Page 18 of Thin Ice

When did it happen? When did the guy in the photograph become the man behind the desk? Was it the firm? The money? Was it slow, a degree at a time, the way a house settles. Or was it always there, underneath the grin?

And the question I didn't want to ask but couldn't stop:

Is that what I become?

Twenty years in this room, in this chair, nodding at this desk. If I signed, would I be sitting on the other side in thirty years, building a cage for my own kid? Would I have a photograph on my wall of the one time I was free, and would I point at it and say, that's the standard without hearing what I was actually saying?

My father's voice continued behind me. Quarterly projections. Board governance. I turned away from the photograph. And my eyes went to the high trophy shelf.

Silver, mostly. Cups and plates and small engraved things in a line, polished by someone whose name I did not know, arranged by height. I had never once read the engravings.

I read them now. Squash trophies, Greenwich, 1979, 1980, 1981. A crystal weight from the firm. A shallow silver plate engraved with a golf score I couldn't decipher. Two cups from Kingswell, my father's era.

And at the end of the row, tarnished at the handles, the largest cup on the shelf.

INTERCOLLEGIATE ROWING ASSOCIATION NATIONAL CHAMPIONS — 1967 RIVERSIDE UNIVERSITY

Five names below that. Riverside University. Riverside.

I couldn't place it at first. Then it came. The Riverside Club. Jace at the head of the table, jaw set, looking around the room the night before he graduated. This program isn't supposed to win. We don't have the money. We don't have the boathouse or the donors, or even the trophy that's supposed to be in that case down there.

Riverside had a missing trophy. My father had a Riverside trophy. My father was born in 1961 and had been nine years old in 1970. The math ended there and started somewhere else, and where it started was not with him.

My grandfather. The man whose Patek was on my wrist. Whose face I had walked past in the Kingswell hall of class photos for eighteen years.

I didn't know the year it was taken, or how, or by whom. I knew it belonged somewhere else. It had belonged somewhere else my entire life. And nobody in this house had ever mentioned it.

My father finished the call.

"Still here," he noted, turning.

"I was reading the folder," I lied.

"Good." He sat back down. The glasses went on. The legal pad came forward. "Close the door on your way out."

I nodded, then walked toward the door. Paused for a moment.

Do I ask about the trophy?

No.

I left and closed the door behind me. I didn't know yet what I was going to do about the trophy, but what I knew was where it was and whose it wasn't.

***

My mother was in the foyer.

Box of holly cuttings against her hip, one-armed, cheeks still pink from the cold.

"Alex. How was your meeting?"

"Productive."

"How was your walk?"

"Lovely. Cold, but lovely. I went out past the boathouse to the inlet." She shifted the box to her other hip. "Would you help me with the wreath? The service did the front, but the mantle one is mine, and I could use someone tall."

I followed her into the living room, took off my sweater, and rolled the sleeves of my shirt to my elbows.