He threw his cell phone against the wall.  It broke into two pieces, and he didn’t see where either of them landed.  He grabbed his keys and headed for the door.  He took the guitar and amp and set them in the back of his truck.
   The Chinese restaurant was about to close.  The lights had been turned up, the hostess stand abandoned.  Serge sat down at the small bar and called out Ben’s name.
   “Holy shit.  In walks a ghost.”
   They shook hands, and Serge ordered a Seagram’s.
   “I hadn’t heard anything about you,” Ben said.  “Like everybody lost contact.”
   He told him about his mother dying.
   “Jesus,” the bartender said.  “You working anywhere?”
   “I don’t wanna talk about that.” He took a sip of his drink.  “Listen, what are you working with these days?”
   Ben shook his head.  “My guy, Julian, got pinched last November.  I’m taking it easy right now.”
   Serge pulled out a ten and offered it to Ben, but the bartender waved off the money.
   “I already closed out the register.  This one’s a gift.”
   “So, you don’t have anything?” Serge asked.
   Ben smiled.  “You still like that dance club shit?”
   “I see visions.”
   “That stuff will fuck up your brain.”
   “It’s like a reverse reaction with me,” Serge said.  “It pulls the truth right out of the air.  It’s like satellite TV.”
   Ben loosened his neck tie and pulled it over his head.  He ran his fingers through his hair.  “I got some coke,” he said.
   Serge finished his drink.  “I wasn’t gonna sleep tonight anyway.”
   They took Serge’s truck to an ice rink and parked in back.  The rink was closed for the night, the parking lot empty and dark, left over snow piled around the light poles that never worked.  Ben had slipped a bottle of Seagram’s out of the restaurant under his jacket.  They took turns drinking from the bottle and snorting the coke through a Wendy’s drink straw that Serge had burned in half with his lighter.  Ben owned an ipod with an FM transmitter, and they listened to Slayer through the radio static and the occasional interruption of a Sabres game being broadcast from Toronto.
   The two of them had known each other since high school, had played hockey together and in a couple of bands that never gained steam.  Ben was divorced, had two kids from the marriage who’d moved to Florida with his ex and her new husband.
   “My girlfriend’s pregnant,” he told Serge.  “I feel like I’m getting a second chance.”
   “How’s that?” Serge asked.
   “Well, I never get to see Jen and Will any more.  They think Stella’s new husband hung the fucking moon.  And she won’t even let them friend me on Facebook.”
   Ben drank from the bottle.  “It’s my own fault, I know it.  But I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do is leave them alone and let them have the life they’ve got.  And as soon as I did that, as soon as I found peace about it, my girl Loni found out she was pregnant.  It was like a gift from God.”
   “God?” Serge asked.
   Ben wore an embarrassed expression.   Serge understood it had nothing to do with the glob of coke hanging from the side of his nostril.
   “Loni and I go to church.  She’s a very spiritual girl.  I’m starting to understand about second chances and how God has a plan for all of us.  I’ve really done a lot of growing up the past few years.”
   “So, you’re just writing off your other kids?”
   Ben sighed.  “It’s more complicated than that.”
   “You don’t even call them?”
   “They don’t wanna talk to me.”
   Serge took the bottle and drank from it.  He asked Ben if there was any more coke, and Ben told him it was all gone.  They’d been snorting off the top of a Buffalo News sports page.  Serge tossed the paper onto the dashboard, took off his jacket and lay it on the seat between them.  His back was sweating inside his shirt.
   Ben looked through the rear window.  “What’s with the guitar and amp?  You playing in a band?”
   Serge shook his head.  “It’s for somebody else.  I’ve been done with bands for a long time now.”
   Serge pointed to a dim light bulb at the rear door of the rink.  “This is where my father taught me to skate.”
   “Shitty rink,” Ben said.  “I remember getting food poisoning from the hot dogs here.”
   “I thought there was a lake under the ice,” Serge said.  “I thought it was gonna open up and drown me.”
   Ben laughed.  “You were a good skater, man.  That’s hard to believe.”
   “I was only five,” Serge said.  “And there was this older kid who lived next door to us.  He’d gone out on a frozen lake and drowned.”
   “That sounds familiar,” Ben said.  “Something Fratello, right?”
   “Yeah, I think so.  Everybody said he was a really smart kid, too.  How does something like that happen to a smart kid?  I mean, he was probably a lot smarter than me.”
   Ben shook his head, drank from the Seagram’s.  “I gotta tell you something.  When I didn’t hear from you for all that time, I thought you were probably dead.”
   Serge felt a chill shoot across his jaw.  “How’d it happen?”
   Ben didn’t seem to understand.
   “Me dying?” Serge asked.  “What happened to me?”
   Ben shrugged.  “I didn’t, you know, think that much about it.  It just kind of crossed my mind one day.”
   “Yeah.”
   Serge got out of the truck, grabbed a tire iron from the back and walked toward the building.  Ben jumped out and fell into step behind him.
   “What are you gonna do?”
   Serge told him they were going skating.  “Come on, we’ll borrow skates and sticks from the pro shop.”
   “I don’t know, man.  I kind of need to get home soon.  Loni didn’t know I was going out after work.”
  Serge felt like he’d never reach the building.  His feet couldn’t keep up with his thoughts, which raced ahead and then came back and circled him with menace.  He could see his father standing on the ice in his practice jersey, the bridge missing from his front teeth, just like in the joke wedding picture his mother had framed.  He was holding out his stick, telling Serge to take hold.  “Come on.  It’s the best thing ever.  I promise.”
   It wasn’t the best by a long shot, but then the ice never opened up to swallow him.  And that was something, maybe a part of a kept promise.  They eventually skated in circles together, carving their way across the gleaming, milky surface, the smell of diesel in the air and his father’s stick lying at center ice.
   Serge was still a few feet away from the building when he took aim at a window and flung the tire iron through the air.  It caught the middle of the glass, tumbled inside the darkness and left a gaping hole in the window.
   “Jesus,” Ben said.  “I’m serious.  I think we should go.”