| |
“How do you know he lied to you?” Katie demanded, when Jonny called her Christmas morning to complain.
“He told me he had to work last night. So I called the air rescue center to wish him a Merry Christmas, and they told me he was off duty.” He settled uncomfortably back on the sofa, his right leg elevated by a couple of pillows. He had given up on icing the leg—too much work to get up and down.
“Maybe he has another job,” Katie said. “Delivering Christmas presents to the needy or something.”
Jonny took a deep breath. “I think he’s married. That’s why he couldn’t spend Christmas with me.”
“Married?” Katie’s voice rose to a squeak. “To a woman?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter? Either way, he lied to me. On Christmas!”
“Oh, Jonny. I’m so sorry. Did you give him a chance to explain?”
“I texted him right after I called his work. I haven’t heard anything back.”
“Give him a chance. Maybe he’ll have a good reason.”
“Or maybe not.”
They talked about how awesome Katie’s Christmas had been, her parents working hard to decorate the new house with all their old familiar ornaments. His heart ached as he remembered the frothy white angels he and Katie had made in high school art class, her mother’s treasured Czech glass balls, the miniature Santa and his team of reindeer that surrounded the tree’s base.
“I have to go,” Katie said. “We’re going into the city to see the Radio City Music Hall Christmas spectacular. I wish you could be with us.”
“I wish I could too, Katie,” he said. When he hung up the phone he had a good cry about how rotten his holidays had turned out, then got up and started to do laundry. He was tired of smelling Peter’s scent on his sheets.
He was transferring the wet mass of linens to the dryer when his parents called to wish him a Merry Christmas. “How are you doing?” his mom asked. “Katie called and told us you broke your leg, but you’d call when were rested up.”
“It’s not a big deal. Just a fracture of the fibula. I’ve been keeping the leg elevated and icing it, and I can move around pretty well with crutches.”
He leaned against the washer for support. It wasn’t so easy moving around on the crutches; they used muscles that he didn’t normally work, and he had started to ache. Or maybe some of that pain came from knowing that someone he had begun to trust had lied to him.
“What are you going to do for work?” his father asked.
“Pick up extra shifts in the store at the Snow Bowl,” he said. “The other guys are usually willing to give up shifts so that they can ski.”
“This is why you need a more solid career path,” his father said. “You should move to Florida. I’ll put you in charge of a couple of my rental properties.”
“Thanks for the offer, dad. Maybe I’ll take you up on it eventually. But right now I want to stay here. I’ll be able to ski again in a couple of weeks, so I can still make money from the winter.”
Neither of his sisters had made it to Florida for the holidays, so his parents weren’t doing much to celebrate. “I hung a wreath on the front door,” his mother said, and he remembered how much she had loved decorating when he and his sisters were young, before she got sick. She was crafty, and had painted a series of stoneware gnomes with different expressions, then had them fired up in the kiln at her pottery workshop.
His father had complained about living in a gnome farm, but Jonny could see he loved her. That was the kind of emotion he wanted to receive—a love so deep it encompassed all someone’s quirks and oddball habits, each one making the person that much dearer to you.
When he hung up the phone, he looked at his bank balance. He had been saving up, knowing that Katie would be leaving, but he’d assumed he’d be working, too. Time to look for a new roommate.
He put up a note on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter that he was looking for a roommate, and asked his friends to pass the word around. Then he settled back on the sofa to watch cheesy Christmas movies and feel miserable. He had to put his happy face on the next day, go back to work and be cheerful to people who could do the one thing he couldn’t—ski.
Oh, and be happy with their friends and partners around them.
The manager of the Snow Bowl, a middle-aged man named Bob Skeer, lived only a few blocks from Jonny, and arranged to pick him up each morning on his way to work. Tuesday morning, Jonny was waiting outside in the bright December chill when Bob’s truck pulled in at the curb.
Bob had the weathered face of a man who’d spent most of his life outdoors. He had been a competitive skier himself, nearly making the Olympic team twenty years before, and then had settled into a management career.
“Think you could handle being the assistant manager?” Bob asked, as they drove along the curving Route 125, lined with spruce and pines. “I want to spend some time over the next few weeks out on the slopes checking out the trails. I could use you in the office full-time.”
“That would be great, Bob,” Jonny said. In reality, he hated the idea of being cooped up in an office all day, when he had spent so much of the last months outdoors, but it was a kind offer and it would help him pay his bills while he was still on crutches.
A couple of days later, he got a message from a woman called Lana, who had secured a full-time temporary teaching position at Middlebury College for the spring term, and needed a place to live. He Skyped her from work, and she seemed smart and friendly and unlikely to stab him with a knife in the middle of the night, so he agreed to let her move in.
He printed a calendar from the internet and began crossing off days until he could ditch the crutches and walk unassisted. It would be a while after that before he could start to ski again, but at least he had the first goal in mind.
The doctor had performed what he called a closed reduction, realigning the bone without cutting the skin. He had an appointment to see his regular doctor in mid-January for an X-ray, and hoped that he’d be able to move to a walking boot then. In the meantime, he did a lot of upper body exercises using light dumbbells to keep the strength up in his arms, chest and shoulders.
Every now and then his phone would beep with a notification, and he hoped it would be from Peter McGuire—but he never heard back from his initial message.
