Page 12 of Thin Ice

Dead quiet, Jerry called it. Best season we've got.

He was in the office when I came up the lot, which is to say he was in the shed with a desk in it, radio going, and coffee maker brewing. The entire room smelled like diesel and old wood and always had. There was a chart of the lake on the wall older than my mother.

"Look what the bus dragged in," Jerry said, not looking up from the paperwork. "College boy."

"Jerry."

"Wind got into the back lot Thursday night." He tipped his head at the window over the docks. "Tore the wrap open on the Hendersons' Sea Ray and that big pontoon at the end of row C. Been flapping for four days. Sounds like applause out there. Go make it stop."

He slid a heat gun across the desk. That's the thing about Jerry. I'd been gone four months, come home bisexual, punched a Kingswell kid, made captain, and Jerry didn't care to ask about any of it. He told me what to do. I did it. Got paid.

I took the heat gun and the coffee he didn't offer and went.

I found the tear on the Sea Ray's starboard side, a three-foot gash where the wind had peeled the plastic back like a lid. I pulled my box cutter and trimmed the ragged edge back to clean wrap, ran a strip of tape along the margin, and cut a patch from the roll on the cart. Lined it up. Smoothed it flat with my palm.

Then, the heat gun.

I pulled the trigger and worked the seam low and slow, one pass, watching the plastic go cloudy and then draw down, tightening against itself, pulling smooth over the hull. You can't rush it. I'd melted a hole in it during my first time, and Jerry had stood over me going slower, slower, you're not drying your hair, son. So I held the gun at the distance my hands remembered, one speed, steady, and the seam hazed and sealed and went drum-tight under my glove.

I like this work.

That's the part I never say out loud to anyone at school. I liked the cold and the gun in my hand and the lot to myself and the lake stretched out flat and white past the last row of boats, not a soul on it, ours again for one season.

The rich take the summer. December belongs to us.

Saturday night was still with me while I worked.

We'd left things weird. Not bad, just off. I'd gone quiet on him, and he'd gone short with me, and Sunday had been a whole day of neither of us texting first.

I didn't know when I was going to see him. He was twenty minutes away, and I had no idea when we'd actually be in the same room. Could be tomorrow. Could be a week. And the not knowing made everything else worse. The fear about him seeing my house, finding out that I worked all winter at the marina, or worse yet, that we wouldn't see each other at all.

Jerry came out mid-morning to inspect the Sea Ray, which meant he stood there with his coffee and looked at my seam for five seconds.

"Hm," he said. High praise.

Then, walking the row toward the pontoon, casual as a forecast: "They opened the big place out on the Point. You hear that?"

My hands kept working. I made sure of it.

"Which place?"

"Which place, he says." Jerry snorted. "The place. Harrington's. Lit up like an airport out there since the weekend. Denny plowed their drive, says they got it staffed and everything. Christmas at the lake." He shook his head at the wonder of rich people. "Thirty years they've closed that house every fall. Never once seen it lit in December."

"Huh," I said.

"Huh," Jerry agreed.

I ran the heat gun over a seam that was already sealed and listened to my heart going. He doesn't know. Of course he doesn't know. On this lake I'm still just Linda Moore's kid who's good with a heat gun. The fact that I could see Alex's house from where I was standing, that his father had lit up thirty years of dark windows specifically to deal with me, that the boy inside had gone to sleep in my hoodie last night. No one knew that, not here.

I had lunch in the shop — space heater, sandwich from home, hands thawing enough to hold a phone.

I looked at it. No new texts. Just Saturday night's conversation sitting there on the screen, the last message still mine: I'm good… really. Night, Alex.

Good really. Who says that? I sounded like a robot trying to pass a feelings test.

I typed: Hey.

Deleted it.