“Got that. Best way to protect your extremities.” The trainer sprayed Neosporin on Cyndra’s knuckles. “I haven’t seen you here before,” she said to me.
Cyn remembered the manners Addy had been working so hard to instill. “This is Van. He’s . . .” She hesitated. What was I, exactly?
“Family,” I said.
Cyndra nodded vigorously. “Yeah. An’ this is Pain.”
It was the trainer’s turn to grin. It was a good grin. A little crooked, a little self-mocking. She was long of leg and strong-looking in the way naturally slender athletes develop over time, as much sinew as muscle fiber. Kneeling with one leg up and balanced on her skate’s toe-stop seemed to be no effort for her at all.
This close, the spiral of tattoos on her arm and shoulder was identifiable as a loose line of small birds in flight. Each bird varied slightly in size and radically in style, from photorealistic black and gray to eye-poppingly bright cartoon. The flock winged its way from her wrist all the way up and under the strap of her tight tank top. Her skin beneath the ink was tan, whether by genes or the sun. Not every part of her figure was slim.
She caught me looking. “My name’s Wren,” she said, nodding at the bird tattoos before turning back to Cyndra. “Teddy bears or pop art?”
“Art,” Cyndra said. Wren took two bandages with Warhol soup cans and Elvises printed on them and applied them to Cyn’s ointment-covered knuckles. “There. Better than new.”
“Can I finish?” Cyndra said, looking at the track. The other skaters had collected by the aluminum bleachers to stretch and rehydrate.
“You better. You owe me laps.”
Cyn dashed away, injury forgotten.
“She’s fast,” Wren said as we watched her bank hard into the curve, “for being so new to it.”
“Making up time,” I said.
“You’re her stepbrother or something?” said Wren, eyeing me. I knew what she meant: that Cyndra and I looked nothing alike. Cyn was small and blue-eyed and fair, at least when her hair wasn’t dyed. I was none of those things. I’d inherited Dono’s Black Irish looks through Moira.
“It’s an unusual situation,” I said. “You’ve met Addy? Cyndra’s guardian?”
“Talk about unusual. She’s amazing. She told me she had a tryout with the Bay Bombers back in like nineteen-sixty-something.”
I hadn’t known that but didn’t doubt it. Addy seemed to have lived enough lives for a dozen octogenarians.
“None of us have other relatives,” I said, “except for Cyndra’s dad, who’s down in California. Addy was a neighbor of my grandfather’s. We all sort of adopted each other.”
“Chosen families can be the best. If you want to help out Mortal Cyn, she could use some resistance training. You look like you’ve seen the inside of a gym.”
“Once or twice.”
“Show her how to use the weights. Nothing too heavy. Just build up the endurance in her back and legs.”
“Core strength. To get up every time she falls.”
“You got it.” Wren’s eyes were a lighter shade of brown than her hair, a splash of cream mixed in the coffee. With tiny flecks of gold near the center. “Come to practice again. Let me know how it goes.”
“I’ll do that.”
She glided away to join the girls, who had collected by the aluminum bleachers to shed their gear and goof around, not in that order. One of the older teens handed out popsicles from a cooler. Wren waited until Cyndra had finished her laps, then she had the skaters shout out the team name three times to close practice. Kids or not, they could yell like drill sergeants.
Rain pelted down, bouncing like hail off every hard surface. Cyndra and I ran for the car with me carrying her gear bag. She shook water out of her hair while I turned the defroster on full blast.
“You want food?” I said.
“Uh huh.”
“Dumb question.”
“What’s this?” Cyn said, taking the letter to Moira off the seat.
“Junk mail.” The AC had cleared the fog of condensation from the bottom few inches of windshield. Good enough to see the road. We pulled out of the lot, the Barracuda’s wheels splashing through a newborn river of water in the gutter.
“Are you gonna call this person?” Cyndra pointed at Jo Mixon’s number.
“I’m not going to the reunion.”
“Yeah, but . . . your mom, right? This woman knew her.”
“If she really knew my mom she’d know Moira was dead.”
Cyn frowned. Whatever point she was making, I was obviously too dense to grasp it. “Well, what about your dad? You said you never met him. She could know.”
“Not likely.”
“But there’s a chance. Like, you have to call her.”
I should have expected this. Ever since I’d made the mistake of telling Cyndra about my unknown parentage, she’d romanticized it into thinking I might be the love child of an exiled duke.
“Cyndra,” I said. “Give it a rest.”
“Promise me.”
“Yeah. I’ll call her. But no more about it.”
“And you have to tell me everything she says.”
“You want to walk home?”
She sat back, satisfied.
A gust of wind rocked the car. At the next stoplight I pulled up the NOAA weather streaming app, letting the monotone male voice of the running forecast play while we drove. After a few minutes the looped recording cycled around to report on the coastal stations nearest Puget Sound. Winds up to forty knots with a small craft advisory in effect for everything south of Port Townsend.
“I have to go to the marina,” I said. “Do you want me to drop you off first?”
She looked alarmed. “But food.”
“On it.”
The rain hadn’t discouraged many diners from the eternal line outside Dick’s on Broadway. I left Cyn in the warm car playing on her phone while I snagged us two burger-and-shake combos. Double patties for both of us. Cyn could eat nearly as much as me.
We parked in front of Addy’s quaint yellow house and ate in the car, dumping our fries into a collective pile in the cardboard tray. Cyndra held her Deluxe with one hand and deftly texted with the other.
“Your trainer Wren says I should teach you how to lift weights,” I said. “Cross-training, you know?”
“When?”
“Whenever we want. I can take you to my gym. Once we know what size weights you need, we’ll figure out something to use at home.”
“D’you like Wren?” she said around her next mouthful.
“I just met Wren five minutes ago.”
“But she’s pretty, right?”
“You want to tell me about Elias?” Elias was a name I’d heard Addy mention at Thanksgiving. Mention only once, because the topic had made Cyndra flush bright pink from her hairline to her throat, as she started to now. “Okay, then.”
Détente assured, I told Cyn to give Addy’s dog, Stanley, the last bite of my burger and to tell him it was from me. She hauled her bag out of the back and kicked open the fence gate to run to the front door. Addy, ever prepared, opened it before Cyndra reached the porch. I waved to them and pulled away.