The skate outlasted the pond.
Outside my mom’s house, the third silver maple from the kitchen window, there’s a size 11 ice skate embedded, toe first, in the tree.
There was a pond back there, farther back, that used to freeze in the winter and kids would play pickup hockey games on it.
My mom was raised in this house, my grandparents left it to her when they moved down south where nothing freezes, especially time.
Dexter Arbeneau owned the skate that’s embedded in the tree, the black covering of the boot almost gone now, the steel toe exposed.
Dexter’s team lost a game to some guys from Flanckwood, who they invited down for the sole purpose of proving their hockey prowess. Dexter was so furious that his team lost, he took his skate off and embedded it in the young tree.
I wasn’t born yet, but that’s what I was told.
I guess someone was gonna take the skate out, but Dexter threatened to kill them if they did.
Pretty sure Dexter wouldn’t have really killed them, but that skate is still there, so they must have believed him.
My mom says people used to touch the skate for good luck before games.
Don’t know if it brought them good luck, but they must have believed it would.
When the climate started changing, the pond got smaller, and was frozen for a shorter period.
I skated on it for the last time when I was fourteen, the ice all cracked and brittle.
I was mad that I couldn’t skate anymore, so as I walked back toward the house I tried to pull Dexter’s skate from the tree.
My mom ran out barefoot telling me to stop.
Intuition, or whatever it was, told me that she wasn’t running outside barefoot in February if the skate didn’t mean something more than a skate.
When we got back inside, my mom sat next to me, weird close, and told me more about Dexter.
How he was big and tough, but got upset easily, like over a hockey game, and how she thought she could fix him, make him happier. And how the only way in 1990 in Ensenyda, Michigan to make a guy happy was to buy him a truck or fuck him, and she couldn’t afford a truck.
She was 16.
She told my grandma she was pregnant, and my grandparents wouldn’t let her end it but wouldn’t let her keep it, because they already had their plans to move down south, so she gave the baby boy up for adoption.
Dexter was furious, threatened to kill my grandfather. My grandfather told him if he wanted to claim the baby as his own he’d have to explain to a judge what an 18 year old man was doing having sex with a 16 year old girl.
Dexter moved out of Ensenyda.
My mom married Chuck Chenault, they had me, Chuck got killed in a snowmobile wreck when I was three. I’d love to say I remember him. I don’t.
When I turned 18, I asked my mom if she was gonna leave me the house like my grandparents did to her.
She said she hated Florida and was gonna die in this house.
I felt a little betrayed. I know it’s kind of silly, but it made me feel like my family didn’t care.
And I decided to track down my half brother.
Put my DNA on the DNA services.
Nothing, after nothing, after nothing.
A bunch of fourth cousins and cousins I already knew about.
Today I came to visit my mom.
I’m standing out where the pond used to be.
I swore if I was gonna inherit this house as a young woman I was gonna build an ice skating rink and let kids play hockey. But my mom wanted to die in this house, didn’t want a skating rink, so I moved out.
This morning I finally matched DNA with my half brother. He messaged me
He lives in Yuma, Arizona.
Never been ice skating.
I was so excited, I invited him ice skating.
He said sure, he’d love to come to Michigan.
Asked if he could bring his father.
Certainly! I’m glad you get along with your adoptive family,” I wrote back.
Not my adoptive father, Jeffrey wrote back. My bio father. Dexter Arbeneau.
I’m struggling with telling Mom about Jeffrey
I’m really struggling with telling mom about Dexter.
I guess she struggled to tell me.
The ground still gets wet where the pond used to be.
The skate is still there and I wonder what my mom’s life would have been like if the pond had never existed at all.
***
You know how to tell a good tale!
Good story.