The chairlift
Christa and I rode the chair together that first run. Micah went up with his cousin Sully, because Sully had grabbed his arm and said, “Ride with me,” and I loved that boy for it.
It was quiet on the lift. The kind of quiet you only get in snow, where the world goes soft and you can hear the cable humming over the towers.
“Mom,” Christa said.
“Yeah, baby.”
“It’s okay.” She was swinging her skis a little, the way I always tell her not to. “Maybe Grandma only had enough for the real ones.”
I held the safety bar and looked straight ahead at the pines. I am a person who stays calm while monitors are going off. I could not get a single word out of my throat for about ten seconds.
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“You are a real one,” I finally said. “You are as real as anybody on this mountain.”
“I know,” she said. “I just meant for her.”
She said it so practically. Like she was explaining a rule at school. That was when I understood she had been working it out for a long time, in that careful little head, and had decided it was easier not to need anything from Grandma.
Sterling
Sterling had been down in the lot the whole time, unloading skis from the truck and digging Stuart’s boys’ boots out from under a pile of groceries in the back of Stuart’s car. He didn’t see any of it.
He came up the hill about an hour later. Clarice had found him at the bottom of the bunny run and told him. Clarice had seen it from the steps. She was the only one of them who did.
I watched him ski across the flat to where his mother was standing by the rope tow. He didn’t hurry. He planted his poles, and he spoke to her low enough that nobody else heard. I asked him later what he said.
“I told her the kids wouldn’t be coming to Sunday dinner,” he said. “Not until she could tell them she was sorry. Them. Not me.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I was making a big thing out of four tickets.” He rubbed his face. “I told her it wasn’t four tickets. It was five years.”
Then he skied over to the lift line, got between Micah and Christa, and rode up with both of them. The three of them took the blue run on the left side eleven times that day. Sterling counted. He’s a parts man. He counts things.