Benny's niece had the counter. Her name is Kayla, she's nineteen, she does nails at the mall on weekends, and she gives pretzels away like they're napkins.
Owen put his worksheet down on the counter at seven o'clock, out of habit, with his hat still on. He had a long division page with three eraser holes in it, one of them worn right through where he'd fought the same remainder four times. Kayla didn't even pick it up. She didn't hold it to the light. She reached in the warmer with her bare hand and gave him a whole pretzel on a napkin, and smiled, and went back to her phone.
He came over to the boards where I was waiting for the public skate to clear, holding it out in front of him like something he'd found in the lot.
"She doesn't even check," he said.
"Eat it."
"I am going to eat it. I'm just saying she doesn't check. That's not how it works." He took a bite and talked through it. "There were three holes. That's not even half. That's like a third. I got a whole one for three holes."
"Lucky you."
"It's not lucky," Owen said. "It's wrong."
He went back to the corner table and sat with the pretzel on the napkin in front of him and didn't eat any more of it.
At seven-thirty he came back to the boards.
"Is Kayla the counter forever now?"
"I don't know. For now."
"She calls me buddy," he said, with his chin on the top of the boards. "Everybody calls me buddy. Coach Cody called me buddy." He watched the public skaters go around, a dad holding two kids up by the backs of their coats. "Nobody calls me Mister anymore."
"Do you want them to?"
He thought about it, slow, the way Benny thinks, in a line.
"No," he said. "I just noticed."
Then he went back to his table. The new Squirts coach, one of the moms, a dental hygienist with a whistle on a pink lanyard, came through the lobby with a bag of pucks and waved at him, and he waved back without looking up.
It had been fifty degrees that afternoon. The snowbanks in the lot had gone gray and shrunk down to nothing and run off into the storm drains, and everybody'd said that was it, winter was done, and then about six the wind came around off the lake and the radio said one more inch tonight, the last one, maybe two. Through the lobby glass the lights over the lot had halos on them already.
At eight I took Big Sue out for the last cut. Benny stood at the ice door with his arms folded and watched my lines, the whole way around, every pass, and when I brought her in he put his hand on the side of her and walked with her into the machine room like you'd walk a horse in.
"Good lines," he said.
"Thanks."
He started the hose. He stood there watching the tank fill and didn't look at me. Benny doesn't say things nobody asked him, except about Olympias. I didn't think he was going to say anything else. He turned the hose off.
"Ten years I drove her," he said. "She never said."
He coiled the hose on the hook, the way he does it, over and under so it doesn't kink, and went out to do the gates.
\ \ \*
The snow started while I was locking up. Big, wet, slow flakes, the kind that melt as soon as they touch the windshield and leave a dot. Owen climbed in on his own side, which he'd been allowed to do again since February, and put his backpack between his feet and the pretzel on his knee in its napkin. He still hadn't eaten it. I started the truck and let it run to warm up, and the wipers went once and stopped, and we sat there in the empty lot with the dash lit up green.
"Is it still a deal," Owen said, "if the person goes to jail?"
"What deal?"
"Any deal. Like if you make a deal with somebody and then they go to jail. Is it still a deal or is it over."
"I don't know, bud. Depends on the deal."
"That's what Benny says. Depends." He turned the pretzel on his knee. "Because technically the deal was only about the pop, the deal was if I don't tell you I had pop at midnight she owes me two pretzels, and she can't give me two pretzels because she's in jail, so she broke it, so technically it's not a deal anymore and I can tell you, right? Because she broke it first. And it wasn't even really about the pop. The pop was just the part we said."
I had my hand on the gearshift. I left it there.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay so," Owen said, loud, fast, the way he tells me about a movie. "So I was asleep on her couch, and it's a really bad couch, it's got a hole in the cushion and she put a towel on it, and then I wasn't on the couch, I was in a car, in the back, and I was still asleep mostly. I slept through the gas station. I know it was a gas station because after there was a bag on the seat and it said Sheetz. And then I woke up when the car stopped. It stopped and the engine was still going and I was in the back seat under her coat, she put her coat on me, the big one, and it smelled like the fryer. Like the warmer. Like when you stand right next to the warmer."
He stopped. He picked a piece of salt off the pretzel and put it on the dashboard.
"And she opened the back door and she gave me a pop out of the bag. Orange. And she said don't spill. And then she didn't get back in."
The snow was coming down harder. The wipers went again by themselves, once, because I'd left them on intermittent, and in the clean place on the glass the lot was white already, all of it, the whole thing, nobody's tracks on it.
"She stood outside," Owen said. He wasn't loud anymore. "By the door. It was open, and the snow was coming in on the seat, and she was just standing there in the snow, and she didn't have her coat because I had it. And she was looking over the trees. There was a light over the trees. Orange. Like a really big orange light, like when they do a night game at the high school, but orange. And she was crying." He looked at his knees. "Like a grown-up. With no noise."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't have.
"And then she got back in," Owen said, "and she turned around in her seat and looked at me, and she said, 'Go back to sleep, Mister. I'm taking you home.'"
He put his finger in the salt on the dashboard and moved it around.
"And I went back to sleep. And in the morning she made me eggs. And then you came."
I took my hand off the gearshift. I reached across the seat and got him by his coat and pulled him over the backpack and the gearshift, pretzel and all, and the pretzel went on the floor, and I had him. I had my arms all the way around him and his face in my neck and his hat coming off. I held on too hard. I knew it was too hard. He said "Mom," once, muffled, and then he didn't say anything, and he didn't try to get away. He's nine. He's almost too big for it. I didn't let go.
The engine ran. The wipers went. The snow came down on the lot and on the truck and on the lobby glass and on the dark windows of the snack bar, and I didn't let go of him for a long time.
\ \ \*
On the way home Owen leaned over in the dark of the cab and felt around on the floor mat by his boots and found the pretzel, in its napkin, gone cold and a little wet from the snow off our feet. He blew on it. He ate the whole thing, every bite, looking out the window, and folded the napkin into a square and put it in the cup holder. I didn't say anything about it. He didn't either.
Benny came over at midnight and sat on my couch with the TV off and his coat still on. Owen was asleep in his own bed with the hall light on and the door open the width of a hand. I'd stood in his doorway a long time first. Benny didn't ask where I was going. He looked at the clock on the stove and at me and said, "You want me to wait up? I'll wait up," and took his boots off and put them on the mat side by side.
I took Twenty-Sixth over to Cascade and went north, past the Sunoco with its lights on and nobody at the pumps, past the underpass at Sixteenth, past Fourteenth and the square brick building with the ghost of a sign on it and a dark window over the garage door, all the way up to Eighth, and I turned around in the bank lot so I'd come down the right way.
Twelve-forty, the clock said, when I stopped by the hydrant.
He was in the light.
Not at the end of the shelter. Not one step outside it. He was standing right under the pole on the corner, with the snow coming straight down on him through the streetlight, on his shoulders and his hair and his face, and he didn't wipe it off. He had a duffel bag at his feet on the sidewalk, a green one, army surplus, and his hands in his coat.
I got out. I left the truck running. I didn't bring anything.
"Hello, Nell," he said.
"You're leaving."
"Tomorrow. Dale has a room over his garage in Corry. There is a man there who has a commercial kitchen. Banquets. Weddings at the fire hall." He looked down at the duffel. "He needs somebody on the dish machine, and then maybe on the line. He knows who I am. He said he does not care, as long as I show up at five."
"Five in the morning."
"Yes."
"That's my shift," I said. "Ten past."
"I know," he said. "I would like to be on time for something."
A plow went by on Cascade with its yellow light going around, and the driver didn't lift any fingers this time. We watched it go.
He took his hand out of his coat. He had the clipping, folded small, the creases gone soft and white as an old dollar.
"Is it all right if I give you this?" he said. "I do not need it in Corry."
I took it. I unfolded it under the streetlight, with the snow landing on it and making gray spots. There I was on Big Sue in my orange hat, with my mouth open. There was Benny with his arms folded. And behind us, the lobby glass, the pretzel sign, the counter, the smear of white that was somebody in an apron, out of focus, the way the back of a picture always is.
I folded it back up along the creases. I did it wrong. He watched me do it wrong, and he didn't reach for it, and I put it in my coat.
"The pictures," I said. "Of the lot."
"I wanted to see what she drove," he said. "She got into Benny's car. I thought, she does not drive."
"She drove," I said.
"You said you owed me the rest of it."
"Yes." He was quiet a while. The snow kept landing on him. "I told you the railing. I told you she slipped and I held her arm, and she laughed at your truck. I told you she sent me home. I did not tell you what she said."
I stood there. I put my hands in my pockets so I wouldn't do anything with them.
"You drove off," Garrett said. "She was still laughing. She had her hand up. She watched your taillights to the corner. And I said, is it all right if I walk you, and she looked at me like I was the stupidest man she had ever seen." Something moved at the edge of his mouth. "She said, 'She'll come back around the block. She always does.' And then she told me to go home. She said I smelled like the dish pit."
I made a sound. I don't know what it was. It wasn't crying and it wasn't laughing, it came out of my chest by itself, like when you're hit in the stomach with a puck, and I bent over a little with my hands in my pockets and stayed bent.
"I did," he said. "I smelled like the dish pit. She was right."
I straightened up. The snow was in my eyes.
"Did she send you," I said. "Or did you go?"
He didn't answer right away. He looked south down Cascade, past the dark houses, toward the corner of Fourteenth.
"I have told it both ways for twelve years," he said. "To the wall. To the man in the bunk under me. To myself on the walk to the yard. She told me to go, and I went. I wanted to go, and she let me. I have told it both ways so many times." He looked back at me. "I do not know anymore which one I made up."
I didn't have anything for that.
We stood there. The snow came down between us, through the light, every flake, slow.
I took my hand out of my pocket and put it on his arm. Just above the elbow, on the wet canvas of his coat. Not hard. Not soft. Just on it.
He didn't move. He looked at my hand there, and then he looked at me, and he let it stay.
Then I took it back, and I walked to the truck, and got in, and pulled away from the hydrant without looking at him.
\ \ \*
I went down Cascade to Fourteenth and turned right. I didn't signal. There was nobody to signal to.
By the end of the block I was mad. It came up out of nowhere, out of my stomach, hot. Mad at her, for laughing, for the finger, for standing in the road, for telling a man to go home like she was the one doing him a favor. Mad at him for going, either way, whichever way it was, and at Dolores, and at Dolores, and at Dolores, and I hit the wheel with the flat of my hand so hard the horn went, one short honk in the middle of the night on a street of dark houses, and a dog started up somewhere behind a fence.
I turned right at the next corner. I was crying with my mouth open. I didn't care. The wipers were going, and I hadn't touched them, and the heater was roaring, and I was saying things out loud in the truck, to her, I don't know what. Some of it was swearing. Some of it was her name.
I turned right onto Twelfth, and there was Cascade at the end of the block, and the corner, and the shelter with its three scratched walls and the lawyer sticker, and the hydrant, and the pole.
He was still there. He hadn't picked up the bag. He was standing in the light with the snow coming down on him, the way I'd left him, looking down Cascade at the corner where I'd turned.