Chapter 9

They put Mabel and Ruth in the first-aid room at the arena, which was really a converted officials' locker room with a shower, a cot, and a wall of white cabinets I had stocked myself two years ago because the youth hockey program kept running out of tape.

The medics came. Ruth needed fluids and a real hospital visit and would get one, but not before she had made them swear on a stack of release forms that Mabel would not be handed to anyone without Conrad Vale standing in the room. Mabel needed a bath, dry clothes, and about four thousand calories, and got the bath first because the medics wouldn't touch her until her fingers warmed up.

The fire department had cleared the arena for the night. Two hundred guests had gone home in the storm - or to the parking lot, where half the old families were standing around in their furs in the blowing snow, refusing to leave, because in Duluth a rumor is a spectator sport.

I came in with a towel over my shoulder and my tuxedo jacket over my arm, and I shut the door, and for a second I didn't know what to do with my hands.

Mabel was on the cot in a Duluth Amateur Hockey sweatshirt three sizes too big, hair wet and combed, arms out on the blanket like she was afraid it would be taken.

"You look like a hockey player," I said.

"I don't know how to skate," she said.

"Then I'll teach you." I sat down on the bench across from her and laid the tuxedo jacket on the cot. It was the closest thing to a blanket I had. "It's wool. It'll be warm. Put it around your shoulders."

She did it slowly, watching me the whole time, and the sleeves went out past her hands.

Ruth was in the shower with a nurse, and through the wall I could hear water running and, once, a sound like somebody crying.

I took the charm out of my breast pocket and opened the little blade with my thumbnail, and held it out to her, the photograph facing her.

"This is your mother," I said. "Her name was Astrid. She was thirty-three on the day this was taken. She had a laugh that came out of her nose when she thought something was funny and she didn't want anyone to know she thought it was funny. She skated like the ice owed her money. She was the best thing I ever made and I lost her because I was too proud to say yes to a wedding."

Mabel looked at the photograph for a long time. Then she looked at me.

"Ruth said you'd be mean."

"I am mean," I said. "I've been mean my whole life. It's how I got all this." I gestured vaguely at the building, the lake, the whole frozen empire of it. "But not to you. Not anymore."

"Ruth said they'd put me in a home."

"You're not going to a home."

"Where am I going?"

I had thought about this on the walk down the corridor, and I had thought about it long before that, if I am honest - every night for nine years, in a shape I couldn't name.

"Here," I said. "You're going to live with me. In the house on Arrowhead Road, where your mother grew up. There's a workshop out back with a bench and a vise, and I'm going to teach you how to solder, and you're going to be terrible at it for about a year." I looked at the charm. "And I'm going to be your legal guardian. That means no one takes you anywhere I don't go first, and I've already had a lawyer - the same one who's going to tear the company apart on Monday - start the paperwork tonight."

Mabel was quiet.

"Ruth too?" she said.

"Ruth too." I said it before I thought about it and found that I meant it. "Ruth gets a house, and a salary, and if she wants, a job in the foundation, and I will spend the rest of my life paying her back for a night on a boathouse floor."

Mabel thought about that for a long time. Then she asked the only question that mattered, and she asked it the same way she had asked everything else - flat, and direct, and with her whole small face.

"Will you keep me?"

I leaned forward and put my hands over hers, and the tuxedo jacket swallowed both of us.

"Until I die," I said. "And you'll have my lawyer's number so you can sue me if I ever change my mind."

The door opened, and Ruth came in with wet hair and a blanket and one eye swollen shut and, for the first time all night, standing up straight.

"You," she said.

"Me," I said.