Thin Ice Read online

  A battered pile of metal and plastic was heaped on the ground where it had slid off the tilted bed of a tow truck. My brother’s snowmobile, salvaged from the river.

  “Sure does, Reuben. You could probably get a few thousand for it down in Minneapolis, especially with the right title.” We joked around with titles for a bit while Scott poked and pulled at the machine. Then he gave it a final kick and swore. “Come in for cocoa?” I asked Reuben. Someone had to be pleasant.

  “Nope. It’s late. Time to head home.” He pulled gloves out of a jacket pocket and whacked them on Scott’s shoulder. “Must make you feel lucky to look at that heap, Scotty. After a day of rocking around in the river, think how banged up you’d’ve been.”

  Scott smiled. “It’s crossed my mind.” He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a wallet, slid some bills out. “They can’t possibly pay you enough for the after-hours work, Reuben. Here’s something you don’t need to tell the taxman about.”

  “Wait till you see your copy of the insurance claim. The diver’s bill alone goes over a thousand.”

  Scott nodded, but my jaw dropped. “What?” I asked.

  Reuben smiled at my surprise. “Gosh, yeah. The recovery part of the claim will be over fifteen hundred, easy.” He pushed the bills back at Scott. “I’ll get my share, Scotty. No tip necessary. But you can do one thing for me—I’d love to take a look at the ’Cuda. Didn’t you put in new front seats last fall?”

  Scott grinned, bad mood immediately erased, and he nodded and led Reuben to the back of the garage, to a sky-blue mound. Scott grabbed hold of the blue cotton and whipped it off in a single, masterful sweep, revealing his pride and joy, his treasure, his mistress, and the reason this two-person household has a four-car garage: a carefully restored 1970 Plymouth Barracuda.

  My brother’s passion was not mine. He saw automotive perfection. I saw a squat old green car. He started his spiel: 383 Magnum…pistol grip…Weldwheels…

  I’d heard it before and my feet were cold. Time to take sanctuary in the kitchen.

  “Does insurance really cover your accident?” I asked him later, when Reuben had gone and we were both in the kitchen warming up with cocoa. Immediately I wished I hadn’t asked. The good mood he’d developed from showing off the car vanished as he thought about the snowmobile.

  “Yes, really. The policy has coverage for stupidity.”

  This self-flagellation was tiresome, and I must have made a noise. He looked at me sharply. “I’m not proud of what I did, Arden. It was an expensive, stupid, scary mistake.” He dropped within himself again, his favorite place lately. “A big fat mistake,” he whispered. “Allow me to be mad at myself.”

  I had nothing to say, he didn’t want to talk to me, but neither of us wanted to back off first, so thank gawd for the phone. It rang, I answered, she said hello. I debated taking advantage of his torpor and talking to her myself. I was dying to ask a few questions—age, occupation, intentions—but, bright girl that I am, I figured doing that would only steam him further.

  “Of course it’s not too late,” I said sweetly. “One moment, please.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Over the next few days I cannibalized the snowmobile wreck. Scott and the insurance company saw a total loss, Reuben saw a goofy sculpture, but I saw raw material for ArdenArt. I was inspired: I’d broaden my markets and reach out to the northwoods male with a line of crushed-metal frames and mirrors.

  While I ripped apart the old toy, Scott began work on the hard job of buying a new one. Evidently this takes planning and research. Four days had passed since his dunk in the Gogebic and he still hadn’t gone back to work. He had, however, managed to get to Ed’s Stop and Shop, the nearest c-store, to pick up a stack of snowmobiling magazines.

  “I want the right one this time,” he said when we met in the kitchen Thursday evening. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a container of party leftovers. One more meal? I opened and sniffed. Yes, maybe so.

  “With this machine I want power. I want speed. I want—”

  I sniffed the air. “Gosh, what’s the funny smell? Why, it’s…it’s…testosterone!”

  He made a face, then yanked the refrigerator open and pulled out his own container of leftovers. We sat at the table with spoons and plastic tubs and had supper.

  “If you don’t go back to work, Scott, you won’t be able to afford any new toys.”

  “I’ve got plenty of vacation time logged. But you’ll be pleased to know that I’m going in for the day tomorrow.”

  “Only one day?”

  “Wyatt Pierce is bringing in his car and he won’t let anyone else touch it.”

  “The bedeviled Mercedes? Well, you are the vintage car specialist. Do you get paid extra when someone asks for you especially?”

  “Nothing extra and I’m getting tired of it. I should open my own shop. Lorenzo Motors would realize pretty quickly what I was worth.”

  “Why don’t you? Do it right here in town, then you wouldn’t have to commute sixty miles every day.”

  “Scott’s Auto Repair in Penokee, Wisconsin—now there’s a dream come true.”

  Phone. Figuring it would be one of my many admirers, I moved to answer, but he held me back. “We’re not home?” I asked.

  He shook his head, let the phone ring three more times, then relented and answered himself. “Yeah? Oh, hi.”

  Even with his cryptic responses, I could tell soon enough that it was Claire. I should have done the courteous thing and gone to another room, but watching and listening to him was too interesting. Besides, if he had wanted privacy he could have moved to another phone. I decided that maybe he wanted me to pay attention—perhaps he was offering a lesson in relationships.

  I kept one eye on him as I thumbed through his magazines. The ads were full of happy people dressed in bulky clothing. My brother didn’t look too happy. His face was a study. I saw distress, and maybe some other emotion. Love?

  After he hung up he stood mannequin-still. Then his fingers started a rhythmic tapping on the counter. I tapped along on the table, but either he didn’t notice or he didn’t care. “Ahem,” I said. “Should I assume you’re going out tonight?”

  He walked away without bothering to answer.

  CHAPTER 13

  He didn’t go out, but spent the night in his room. And the next morning, for the first time since he’d slid into the icy Gogebic River, he went to work.

  By afternoon I felt like I’d had my own slide into cold water. At school, Jean told me our movie plans were off because her whole family was going down to Eau Claire. Something to do with a college friend of her mother’s and a crisis. “Why the whole family!” I asked.

  “Mom will hold hands and we’ll go shopping. Dad’s picking us up right after school, so we don’t need a ride.” Mr. Drummond was the principal at the elementary school across the street from the high school. The twins usually rode with him in the morning and went home with me. Jean dumped her lunch bag on my tray and left. Seniors had early lunch, and she’d only hung around to dump the news.

  After she left, I looked around the cafeteria, wondering who in that huge assembly of six hundred students might offer the key to a good time. I passed over the freshmen and sophomores (I wasn’t that desperate), looked at the backs of the departing seniors, then picked up my tray and moved over to a table of classmates. Leesa Coltrane was holding court. Unless you liked endless conversations about clothing, Leesa was not the world’s most interesting person, but she did throw parties. The conversation—shoes, the latest Delia’s catalog, Ms. Penny’s wicked grading system—didn’t even slow down when I arrived, though Cody Rock managed to stop stroking some sophomore girl’s hair long enough to give a little wave.

  I can’t say I’m real close to many of the kids in school. They’re all mostly party friends, I guess. One hundred sixty-seven classmates and I’ve known many of them most of my life; except for Jean and Kady, there’s no one I automatically think of as a good friend. How
did this happen? How does a person get to be seventeen and have so few friends? In a crisis, who would come hold my hand?

  “Gawd, Arden, you wear the weirdest clothes.” Leesa smiled and bit down on a baby carrot. “Where did you get that shirt?”

  I was wearing my second-best, a kiwi-colored bowling shirt formerly owned by “Franz.”

  “Duluth.”

  “The mall?”

  “Ragstock.”

  She made a face and a tiny orange sliver popped out of her mouth and stuck to her lip.

  “Ragstock?” said Tiffanee. “That’s where I went for a Halloween costume. There was such a weird clerk there. He had hair that hadn’t been combed for like a year and he smelled.”

  Everyone looked at me and my shirt as if we gave off a bad scent. It didn’t, nor did I. I’m clean and I use color-safe bleach in the laundry.

  “I like it,” said Cody. “But maybe you should leave a few more buttons undone.”

  What a wit! As the others laughed, Cody turned to his girl and they smacked a quick kiss, a young lovers’ high five.

  The conversation got off me and back on track and I gleaned that everyone’s life this weekend was centering around either work or a hockey game in Superior. No party.

  Friday night alone. Well, I could work or study, right?

  The house was dark and cold when I got home. My mood exactly. The first order of business was food. As I opened the fridge the phone rang, and my spirits soared. Had I won something? Was there a party? Had the Drummonds changed plans and stayed home?

  It was my brother. “Hey, sis, I need a favor.”

  “I just got home. Can I eat first?”

  “Quit whining, this will only take a minute. I’m having a hell of a time with the valves on this Mercedes. I came home at lunch and shot off a question to one of the guys on the mech list. Check and see if there’s a reply.”

  The mech list was an Internet group of car mechanics who used the list to share information. I’m no Luddite, but I’m not exactly in love with the computer. I mess around with it some, though not as much as my brother. For a while I used it to network with other crafters, but I got fed up with the way newsgroup and bulletin board discussions digressed—there were too many middle-aged women obsessing over muffins or their gardens. Scott, however, loved what he found through the Internet and he especially loved the hardware. Every year he’d power up to a faster machine. Hairy-chest machines, I call them. Sort of a pattern with my brother.

  I went to the study and picked up that extension. “What’s your password?” He paused before telling me, a hesitation that was justified because I snorted when he did, “‘BigTool’?”

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  “Oh, sure.” I logged on and pulled down his e-mail. “Whoa, you get a lot of stuff. Mechanics must be chatty people.”

  “Look for something from JasperP, probably subject-headed ‘300S Coupe.’”

  “Here it is.” He made funny little noises as I read him what I thought was an indecipherable message. But it must have made sense to him, as he thanked me cheerfully.

  “Good news?” I asked.

  “There’s hope for the bedeviled car after all,” he said. “I’ll probably be late and then I’m going to Claire’s. Do you have plans?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “I’ll be up early so I may not see you. I think I found the sled I want down in Minneapolis.”

  “Why Minneapolis? There’s a shop on every county-road junction around here.”

  “Better selection, better prices. Besides, every dealer around here knows how I lost my old sled. I’m a little tired of the teasing.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Stuff like, ‘Just for you, Scotty, we’ll throw in a wet suit.’ It’s irritating and it’s distracting. I want to talk about the machines and they just want to joke.”

  Serious stuff, buying a power toy.

  Serious and complicated, I guess. It took him four trips over three weeks. He had to shop around, haggle over price, order, select accessories and gear, and then—a red-letter day in my brother’s life—he got to pick up the dream machine. Four trips and I wasn’t invited along even once.

  “I’ll be home for supper,” he said before he left on the great day. “It’s Friday night. Let’s kick off the weekend and have a real meal.”

  “A real meal that I cook?”

  “I’ll pick up some things. You could start a chicken after school.”

  “If it’s a real meal, why don’t we have company? Invite Claire.”

  Not amused.

  “Is she going to Minneapolis with you? When am I going to meet her?”

  He blew off my questions the way he always blew off my interest in his girlfriend. Over the past few weeks I’d gotten bold and asked about her every chance I got. If he can be so mysterious about his love life, I can be obnoxious. I pushed him to exasperation once, which is how I finally learned her age: thirty-three. An older woman.

  It made me wonder sometimes, was she pushing to learn about me?

  I watched him pour coffee into a travel mug. Why not push as far as I dared? “Do you love her?” I asked.

  He spilled hot coffee over his hand. Didn’t swear, didn’t mutter a thing. Just rinsed his hand, dried it on a towel, started pouring again. I waited. I knew he’d heard me.

  “No,” he said finally. “I don’t love her.”

  Scott spoke clearly and firmly, but later, when I was going over everything he ever said and did in those last days, I decided that there was something wrong about the way he had said it. He’d said “don’t,” but I think he meant “won’t.”

  I let him get away without any more questions about his private life. I’d have loved to be going with him, but I hadn’t been invited, had even been flatly refused when I begged. “You should study,” he said. “Finals next week, right?”

  Right, as always. School was pressing down, and I had ArdenArt orders to finish. I loved my woodworking, but the business of it had become as tedious as school; filling orders for frames and mirrors based on old inspirations was a lot like doing homework. I’d much rather be working up new ideas, like the one I had gotten a few days before when I was in the c-store prowling through the cheap candy.

  “Darn, I forgot,” I muttered, and ran out of the house, waving my arms to stop him as he backed down the driveway.

  He looked irritated as he rolled down the window. “What?”

  “Remember that bulk candy store at the Rosedale Mall?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “I need wax lips.”

  * * *

  One box of wax lips, eighteen dollars and ninety-five cents.”

  “Did you get a receipt?”

  “This is for ArdenArt?” He was stunned.

  “Why else would I need them?”

  “You’re decorating frames with red lips!”

  My poor, dull, dim-witted brother. “Of course not,” I said patiently. “Makeup mirrors.”

  Minutes later he was on the phone telling Claire about the lips. He glowed, he laughed, he whispered, he twisted the cord around his wrist.

  But no, he didn’t love her.

  We had our real supper. I’d come straight home from school and produced a nicely roasted chicken. He had brought interesting side dishes from an Italian deli in St Paul. We both ate too much. A real supper.

  After cleanup I went outside to admire the new snowmobile. I needed some coaxing because it was cold, one of the low days in a week of roller-coaster weather. I hugged myself and trotted in place on the fresh snow in the driveway. “Nice,” I said, but I really couldn’t share his pleasure. He saw fun and speed. I saw thin ice and black water.

  “Al and I are going out tomorrow to break her in. What do you say afterwards we go out for dinner? There’s that new steak place.”

  I was shocked. Saturday-night date with my brother? Since when? “Sorry, Scott, but I’ve made plans with Jean. School play. Unless you want to joi
n us and go see Penokee High’s production of Macbeth?” He didn’t, of course. I’m not sure I did, but it’s a small town, it was Saturday night, and I knew everyone in the cast. And, as it turned out, the play wasn’t bad, though all the guys looked silly wearing fake facial hair.

  Scott was home when I got in from the play, close to midnight. He was nursing a beer and listening to music. A woman vocalist, jazzy, unfamiliar. I foraged in the kitchen for my own bedtime snack. Toast.

  I was slathering peanut butter on a third slice when he joined me. “What’s that?” I asked.

  He held up his beer bottle and looked at it. “Pig’s Eye.”

  “No, the music.”

  “One of Mom’s CDs. Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter. Her favorite. It’s her birthday today, you know.”

  “Ella Fitzgerald’s? No, I didn’t—”

  “Mom’s.”

  I finished a bite of toast. “I guess I’d forgotten.” A small offense, brother. Don’t look at me like that.

  “Hers was February second and his was November twenty-eighth,” he said.

  “I know that. I just forgot. Sorry, okay?”

  But he didn’t want an apology, he wanted a promise. “Don’t forget, Arden. What little you know about them, don’t ever forget.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Years from now, when I reflect on my junior year in high school, I suspect that I will have no trouble deciding upon my greatest achievement. It will not be my solid A in biology. Not the money I’d made with Arden Art. Not even the Thai curry I produced last fall for Scott’s birthday.

  It will be the pompadour.

  Right before Thanksgiving I’d had an English assignment to write a personal essay based on a family photo. I found one of my parents taken on the day Mom graduated from medical school. She had this huge amount of hair piled on her head. Not sixties beehive, but turn-of-the-century puffs. A pompadour.

  Sometimes I forget what my parents looked like, and I had totally forgotten that my mother once had hair like mine. Long, thick, reddish brown.

  The teacher wanted five to seven pages of familial insight, but I was more interested in the mysterious man standing behind my father in the picture. I wrote about the stranger, and it steamed the teacher. C plus. Okay, maybe I didn’t produce a great essay. But after weeks of practice, I did manage to produce great hair. Special-occasion hair. Prom-night hair. Graduation-day hair.