He got there eventually — fifteen minutes eventually, after he'd delivered the boy to his mother and fallen down twice more on his own, without any audience — and he pulled himself hand over hand along the boards until he reached her, and he leaned there, panting, with snow on the knees of his very good trousers and his glasses crooked on his face.
"I lost," he said.
"You lost."
"Definitively."
"You lost on purpose."
"I didn't lose on purpose. I lost because I'm bad at skating. Helping Danny was incidental." He straightened his glasses. "His name is Danny. He's six. He's going to be an astronaut, or possibly a garbage man. He hasn't decided."
They went into the warming house, which was a low brick building with benches along the walls and a potbellied stove in the middle and a counter where a teenager sold coffee in paper cups and cellophane-wrapped cupcakes out of a box. They sat on the bench closest to the stove and unlaced their skates, and Gina bought two coffees, because she had won and winners bought, and handed him one. Their knees were almost touching. Outside the steamed-up windows, the skaters went by in blurs of color.
"Okay," Gina said. "Pay up."