The Skates My Father Left

My father took me to the ice for the first time when I was five, and I think some part of me has been trying to get back to that morning ever since.

It was a Sunday.

The Delford Ice Arena is a long, low building on Dupont Street with a curved metal roof, and everyone in town just calls it the Barn, because that is exactly what it looks like.

Inside it smells like cold rubber and old popcorn and the sharp clean bite of the ice, and when you push through the double doors the air changes temperature so fast it makes your eyes water.

My dad held my hand in his big one.

His hand was always warm.

That is the thing I remember most about him, before everything, just how warm his hands were.

He laced me into a pair of rental skates that were three sizes too big and stuffed the toes with paper towels, and he walked me out onto the public ice holding both my hands, skating backward in his sneakers along the rubber mat at the edge, and he said, Nell, you are not going to fall, because I have got you.

I fell anyway.

I fell about a hundred times.

And every single time, before I even hit the ice, I was already laughing, because I knew that falling was allowed.

That was the whole secret of it.

With my dad standing there, falling did not count.

It was just the thing that happened on the way to standing back up.

My name is Nell Dunmore.

My father was Danny Dunmore, and he worked eleven years at Hartwell Tool and Die out on Route 9, and he died of a heart attack in our kitchen three weeks after my seventh birthday.

He was thirty-eight.

He was standing at the counter making me a peanut butter sandwich, and then he was on the floor, and the sandwich was still on the plate when the ambulance came.

I know that detail because I was the one who was with him.

I was the one who called.

I am telling you that part now, fast, because I do not want it sitting over the whole story the way it sat over my whole childhood.

He died.

It was the worst thing.

And the last real present he ever gave me was a pair of secondhand figure skates.

He found them that last winter at the rummage sale in the basement of St. Brigid's, a dollar in a cardboard box of mismatched gear.

They were a boy's skates, which is why they were a dollar, and they were scuffed and the blades were dull as butter knives.

My mother said we did not have the dollar to spare, and we really didn't, but my father bought them anyway.

He brought them home and he sat at the kitchen table for two hours with a rag and his own tools, and he sharpened those blades until they could cut paper.

Then he painted over the worst of the scuffs with a little bottle of white shoe polish, and he set them in front of me and said, There you go, Bird.

Now you don't have to rent.

Bird was what he called me, because he said I skated like something that was trying to get off the ground.

After he died, my mother wanted to sell them.

Not to be cruel.

We needed every dollar, and a pair of skates a growing girl would outgrow in a year was a luxury we could not justify.

She sat me down and explained it the way she explained all the hard things that year, gently and tiredly, with her waitress apron still on and her feet up on the other chair because they hurt all the time.

I did not scream or cry.

I just told her that if she sold them, I would never forgive her, and I was seven, so I meant it the way seven-year-olds mean things, which is completely.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she put the skates in the back of my closet and never mentioned selling them again.

So I kept them.

And because I kept them, I had to use them, because what is the point of a thing you keep in a closet.

I started going to the Barn on public skate days, which cost three dollars, which I earned by collecting cans along Dupont Street and dragging them to the redemption center in a garbage bag.

Three dollars got me two hours.

I made those two hours last.

I taught myself.

That is not a brag, it is just the truth, because there was no money for lessons and there never would be.

I watched the club skaters, the girls in the matching jackets who had the ice to themselves on weekday afternoons when kids like me were in school and the public session was closed.

I pressed my face to the glass and I watched how they bent their knees and how they held their arms, and then on Sunday I tried to copy it.

I learned to stop by falling.

I learned to spin by getting dizzy and throwing up once behind the bleachers.

I learned a waltz jump, which is the smallest jump there is, half a turn in the air, and the first time I landed one clean I was so happy I skated a full lap with my arms out before I remembered nobody was watching and nobody cared.

By the time I was eleven I could do things.

Not club things, not clean things, but real things.

I could do a single Lutz, badly.

I could spin until the whole Barn turned into a smear of brown and white.

I could jump, and I loved the jumping most, that one half-second where the ice let go of me and I was Bird, I was the thing trying to get off the ground, and my father's blades were the only part of him I had left and I was wearing them when I flew.

The skates were too small by then.

My toes curled under at the ends and my heels blistered and bled into my socks, and I told no one, because the second anyone found out, the skates would be gone and some sensible adult would decide I had to stop.

So I stuffed the toes with a different kind of paper than my dad had used, cut up from the free newspaper, and I laced them over the knot he tied, and I went to the ice every Sunday I could scrape together three dollars.

I thought that would be my whole skating life.

Three dollars, two hours, a dead man's blades, and nobody watching.

I was wrong about the nobody watching.

Somebody had been watching me for almost a year.

I just hadn't noticed him yet, because he was the one person at the Barn that everybody had trained themselves not to see.