Page 12 of Man Advantage

He found Ford at the coat hooks and pulled his jacket off the peg.

“You ready? Early skate,” Cole said.

It was a lie, and Ford knew the practice schedule as well as he did. He looked at Cole a second too long, like he was deciding whether to say so.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let me settle up.”

He didn’t call the lie what it was, and Cole didn’t explain it.

Outside, the first real cold of the year had blown in while they were inside, and the cab was black and freezing when they climbed in. Cole got the heater going, and they sat a second while it chipped at the fog on the windshield. Then he backed out of the lot and turned them toward home.

He had the first line ready. So the place over the hardware store. Russ needs an answer. Easy enough. Lay it out, let Ford say whatever he was going to say. Cole had said harder things to worse people. All he had to do was open his mouth before they hit the driveway.

“Pace is a good guy,” Ford said, out of nothing, to his window.

“Sure.”

“Nadine keeps telling me I should get back out there.” He said it lightly, the way he said the things that weren’t light. “Says it’s been long enough. Says Charlotte’s fine and I’m using her for a reason not to.” He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “She’s not wrong. She’s annoyingly right about most things.”

There was the door, held open for him. Cole could ask the real thing now. Instead, he reached for the small question, the safe one.

“You gonna?” He kept his eyes on the street.

“Get back out there?” A couple of quiet blocks went by. “I don’t think so,” Ford said. “Not with Pace.”

Cole didn’t answer. He drove, and the words hung there in the cab: “Not with Pace.” It was more than Ford had ever handed him. He could’ve stopped at no. He hadn’t.

Cole knew what it took to give a man only as much as you could stand to have thrown back at you. He’d been doing it his whole life, so he knew it when he heard it. And he still didn’t say the thing he’d walked out of the bar swearing he’d say. Wes had called it. There was always a reason to keep quiet, and Cole had just found tonight’s.

He slowed for the stop sign at the corner and put his hand on the shifter to bring it down a gear.

Ford’s hand came down over Cole’s on the knob, warm, and neither of them moved. The truck sat idling at the empty corner. Cole didn’t look over. He couldn’t have said how long it went on. Likely a few seconds, but long enough that a car should’ve come the other way and none did. He could’ve pulled his hand back and made it nothing, the way he made everything nothing. He left it where it was, under Ford’s, and made himself breathe like this happened all the time.

Then a set of headlights turned onto the street behind them, and he had to go. Ford took his hand back slowly, set it in his lap, and looked out his own window.

Cole drove the last few blocks. Neither of them said anything. He pulled into the driveway, cut the engine, and they went inside and said goodnight in the hall like every other night, and each of them went to his own room. He’d meant to talk to Ford tonight. He hadn’t said a word of it. And now there was this on top of it: Ford’s hand, the quiet, and a whole night neither of them was going to bring up. Cole lay in the dark and didn’t know how much longer he had it in him to keep doing this, saying goodnight in that hall and turning the other way.

SIX

Bedtime was supposed to take twenty minutes. With Charlotte, it took an hour most nights, and tonight, it took longer because the hip had him moving slowly and he was careful not to let her see it. She was six and had turned stalling into an art form. She had no idea she was sending her old man up and down the stairs four extra times on a bad night. He kept the wince off his face and went back up every time she called.

“One more book,” she said, holding it up in both hands when he’d already read two.

“We said two.” He tucked the moose back under her arm, where it kept trying to escape.

“You said two. I never agreed to two.”

“That’s not how it works, bug.” He pulled the blanket up to her chin. She pushed it right back down, negotiating from a position of strength.

“Well, that’s how it should work,” Charlotte said, with the calm of a very small dictator, and Ford laughed even through the burn in his hip and read her a third book, this one shorter than the rest. He could deny her almost nothing, especially in the season when he didn’t get to see enough of her. She knew it too, and only used it on him about half as often as she could have. Then she needed the blue water cup instead of the green one, which was apparently vital to her sleeping well. Then she wanted to know whether fish slept, and he answered it badly enough that it took a follow-up and a compromise to get back out of the room.

By the time she was flat on her back and quiet, the hall light cracked to the exact width she liked and the moose jammed under her arm, the hip had gone past bad. It was a deep, grinding heat now, running from the joint down into his knee. He descended the stairs one careful step at a time, gripping the rail with one hand and sliding the other down the wall, and he had to stop twice to breathe through it. He used to feel sorry for older men who took stairs like that. Then he stood in the dark kitchen with his hand on the counter, waiting for it to ease.

He should ice it. He had the routine down by now: twenty minutes with the gel pack, then shove it back behind the peas before anyone was up, and by morning, it was mostly okay. He stood there trying to summon the energy to do it. Icing it meant crossing the kitchen and folding down to the freezer drawer, and he wasn’t sure he could get back up once he was down there. So he held the counter and weighed whether he could make it to his own bed without the pack. He knew he couldn’t.

Under the pain, and worse than it, was what he’d done that afternoon.

The first hard cold had come, and the snowblower had been buried in the back corner of the garage since spring. Ford had been dragging it out one-handed after practice, favoring his bad side, doing it wrong out of pure stubbornness, when Cole came out for the roof rake.