Our boys play on the same team

Practice is five twenty Tuesdays and Thursdays at Neilson Reise over in Bemidji, so we're pulling out of Cass Lake by quarter to five. We take Dale's truck because of the bags. I offered mine the first week and he said the bags.

Nine years in this chair and people up here still beat me to my own door. A guy I've known since third grade about tore the handle off my Silverado last winter being helpful. I asked him if he wanted to carry me in while he was at it and he stood there holding the handle. There's a knob on the wheel and I've been driving longer than he has. Dale stands by the tailgate with his hands in his coat until I'm out.

Rylan and Beau have been in the same class since kindergarten. Beau's at my place half the weekends I've got my kids and Rylan's out at theirs the rest of the time. That was going on two years before any of this. Rylan plays wing and he isn't fast. Beau's on D. That team doesn't win a game without him.

That rink's cold about ten feet past the door, so in January we started sitting out in his truck with it running. Practice is an hour and fifteen and then somebody can't find a mouthguard. Call it two hours a night, twice a week, since the first week of January.

We talked about a furnace out in Ball Club I couldn't get a board for. Then a guy we both knew who went through by Sugar Point in 2011 and how long it took to get him up. Dale wires buildings for the school district and he coaches squirts because nobody else put their hand up. He'll tell you that himself, and then he's out there at six in the morning dragging the nets around.

End of January he didn't put it in drive. He sat there with his hand on the shifter and said Kayla's on nights now. I said I knew that. He said no.

He keeps a wheelhouse out on Pike Bay. Sixteen foot, propane heat, two bunks and a little table that folds down over the holes. There's twenty-some houses out there once the road's in and nobody looks at a truck parked next to one. The weeks I don't have my kids I've got nothing going on after five. Their girl's sixteen and she stays with Beau when Kayla's on shift.

The step into that house sits about thirty inches off the ice. Second week of February I came around the front of the truck and there was three-quarter plywood cut into a ramp and screwed down, with that grit paint rolled over it the way you do on a dock. He never said anything about it. You can't buy a bag of screws at that hardware store without it getting around by supper.

I put a truck into the trees on 371 outside Backus when I was twenty-seven. I don't tell that one and he never asked me for it. He asked me once how cold my legs get and I told him I'd be the last to know. He turned the heat up anyway.

We did what we did in there and then I'd drive home and plug the truck in.

You can't park anywhere in this county. Everybody knows my truck. His has got the ladder rack and the school sticker in the back glass. There's a pullout down by the landing at Norway Beach and I counted four people I know sitting in it on one afternoon in July. I do the inspections for the housing authority and I sit on the list. Last month a woman cried at my desk over a three bedroom in Bena.

The custody is week on week off and it's out of a court order, not the two of us being reasonable about it. Renae's got a cousin at the clinic and another one working over at the school. Something gets seen on a Monday and she's got it by Thursday without making a single call.

Second Thursday of March somebody knocked on the door out there. Ronnie Beaulieu on a four wheeler, wanting to know if we were marking anything on the flat. Dale opened it eight inches and said not much. Ronnie stood out there talking about his brother's transmission for four or five minutes. I was on the far bunk with my back against the wall and I could see the toe of one boot. Then he went, and Dale shut the door and sat down on the other bunk, and after a while he laughed, and then I did.

My grandma's two roads over and she raised me from six on and she calls the landline, because she says you can't hear anything on a cell phone. She called on a Sunday in February and asked how Rylan's skating was coming along. Then she said, you're over that way a lot. I said the rink's over that way. She said mm. Then she asked did I have a good coat this year.

Rylan sits behind me with his headphones and he's usually out cold before Wilton. One Thursday we sat in the lot longer than we needed to and he came up off the door and asked if we were out of gas. Dale told him we were letting it warm up. It was thirty-eight degrees. Rylan said okay and laid back down.

The other one I've got is Junie and she's eleven and she doesn't miss anything. She asked me in February why I wear my good coat to a hockey practice. I told her the good one's the warm one. She looked at me about two seconds longer than she needed to and went back to her phone.

Dale started to say something in March about what this is. The Zamboni had been making a noise all winter so I asked him about that instead, and he went ten minutes on it, and we left it there.

Houses have to be off the lake by the Monday after the twentieth up here. We were out on the fifteenth and there was six inches of water standing on the ice by the landing and he drove through it doing about five miles an hour.

Season's over the first week of April. Rylan's signed up for baseball and most of those games are in Bemidji too.