Page 64 of Canadian Boyfriend

Aurora met my gaze with twinkling eyes. “Except Stephanie,” she pointed out. “She’s eating an onion to prevent it.”

“Just wait,” Olivia said, and sure enough, soon Stephanie was tackle-kissing the boy she’d supposedly been trying to avoid.

“So much for not kissing,” Aurora said, and I had to physically look away from both her and the TV so as not to laugh.

It did occur to me that for a guy who was done kissing, I sure spent a lot of time thinking about not kissing.

When the doorbell rang, I went to get it. “Can I interest you ladies in a predinner cocktail?” I asked as Aurora appeared in the entryway.

“If you can make it mocktail—I’m driving—absolutely,” Gretchen said, shrugging out of her coat.

After I performed introductions, Olivia latched on to Gretchen and started telling her about Disney on Ice. Gretchen enjoyed near-celebrity status among her students. Olivia was tickled by the extra exposure to Gretchen that came with Aurora’s being part of our lives.

Everyone walked the ladies to the door after drinks—the rest of us were headed to the kitchen to heat up the meals I’d ordered from our local lakeside place.

“You sure you don’t want to take a cab?” I asked, aware that I was hovering over Aurora and Gretchen like a dad.

“We’re good,” Aurora said.

“Well, call me if you get into any trouble. Or if you decideyou want to have some drinks, Gretchen, I can come pick you up. I’ll lay off until you get home.”

Gretchen made a strange face—like she was trying not to laugh at me, but not in a mean way. I liked Gretchen. Another big realization since Sarah died was that she had been the social gatekeeper of our family. I had my block about feeling like I could never trust people. That, combined with how busy my life was—the season was long—had meant Sarah took the lead on that front. I trusted the people she trusted. I literally could not remember the last time I—on my own—had made a nonhockey friend.

After they left, we ate and played board games for a couple hours before heading outside. Ivan and I were tired from the game, which felt like it had been a thousand years ago, so we sat by the fire while the girls hit the ice. When Aurora and Gretchen got back, they joined Lauren and Olivia—Aurora and I had gone skate shopping after her first lesson in the borrowed pair.

Gretchen professed not to have skated for years, but like Aurora, she had a dancer’s grace and strength. Soon the four of them were laughingly making up a synchronized routine. I pulled my chair closer to the fire, cracked a Labatt now that I knew no one needed chauffeuring, and lifted the can to tap it against Ivan’s bottle.

The stars were out in force, the stripe of the Milky Way slashed across the center of the sky. I thought back to that skating party last year, before Christmas. I’d watched everyone skate and thought about how good life was. And not a weak, superficial kind of good. Not like,I’m rich and happy.More like… I don’t even know. When I was little, we used to go to church—just a run-of-the-mill United Church like you find inevery Canadian town. Church had fallen by the wayside when hockey began to swallow our weekends, and I wouldn’t call myself religious today, but the one thing that had stuck with me from those days was this saying that was probably from the Bible. I wasn’t even sure, but it had been stitched on this giant quilted tapestry on the wall in the sanctuary. I, usually zoning out during the service, used to stare at it. It said, “Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.”

I’d thought of that phrase that night. That’s what it had felt like.

I didn’t believe in fate, so I didn’t think I was being punished or hit with karma when Sarah died. But if you’d asked me last summer, when Olivia was lashing out and I was standing so close to the abyss, if I would ever get to have that feeling again, that sense ofrightness, I would have said no. And I would have been OK with that, in a weird sort of way. I’d had it once. That was probably as much as anyone deserved.

But here I was having a version of it again. I felt that same sense of marvel sitting by the fire on the edge of the lake and the edge of the stars, listening to the happy chatter of my daughter against the background noise of scraping skate blades. Was there any better sound?

There was a hole in the feeling, of course. In the scene. How could there not be? But it felt like a normal sort of hole. The kind of hole you weresupposedto have when you lost someone. It was a world apart from my pinpricks of doom. The abyss was in the distance now. It was a place I had once visited.

It changed things, that hole, but maybe not entirely, or not only, in the ways you would expect. There was a sense of loss, a person missing. But the proximity of that loss tothis, to skating and a fire and friends who felt like family, made the evening all the sweeter somehow. It meant I had survived.

It was a frigid night, so the girls didn’t last long on the ice. After a bit, they joined us at the fire and shortly after went inside.

“Do you think it’s smart to get involved with Rory?” Ivan asked after a few minutes of silently staring at the fire.

I was shocked. We didn’t really talk about this kind of shit.

“I’m not involved with Rory,” I said quietly, aware that to object too indignantly would only make me look guilty. Which I wasn’t. But he wouldn’t understand that.

“OK.”

He didn’t believe me, which irritated me. “Look. If you think—”

“I don’t think anything.”

“I’m not—”

He held up a hand. “Will you just let me talk?” I rolled my eyes but gestured for him to continue. He huffed a breath, and the steam it made was illuminated by the light from the fire. “I want you to know that if you want to start dating again, Lauren and I are with you. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong timeline.” He sounded like a robot, like he was reading a rehearsed speech. Maybe he was. “And God knows, Rory is great. But that’s the problem. You need her.”

“I know.” Aurora was irreplaceable. “Which is why it’s handy that there’s nothing going on with us—other than, you know, school lunches and dance classes and stuff.”

---