Page 10 of Canadian Boyfriend

Maybe the insides would follow.

In preparation for this fall, Dr. Mursal—the shrink—had asked Olivia to write down two things that made her happy, which made me laugh because nothing made Olivia happy anymore, especially not since my mom left. Which I could understand—my mom was great—but could I catch a break for one single second? Anyway, Dr. Mursal had suggested we figure out a way to make sure Olivia’s two happy things did not fall by the wayside as the school year and the hockey season started. Those things turned out to be Olivia’s dance classes at Miss Miller’s—“tap with Miss Rory especially”—and driving around the lake.

The driving part had been a surprise but easy to keep doing. It had started a couple days after the funeral. When we were out, in those early days, I’d find myself resisting going home. I didn’t want to see Sarah’s shoes in the entryway or her pile of magazines on the nightstand. I didn’t want to face the shape of our house, of our lives, without her in it. So I’d told Olivia I wanted to drive for a while, expecting her to object.

I was surprised when she hadn’t, and even more surprised when she’d suggested, the next day, on our way home from a session with Dr. Mursal, whom we’d started seeing together and were now seeing separately, that we do it again.

We kept doing it. When spring grew heavy in the air and started serving up the odd day that reminded you that the deep, sharp cold of a Minnesota winter had not, in fact, been a permanent state of affairs as you’d been beginning to fear, we started cracking the windows. The cold air smelled like thawing, and thawing seemed like a good smell. As summer arrived, we rolled the windows all the way down and stuck our arms out. I wouldn’t let Olivia stick her head and torso out the window like she wanted to, but I understood the impulse. So I came up with the idea of a convertible. It was maybe a littleweird that driving was our “thing” when Sarah had died in a car, but if Olivia was cool with it, so was I.

Driving aimlessly reminded me of summer in Manitoba. Summer, when there was no hockey, had always seemed so long, and my buddies and I would drive around in my crappy old Kia, going too fast down country roads, the corn whizzing by like background static. At our destination, be it a fast-food place or the shores of Crescent Lake, we’d shoot the breeze about hockey. Didn’t matter what kind. NHL, NCAA, my own experiences in the WHL, my old high school team where my buddy John played. We loved it all. I missed those days.

But Olivia turned out to be a pretty good driving companion, too, even if we didn’t talk hockey. We didn’t talk about anything, which honestly was part of the appeal. If we weren’t talking, she couldn’t be mad at me.

There was one day, before Christmas last winter, when Lauren and Ivan had walked across the frozen lake to our house. I’d built a bonfire. Sarah had made a batch of some kind of spicy hot wine in a Crock-Pot, which you’d think would be too fancy for my basic, Labatt-loving self but somehow was not.

As I looked around that day at my family and friends zipping around on skates on a patch of lake I’d cleared, the whole thing lit by these old-timey lights Sarah’d bought and had me string up on poles, I thought to myself,Damn, I have it made. Ivan had told me that night that he and Lauren were trying for a baby, or, as he put it in his terse, Ivan way, “No longer trying to prevent one, anyway.” They were starting to think about postretirement life, as were Sarah and I—or so I’d thought.

After my last few laps on the ice, taken solo—everyone else had gotten too cold and gone inside—I turned off the lights and looked at the stars and entertained a fantasy of a future inwhich Lauren and Sarah were pregnant at the same time. Our kids would be the same age, and once they got a little older, Olivia would be old enough that we’d have a built-in babysitter.

That future had seemed so close, like a perfect, crystalline snowflake about to land.

And now it was gone, and I was focused on putting one foot in front of the other, doing what Dr. Mursal told me to, including working on Olivia’s two things.

Olivia had ballet on Saturdays and tap on Tuesdays after school. She liked tap better than ballet, and I could see why. It was partly the format. Tap seemed less finicky than ballet, and the noise those shoes made was oddly satisfying. It reminded me of snapping bubble wrap. But mostly it was Miss Rory. I’d been watching Liv’s classes, and Aurora was funnier and less strict than Miss Riley, the ballet teacher, yet she seemed to get better results. She was a natural coach.

I liked Aurora. She had a lot of emotional intelligence. Dr. Mursal said I did, too, and from the beginning she’d said that was how Olivia and I were going to get through. I didn’t see it, even when she explained that emotional intelligence was different from the regular kind. Aurora, though, I couldseedoing things like distracting those nosy moms that time I was having a freak-out about the emergency contact forms. Or shutting down problematic behavior in class without making a big thing of it. Plus she was a bit weird, but in an endearing way. Like how she seemed to view eating ice cream as a life-changing event and how she wore this clanky bracelet with a bunch of charms on it, including a Snoopy one.

So when we got into the habit of driving Aurora home on Tuesdays after class, it was the perfect mixture of Olivia’s two priorities: dance with Miss Rory and driving. And it suited mydesire to postpone going home and looking at Sarah’s shoes, which I still hadn’t cleared out of the entryway. I didn’t want to get rid of them, but I also didn’t want to look at them, which made no sense, but there it was.

Aurora always thanked me profusely when we dropped her off. I didn’t know how to tell her she was doing us a bigger favor than we were doing her.

“Ice cream?” Olivia said when we left the studio the Tuesday of the second week of September. She’d been back to dance for a month, my mom had been gone for a month, and my first away game was in a month. It was possible that we were in the eye of the storm. It was possible that things were about to get really bad.

“I was thinking maybe we’d eat dinner first?” I said. Suz’s had an ice-cream counter up front, but it was also a full-service, old-school restaurant where you could get a table and order a Juicy Lucy and fries along with your root beer float.

I thought the idea of eating out would be welcome, but as Olivia so often informed me, I didn’t know much. She wasn’t wrong, in general but also as it related to my ability to predict when the rage that always seemed to be simmering inside her would boil over.

“Yes! Dinner!” Olivia said, and, relieved, I turned my attention to Aurora. I didn’t want her to think I was making a move or anything. Well, I was going to make a move, but not that kind. Aurora had frozen in the middle of taking her long, auburn hair down from the bun it had been in for class. Most people with long hair put it up to ride in a convertible, but Aurora did the reverse. Like the Snoopy bracelet, it was another quirky thing about her.

Now, though, she was getting that deer-in-headlights lookshe sometimes had. She’d gotten that look the first time we went for ice cream. Maybe she didn’t like Suz’s.

Aurora unfroze and said, “Dinner sounds great. I’m finally getting a new car—a new old car—next week, so it can be our farewell. It’s been fun hanging out with you guys.”

Hmm. Her getting a car might mess with my plans, but all I could do was try. After we ordered, I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “Liv, you want to hit the arcade until the food comes?”

Her mouth fell open. It wasn’t normal for me to hand over so much money for her to blow on games. In the before times, we used to talk a lot about not spoiling Olivia. But one thing I had learned in the post-Sarah era was that sometimes you had to sacrifice one thing in order to concentrate on another, more important thing. Olivia snatched the cash out of my hand and ran off as if afraid I’d change my mind.

Aurora laughed. She had a high, melodious laugh that erupted out of her in little bursts that sounded the way light looked. Part of her bright-thing appeal, I guess.

I laughed, too, but mostly at what a rule follower I was. Here I was combining Sarah’s advice about bright things, my mom’s adage about muddling through, and Dr. Mursal’s recent instruction that I start asking for help beyond Lauren and Ivan. What can I say? I’m good at following directions. In the hockey world, people always said I was very coachable. And this was a logical solution to the one problem about my return to work I had not solved to my satisfaction.

I fiddled with my napkin—I was good at following directions, but that didn’t mean it was easy to do. When your skating coach tells you your edge control is sloppy, she might not be wrong, but that’s hard to hear. “I have a proposal for you.”

“OK.” Aurora was looking at me kind of funny with her bigbrown eyes that were the same color as the mud pit our backyard at home used to become in the spring after our homemade rink melted. She was skeptical, which was fair. I was probably giving off nervous vibes. I was more accustomed to distrusting people than to trusting them. It came with the territory of my job, my life. I had no interest in people whose only interest inmewas the fact that I was overpaid to play hockey.

It was hard to find the other kind of people.

“Oh my God, are you Mike Martin?”

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