Warmth Between the Ice

Trina Bannister had been in Wolverton, Manitoba for three weeks, and she still couldn't get used to the smell of the curling club. Thirty-three years old, five years of flying domestic routes, and the first thing she'd done with her savings was rent a house on a street where everybody waved. The club needed a part-time bartender for the season, and she needed to feel like she belonged somewhere without a boarding pass in her pocket.

Her first shift was a Tuesday league night. The pay was modest and the tips were mostly nickels, but the members treated her like she'd already lived there a decade.

"You'll want to keep the Canadian on the left, dear," said Ruthie Krantz, sixty-one and a skip in the ladies' league. "The Germans drink the other one."

"Got it," Trina said. "Left side Canadian. I can manage that."

Ruthie squinted at her. "New girl does arithmetic. We'll keep you."

Trina laughed and went back to stocking the cooler. The bar sat behind a row of wooden stands that looked down on the ice, and between draws the whole place went quiet enough that she could hear the pebbled surface hissing. It was during one of those gaps that she saw the man on the far sheet.

He wasn't curling. He was standing in curling shoes on the walkway beside the sheets, moving like he was walking on a frozen lake he didn't trust. Step, pause, step, pause. He had his arms out in front of him like he was holding a large invisible laundry basket, and he was counting under his breath.

She watched for a while before she said anything. It was honestly better than television.

"Are you okay over there?" she called.

The man stopped mid-step. He was tall, maybe six-one, a Black man from St. Boniface with dark hair going grey at the temples and the resigned look of someone who'd been caught doing something embarrassing. "I am practicing," he said.

"Practicing what? Speed walking?"

"Tango." He crossed the walkway toward the bar with a dignity that suggested he'd heard that joke before. "There is a demonstration at the club gala. Saturday. I agreed to it in a moment of weakness."

"You agreed to dance the tango at a curling fundraiser?"

"Nobody else would do it. There is a woman, Colleen, who teaches. She is very good and very married to her job in Winnipeg, and I am the one who said yes." He arrived at the bar and put both hands on it. "I am Emile. I run the rink."

"Trina. I run the bar. Apparently badly, because I've sold four beers in an hour."

"It is Tuesday," Emile said. "Tuesday is not a drinking night. Tuesday is a yelling-at-your-sweeping night."

Up close he had glasses that sat low on his nose and forearms that looked like they'd done some lifting, which made sense when she found out he resurfaced the ice himself every morning at six. He ordered a coffee, which told her something about him, and they talked while the leagues changed over. He was an entomologist, thirty-eight years old, and he kept beetles in his office for reasons he promised to explain if she ever seemed genuinely interested.

The gala subject came back around on its own.

"The demonstration is meant to raise money," he said. "We charge five dollars a lesson after we perform. The furnace needs replacing. The furnace does not care about my dignity."

"How bad is your dancing, actually?"

Emile took a slow sip of coffee. "I know the steps. My feet know the steps. But I look like a man carrying furniture." He paused. "Colleen says my frame is like a collapsed deck chair."

Trina set down the glass she was wiping. Here was the thing she hadn't told anyone in Wolverton yet, mostly because there had been no natural moment. Her grandmother Kayla had grown up outside Buenos Aires, and every family wedding of Trina's childhood had ended with Kayla dragging somebody onto the floor and holding their elbow like a vice. Trina had learned the tango at twenty-one, badly, and then properly in her twenties, and she'd taught two complete strangers to lead on a cruise ship once out of pure boredom.

"Well," she said. "That's a coincidence."

"Is it?"

"I know the dance. Pretty well, actually. My grandmother taught me."

Emile put his coffee down. "You are not joking."

"I don't joke about tango. Grandma's rules."

They looked at each other across the bar for a second. Then Emile said, "The warm room is open. The ice is done until eight. Would you... I mean, if you have time, could you look at what I am doing wrong? Colleen charges forty an hour and I would owe you a favor that involves beetles."

Trina checked the clock. It was quarter past seven and the leagues were mid-game. "Nobody's drinking. Sure. But if I yell at you, you have to take it."

"I am used to it. I work with the town council."

The warm room was down in the basement, a low-ceilinged space with a rubberized floor, a couple of heaters, and a radiator that had been repainted so many times it looked like a lava flow. There was a chalkboard on the wall left over from some decade when the club taught things other than drinking.

Emile flicked on the lights and Trina got her first surprise of the evening.

"Is that sourdough?"

On the radiator sat a glass jar of pale, bubbly starter with a rubber band around it marking its level. Beside it, a smaller jar of flour and a notebook.

"I feed it at seven," Emile said, a little defensively. "It likes the warmth. It is the only thing in this building that reliably rises."

Trina leaned over the jar. The surface was domed and speckled, and it smelled like sour apples and yeast. "It's beautiful. Look at those bubbles."

"You like it?"

"Emile, I flew for five years. Airport bread is a war crime. A starter living on a radiator in a curling club basement is the nicest thing I've seen in months." She straightened up. "Okay. Show me your basic walk. And take off the glasses if they're going to slide."

He did the walk. He counted in French under his breath, the way he'd learned everything growing up in St. Boniface, which she found out later was a habit, and his feet were honestly fine. His posture was the disaster. Shoulders up near his ears, arms out like he was stopping traffic, chin jutted forward like he was leading with his face into a strong wind.

"Stop," she said. "Stop, okay. You're dancing like you're about to defuse something."

"That is roughly what Colleen said."

"Your feet are great. Your upper body is a crime scene. Come here." She set her water bottle down. "May I? I'm going to fix your frame, and I can't do it from over there."

"Please," Emile said. "Fix liberally."

She stepped in close, closer than she'd expected to, and put her right hand flat on his chest. "Drop your shoulders. There. Now imagine the laundry basket is one person, and that person is me, and you're not holding them up, you're just... connected. Chest here, hand on my shoulder blade, and your left hand takes mine. Gently. You're offering, not grabbing."

He adjusted. His hand settled on her back and she felt him actually find the connection, the weight shifting through his frame instead of hanging off it.

"Oh," Emile said. "Oh, that is completely different!"

"Right? That's the dance. It's a conversation, not a cargo job." She looked up at him. He was taller than her by a good amount and from here his face was mostly glasses and surprise. "Walk. Slow."

They walked. Four steps, five, and by the eighth he'd stopped counting in French and his breathing had settled and Trina felt that specific click when a lead stops being a set of instructions and starts being an actual lead. The radiator ticked. Somewhere above them the leagues yelled about sweeping.

"You've been holding out on the whole town," Emile said. "The gala is Saturday. Would you consider... I know you just started. But would you do it with me? The demonstration, I mean. As partners."

Trina thought about it for about half a second. "On two conditions."

"Name them."

"I get a loaf of whatever that starter becomes, and you feed it in front of me so I know you're not neglecting it."

Emile grinned, and it changed his whole face. "Deal. Feeding is at seven tomorrow. Bring your grandmother's standards."

The lights went out at twenty to eight.

Trina heard it before she saw it, a kind of collective groan from the leagues upstairs, followed by Ruthie Krantz's voice carrying through the floor: "Nobody move, I know where the flashlights are." Then the compressor that kept the ice froze, hummed once, and died, and the whole building settled into a silence that felt heavier than dark.

"Well," Emile said in the black. "There goes the ice."

"That fast?"

"That fast. Four hours without refrigeration and we're scraping puddles for a week." He was already moving toward the stairs, his phone's flashlight beam wobbling along the wall. "I should call the power company. And the board. And possibly God."

Trina followed him up into the bar, where a dozen curlers were standing around in the dim glow of the exit signs drinking their beers before they got warm, on the theory that warm beer was a tragedy and darkness was merely an inconvenience. Ruthie had indeed found the flashlights. Someone had a camp lantern. The overall mood was festive in the way small-town disasters always were.

The power company office was four blocks away, and by the time they walked there, the outage had spread across half the region. Trina could see it, a band of darkness along the northern horizon where the town's streetlights simply stopped. It was a cold night, the kind of clear cold that made the stars look sharpened, and their breath hung in front of them.

"You brought the starter," she said, noticing the glass jar tucked inside