She was gone on two. She heard him shout "Hey!" behind her and laughed into the wind and leaned into the first curve around the island, her blades hissing, the cold air scouring her face, the lights going by in streaks. For a minute — less than a minute — she was ten years old again on the McGuane rink, and her father was standing at the boards in his work coat with the hardware store's name stitched over the pocket, yelling, "Go, Gina, go, go, go! Don't look back! Never look back, you'll lose a step!"
She didn't look back. She came around the far end of the island and down the long straightaway toward the warming house, and she hit the boards with both hands, and turned, breathing hard, triumphant—
And Graham was not there.
She scanned the ice. Skaters went by, couples and kids and a man pushing a toddler on a kitchen chair. No navy peacoat. No gray scarf.
Then she saw him, halfway around the island, not skating. He was crouched on the ice next to a little boy of about six who was sitting in a heap, crying the furious, bewildered tears of a child who has fallen down in public. Graham was saying something to him. The boy shook his head. Graham said something else, and gestured at himself, and then — Gina watched this from a hundred yards away, with her hands on the boards — he deliberately, elaborately, fell down again. Arms everywhere. Legs in the air. A pratfall worthy of the circus.
The little boy stopped crying. Then he started laughing.
By the time the boy's mother came skating over, apologizing, Graham had gotten both of them back on their feet, and the boy was holding his hand, and they were inching along the ice together like two old men crossing a street, and the boy was talking a mile a minute about something, and Graham was nodding seriously, as though it were the most important testimony he had ever heard.
Gina waited at the boards.