Chapter 5: The Door Is Open

He opened the door in his shirtsleeves with a pen in his hand.

I was holding twenty pounds of clear ice in a bar towel against my hip.

He looked at the block, and at the chisels in my back pocket, and then at me.

"It's midnight," he said.

"I couldn't sleep," I said.

"So you stole a block of my ice."

"It's my ice. I made it. It's from Thursday's run, and I was supposed to carve it for a fish-market display that I'm not going to get to do."

He stepped back from the doorway.

I walked in and put the block on his desk, on top of his ledger, and he let me.

The lamp was the only light.

I rolled my sleeves, took the flat chisel from my pocket, and found the grain.

You carve ice the way you split wood, along the line it wants, and he watched me with his arms folded.

"Swan?" he said.

"I'm bad at swans."

"You've carved four hundred of them."

"They're good for banquets. They're bad for me." I tapped a corner and a sheet of ice fell away clean. "I'm doing something for my father."

"What?"

"His boat."

I worked for ten minutes without talking.

The block was cold enough to burn through the towel, and meltwater ran down my wrists and soaked the ledger.

I heard his chair creak as he came around the desk.

"You're ruining my accounts."

"They're about the dock," I said. "They'll dry."

He laid his palm flat on the ice beside my hand.

His hand was warm and rough, and mine was nicked and numb, and between them the water ran down in a thin bright line.