Lost Her On The Ice, Now He Was Begging novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Plant

On the first Saturday of March, the whole town came to skate.

The new ice plant had been running for nine days.

It hummed under the floor of Skogen Arena, and both sheets were glass-white for the first time in four years.

At five in the morning, the lot was already full.

Kids in snowsuits.

Old men with their skates tied around their necks.

A line of mothers with thermoses.

The man in the flannel coat stood at the door with a ticket roll he didn't need, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

"They've been waiting since four," he said. "Your father would've been out there with the whistle."

"I know."

"He'd have cried."

"I know."

I stood in the doorway in my black coat and watched the ice fill.

Banners hung from the rafters, old ones and new.

Above the east boards, my father's green banner had been taken down, cleaned and hung back up.

The paint had been freshened.

SKOGEN YOUTH HOCKEY.

Under it, in new gold letters, someone had added a line.

COACH LINDQVIST RINK.

I hadn't known.

I looked at Axel.

He stood beside me in a green parka with a toddler on his shoulders.

She was a little girl in a pink hat who had taken one look at him and demanded to be lifted.

"Don't look at me," he said. "It was the old man."

"It was both of you."

"It was Mikko too. And his wife."

I laughed.

Mikko's wife was somewhere on the ice, leading a line of seven-year-olds.

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