped in the windshield just big enough to see through. A line of footprints went from the driver's door across the lot to the front doors, small ones, thick-soled, close together, the steps of somebody who walks on ice for a living and doesn't trust it.
I parked next to it. I got out and stood between the two cars with my keys in my hand and looked at it. It was just a car. It was the most ordinary car in Erie. I put my hand flat on the hood, and the hood was cold all the way through. It had been sitting a while.
I walked next to the prints to the door, not in them.
The door was locked. I unlocked it. The alarm panel by the rental desk was green, not red, because somebody had already put in the code. The lobby was dark except for the exit signs and the pretzel warmer, which was off, and through the glass past the ice door I could see the bleacher lights were on. Just the bleacher lights, the row of them on the far side, and nothing over the ice, so the rink was a big dark field with a lit-up stage on the other side of it.
She was in the second row, on the end, in the seat that looks back at the lobby. Coat on. Purse in her lap, both hands on top of it. Black work shoes side by side on the row in front, like she was waiting for a bus.
She didn't wave. She didn't stand up. She watched me through the glass.
I did the boards.
I don't know how else to say it. I went out the ice door and walked the whole rink on the mat behind the boards, both sides and both ends, checking the gates, the way I do every morning, and every time I came along the far side I walked right below her, eight feet away, and neither of us said anything. The gates were fine. They're always fine. Then I went in the machine room and hit the lights, all the banks, one after the other, and they came on with that hum and a click and the whole ice went white, and she sat there in it. Then I filled Big Sue from the hose. I stood there holding it while the tank filled and watched the water go in and didn't look at the window.
I climbed up and took her out.
She's seven tons. You don't think about it most days. That morning I felt every pound of it, in the seat, in the wheel, in my teeth, and I went around slow and wide, the blade down, the water going out behind me, the conditioner laying it hot. The ice hissed and sighed. Every time I came around the far side Dolores was there in the corner of my eye in her coat, not moving, and I didn't turn my head. Behind me the black mirror went down, the roof lights in it, the bleacher lights, her, upside down.
On the fourth pass I got to the middle of the ice and I stopped. I shut Big Sue off. Benny would've had something to say about that, about where the water goes when you stop her in the middle with the tank still full, and he'd have been right, and I didn't care, I climbed down.
The new water was still wet. It came up over the welts of my boots, warm at first and then cold, and I walked across it. I left the machine sitting out there in the middle like something somebody abandoned on the highway. I walked to the boards on the bleacher side, and every step went in and made a sound like walking on a wet floor in a kitchen, and my boots skidded twice and I didn't fall.
I put my hands on top of the boards. She stood up then, and came down one row, and sat on the bottom bleacher with her purse, so we were about the same height. Six feet of rubber mat between us.
"Walt called me," she said. "Ten to four. Says, Dee, I gave the girl the book."
\ \ \*
I'd thought I would have questions. I'd had all the way down Peach to think of them. I opened my mouth and nothing came, and she didn't wait for one.
"Bottle was behind the fryer oil," she said. "Everybody knew, nobody said, Skarupa knew, he didn't care, I ran his line for nine years and nobody ever sent a plate back. That night it snowed so I sent the kid home at twelve-fifteen, I closed out the register at quarter to one, I drank what was left in the bottle standing up by the walk-in. I walked to the church lot on Myrtle. I didn't have a license. I had a license till two thousand thirteen and then I didn't, first one, a judge and a fine and a class in a church basement with coffee, and then to get it back it's a fee and a thing in your car you blow in before it starts, and the thing is a hundred dollars a month, and I had a boy, so I didn't get it back. Diner thought I got rides. I parked in the church lot. Nobody looks at a car in a church lot."
"Stop," I said.
"No," she said. Not mean. Like a no to a kid who wants a second pop. "Mike was eleven. My husband had a lawyer already, for the divorce, a good one, his mother paid. Second one, they take him. The lawyer said that. Second one and you're in the county and he's in Pittsburgh. So I don't drive drunk. That's the rule. I drive to the Sunoco on Eighteenth for a pint, a mile, less, that's not driving, that's an errand. That's the whole errand, Dorsey. A pint."
The compressor kicked on under the floor. It does that, and you stop hearing it after a week, and I heard it. I heard every part of it.
"Cascade's not plowed down the middle. I'm by the underpass at Sixteenth. Radio says five after one, they give the time after the song. I see white. I think it's snow, a bank, the plow left a bank. I don't brake. I don't brake till after." She looked down at her hands on her purse. "Then I'm out of the car and there's one headlight, the other one's in the road in pieces, and the one headlight's on a white coat."
I was over the boards. I don't remember climbing them. My knee hit the top and my boot came down on the mat and slid on the rubber, and I was in front of her, right in front of her, standing over her, and she didn't lean back.
"She was breathing, Nell," she said. "I had her in the car."
\ \ \*
I took hold of her coat. Both hands, the front of it, the collar, cheap thick wool that smelled like the fryer. I had it bunched up under her chin and I was pulling her up off the bleacher, and she let me, she came up halfway with her purse sliding off her lap onto the floor, and her face was right there. Fifty-six years old. A mole by her nose I'd never seen. I'd looked at that face every weekday for years over a pretzel warmer and I'd never once seen that mole.
She kept talking. She talked right into my face, flat, the same voice she uses for the price of a hot chocolate.
"I put her in the back. She wasn't heavy. Her leg was wrong. I put my coat on her. I'm going to Hamot. I got the blinker on to go up State and I'm at the light at Eighteenth and it's red, and I'm sitting there, and I can smell it on me, in the car, the bottle, and I'm thinking the nurse smells it, the cop at the desk at Hamot smells it, and they take Mike." She swallowed. I felt it in my fists. "Light goes green. I don't turn. The lane's right there past the Sunoco, the one that goes down under the trestle. I turn in there. I don't know I'm going to. My hands do it."
My hands were doing nothing. They were holding her coat. They'd been going to do something, and they weren't, and I couldn't make them.
"She was light," Dolores said. "I carry her down the bank. I put her at the edge. Where it's white, where it's flat. People walk dogs down there. I think, somebody walks a dog, five o'clock, six. Somebody finds her before it's light. I put my coat over her and then I take my coat back, because I'm cold." Her eyes didn't move off mine. "I take my coat back. You want all of it, that's all of it."
I let go. She sat back down on the bleacher, not hard, and pulled the front of her coat straight where I'd had it.
I sat down too, on the mat, against the boards, in my wet jeans. I didn't decide that. My legs stopped.
\ \ \*
"Saturday seven o'clock I take it to Walt," she said, above me. "Walt's four blocks from me then, I know him, everybody knows Walt. He picks feathers out of the lamp. He says goose. I let him. I'm standing by his coffee and I look up, there's a window over the bay, and there's a face in it. A man. I don't know who. Then Sunday I know who."
She bent down and picked her purse up off the floor and put it back in her lap.
"Sunday I call. Seven fifty-two, they write that down, I hear later. I say what's true, he left at twelve-fifteen, he lives by the shelter. I say he talked about the girl. That's the part I made. He never talked about anybody. He ate standing up." She looked out at the ice, at Big Sue sitting out there in the middle. "I drive the car to Gus. Gus never asked. Gus never asked anything. That's why it was Gus's barn. I find the mitten on the floor in the back and I can't throw it away. I try. I got it over the garbage at Gus's, I stand there. I can't."
"Why here," I said. It came out of me in somebody else's voice, low and scraped. "Of all the places. Why here."
"It was Mike's rink." She said it like the price of something. "He played here. Squirts, then Pee Wee. Then the divorce, then he's fourteen and he goes with his father anyway, after all that, he picks his father. After, I couldn't go to his games. So I sold pretzels to everybody else's."
I looked at the floor. There was a piece of popcorn under the bleacher, old, gray, from some other day.
"I sent fries out to her," Dolores said. "At the diner. She orders chocolate milk, a girl that age, and sits in the booth and laughs so loud the whole counter turns around. I liked loud. Mike was loud. I sent her fries. She thought it was a boy in the kitchen. I let her think it."
"Don't," I said.
"Then he's out. On the TV. Then he's in my bleachers buying popcorn, looking at me, and I know he's the face in the window, and I know he knows. And you're going to sign the paper. The boy says it at my counter, Mom's going places with Garrett. You sign that paper, they open it back up. They look for who." She shrugged inside the coat. It was a small shrug. "I needed him to be who."
"So you went to the DA."
"Lou drinks coffee at my counter every day and never once looked at my face. So I call the DA. I tell them the dishwasher watched the girl in the booth. I told them a lot." She folded her hands on the purse. "Saturday you call me from out there. North East. Hammond Road. I know Hammond Road. Saturday night you call me from the police and you tell me they're going in the morning." She stopped, the first time she'd stopped on her own. "Boy was asleep. I dug out Mike's car. Mike's car, Mike's name, Mike's insurance, it's the only way I can keep it. I bought gas. I couldn't let them look at it. Twelve years I couldn't let anybody look at it, and you were going to bring them in the morning."
"And the mitten."
"I said it was his locker," she said. "I said a lot."
The compressor shut off. It was very quiet. Out on the ice the black mirror was going gray as it set, the way it does, with Big Sue in the middle of it.
"You left her," I said.
I was looking at her shoes. Black, thick soles, side by side.
"She wasn't in the road because of me," Dolores said. "She was in the road because nobody came back for her."
I didn't move. I didn't look up. I sat on the mat with my back against the boards and my wet jeans freezing to my legs, and the cold came up into me from the floor, and I let it.
"Don't tell Mister it was me," she said.
"Don't you call him that."
She didn't say anything back. It was the only time I ever got the last word with her.
\ \ \*
My phone went in my coat at five fifty-two. I got it out and looked at it and it said Kovach, and I put it on speaker and held it up between us, in the air, because I wanted her to hear it. I wanted her to hear it be real.
"Nell," Kovach said. She wasn't eating. "I got your picture. I just got it. Where are you?"
"At the rink."
"Okay. Okay. Stay there. Are you alone?"
"No," I said. "She's here."
There was nothing on the line at all, not even breathing, for long enough that I looked at the screen to see if it had dropped.
"Don't say anything to her," Kovach said. "Nell? Don't say a word, don't let her say a word, I'm leaving right now, I'm twenty minutes out—"
"Glenwood," Dolores said, toward the phone, the way you'd give a delivery driver directions. "Off Thirty-Eighth. I'll be at the counter."
"Ma'am," Kovach said, "I need you to not say anything else."
Dolores stood up. She picked up her purse and went down the end of the bleachers and along the mat and out through the ice door into the lobby, not fast, the way she goes every morning, and I got up and went after her because I didn't know what else to do, and Kovach was still talking out of the phone in my hand and I don't know what she said.
Dolores went behind the snack counter. She took her coat off and hung it on the hook and put her apron on over her head and tied it behind her back. She turned on the pretzel warmer. She took the drawer out of the register and set it on the counter and counted it. Bills, then quarters, then dimes, stacking them, her lips moving. She wrote a number on a pad. Then she took the pretzel tongs out of the cup by the warmer and wiped them on a rag and laid them down on the counter, straight, square to the edge, and moved them a quarter of an inch, and looked at them.
At six o'clock Benny's Grand Marquis pulled in off Thirty-Eighth, alone, and parked next to the gray car, because the gray car was in his spot. He came in stamping, with his thermos.
"She wasn't out front," he said. "I honked. I went up and knocked." Then he saw her behind the counter in her apron, and he saw me in the lobby with my jeans soaked black to the knee, and he stopped on the mat.
"Benny," I said. "Sit down."
He didn't ask me anything. He went over and sat at the corner table with his thermos in both hands and his coat on, where Owen does his homework, and he stayed there.
Kovach came in at six-twenty with snow on her shoulders and her coat open and no food in her hands at all. She looked at Dolores and at me and at Benny, and out through the glass at Big Sue sitting dead in the middle of the ice, and back at me.
Dolores took her apron off over her head. She folded it and put it on the counter by the tongs. She put her coat on and picked up her purse.
"Drawer's two hundred and six," she said, to nobody, to the counter. "Pretzels are counted. Forty-one."
Kovach put a hand on her elbow, light, and walked her out through the lobby and the front doors to the car. She didn't put cuffs on her. At the door Kovach stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me.
"You should've waited in the lot, hon," she said.
Then they were gone, and it was Benny and me, and the pretzel warmer ticking as it heated.
I went back out the ice door. The rink lights were all on and the ice was hard now, set, and you could see everything on it. Big Sue in the middle with a puddle frozen around her tires. And from her to the boards on the bleacher side, my boot prints, every one of them, sunk in a quarter inch and freezing in where I'd walked across the wet, going straight from the machine to the boards and not one of them coming back.