Loved Twice by the Hockey Star novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: Twice

Erik looked up at me from the ice.

He closed the box.

He put it back in his pocket.

"Okay," he said. "Properly."

He stood up.

The team booed him the whole way off the rink.

Jodie gave him a 1.

The next Saturday he woke me at six.

"Pack a bag," he said. "Warm stuff. One night."

"Ingrid."

"Jodie's got her. Jodie's had it planned for a week. She made a spreadsheet."

"Jodie can't make a spreadsheet."

"She made one. It has colors."

Ingrid was already awake when we went to say goodbye.

She was sitting on her window seat in her pajamas with Sheriff the moose, looking extremely innocent.

"Have fun," she said. "Don't do the ring thing bad again."

Erik covered his face.

"Who told you there's a ring thing?"

"You did. On the ice. In front of everybody."

He drove north.

I knew where we were going by Duluth.

I didn't say anything.

Neither did he.

He pulled onto the shoulder at the top of the curve by Stony Point and turned off the engine.

The birch was still there.

The long pale scar down its trunk.

The two rusted nails where the cross had been.

The snow had melted back from the road in March, and the ground around the tree was brown and soft.

Erik got out.

He went around to the bed of the truck and came back with a claw hammer.

I followed him to the tree.

He stood in front of it for a long time.

"I've driven past this tree a hundred times," he said. "I always looked straight ahead. I never let myself look."

"I know."

"I thought if I looked at it, I'd have to think about you behind the wheel. About Nils. About choosing." He let out a breath. "Turns out there was nothing to choose. There was just my dad, in the snow, with his flashlight."

He put the claw of the hammer under the first rusted nail.

He pulled.

It came out with a long squeal.

He did the second one.

He held the two nails in his palm and looked at them.

Then he put them in his pocket.

"There," he said.

That was all.

He set the hammer down against the trunk.

He turned to me.

He reached into his coat and took out the dark blue box, and this time his hands were steady.

He didn't kneel.

He stood right in front of me with the lake gray behind him through the birches.

"I bought this when I was twenty-four," he said. "I was going to ask you on Christmas morning, at the lake, because you loved it in the winter and I thought it'd be romantic."

"It would have been."

"I had a speech. I practiced it in the truck for a month. It was very bad."

I laughed.

"I loved you then," he said. "I loved you the way you love somebody when you're twenty-four and stupid and you think nothing bad will ever happen. Easy. Like breathing."

He opened the box.

"Then you were gone. And I loved you for seven years without you. Every game. Every stick. I put you on the tape so I wouldn't forget your handwriting."

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