Twenty Miles Read Free Page B

and she leaned over again, attacking her laces.
    ‘I’m okay,’ she said to me, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
    I nodded. ‘That’s good.’ We undressed in silence. I looked over at Hal, speaking gravely to Boz, eyebrows raised. Boz nodded her head over and over, the tiny tips of braids dancing on her shoulders. Her glasses filled with the yellow light of the room, burning bright ovals against her dark skin.
    ‘Are you okay?’ Pelly asked.
    ‘What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine.’
    ‘You worried about Hal?’
    ‘No, no.’ I wiped my skate blades with an old T-shirt, kept my head down. ‘A little bit, I guess.’
    ‘Just stay away from her for a while. She’ll forget about it. Pretty sweet hit though, eh?’
    ‘I just – I didn’t mean to, that’s all.’
    ‘It was like,
Pow!
And we were all like,
Holy shit, did that happen?
And we were laughing a bit?’
    I walked along the curve of boards toward the rink door that would spit me onto the road leading back to Rez. The ice lay empty and gleaming. Fluorescent lights hung a steady hum in the rafters, their blurred reflections crowding the surface of the ice. I passed an open door cut into the stands like a mountain cave, seats rearing up high above it. A man’s voice called out the door. ‘Is that Isabel?’
    I thought it was Stan, the assistant coach. I turned around and a stranger stepped from the doorway, craning his neck nervously.
    ‘Look at you, then,’ he said quietly, as though we’d been reunited after years apart. ‘There’s the face.’
    He looked kind of lost standing there in the small doorway, no one else around. He wore navy blue sweatpants that rode up a bit around the ankles, a white polo shirt tucked in. The shirt was old and thinned so you could see the orangey hue of skin and roughly sketched chest hairs beneath. A black leather fanny pack hung crooked around his thin hips.
    I smiled awkwardly, my feet still pointing toward the door to the parking lot.
    ‘Oh – pardon me. Sorry.’ A high-pitched little laugh. ‘My – I’m Ed.’ He took a couple of hesitant steps over and then shook my hand. Strong shake, then, as though he’d just remembered something, he dropped my hand and combed his fingers through his hair with the quick motions of habit, adjusted the strands into a consistency meant to keep up the illusion his scalp wasn’t peeking through. But he had this look while he made the adjustment – he crouched his head down like he was about to be hit and rolled his eyes upward, hand performing the furtive adjustment, so it looked like he was pleading for me not to notice and, although I was confused, I instantly wanted to tell him he was handsome. I wanted to pat him on the back like a dog.
    ‘You don’t know me, I guess,’ he said. ‘You don’t. I knew your, uh, dad. I played with Kristjan back in the day.’ An apologetic tone.
    Of course.
    ‘You’re from Kenora?’ I said.
    ‘No, we played Junior that one year here in Winnipeg. Billeted together. Geez, you look like him, eh?’ Amazed eyes.
    ‘That’s what I’m told.’
    ‘Okay, well.’ His eyes slid to the ground, then over to his door.
    ‘You work for the team?’ I asked.
    He smiled quickly, then ran a hand over his mouth. Long fingers with knotted knuckles. ‘You could say that, I guess.’ He pointed past my head. ‘I drive the beast.’
    The black nose of the Zamboni poked out from its stall beyond the boards, the headlights glowing dully in the shadows.
    ‘Oh, okay,’ I said and made a movement toward the door. ‘I see.’
    ‘You going out? Just hang on one second, I’ll come with you. Need a smoke.’
    Ed patted the fanny pack. He went through the door, then came out pulling on a beaten-up windbreaker, fluorescent green stripes on the sleeves. He shut the door behind him and the room disappeared into the stands.
    He held the door open for me. The late summer air felt curdled after the rink’s ice-thinned atmosphere; walking into the dark