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and Laura knew how hard it was. Firsthand. When Mike watched the parents of two little ones come in, he always smiled. A bit wistfully. Jillian was pulling up now, and that meant she would walk soon, babyhood fading.
    Maybe she needed a sibling.
    He hadn’t said those words to anyone. Those were words that were very, very dangerous. Yet he knew they needed to be said one day.
    Jus t not yet.
    “ I am going to snap a knee and it will be your fault,” Laura said in a tight voice as she looked down the puny hill. Before she could say anything else, Mike took the little bunny slope in ten seconds and cut at the bottom, sending an intentional spray of snow out like a giant fan.  
    “Showoff!” she called from above .
    He couldn’t argue. “That’s right! And you ’ll get to my level soon enough.” A lie. A complete lie, but he said it anyway because he knew that half the battle with becoming a competent skier was in the mind.
    “LIAR!” she screamed down the hill. A four year old whizzed past her and gave her a thumbs up, doing a credible imita t ion of Mike’s maneuver and filling Mike’s mouth with snow.
    Deep, loud laughter came out of him, the feeling coming from the bottom of his lungs, a release his body needed. “Awes ome ! High five!” The little kid shimmied over to him and jumped up on the skis to land a high five, then skittered off, bent over in that crouched way kids with lower centers of gravi ty had. No poles, either; Mike taught the young ones that way. Made them less dependent on the poles and—more pragmatically—less likely to poke themselves or anyone else.
    “You’re both showoffs!” Laura called down.
    “Quit stalling!”
    She planted her hands on her hips and shook her head, then put the poles down. Her legs went into snowplow position—like an inverted V—and he groaned. She was still stuck at that level.
    And then she pushed off, and to his surprise she pulled out a bit from the V, ke e ping the skis parallel as she slow ly descended, her calves turning enough, tigh t muscles working to get around the first barrel. Good! Then she managed the second and third like a pro, gaining speed.
    “Good speed!” he called out. The shout unnerved her, he could see, and he regretted it instantly. No longer in control of her legs, her core muscles and arms didn’t give her enough balance, and he could predict, with pinpoint precision, what would happen next.
    Once you let fear take over, the muscles freak out and aim for what they know. When you’re in a situation so unfamiliar, and gliding on snow on wooden sticks in a body that’s only done it a handful of times, there is no easy “normal,” so the m u scles go crazy and the brain can only see one option.
    Get on safe ground.
    Except you can’t, because falling on skis has its own set of dangers.
    And so panic hits, control abates, and you just—crash.
    Laura made it to the bottom of the hill and Mike skied quickly to her, to try to break her fall, but she crashed smack into the orange construction netting his staff had placed there to stop kids (and adults) from sliding off into the abyss and snowballing down into a culvert.
    Suppressing a smile, he stood over her and said quietly, “You did a great job until the end.”
    “ Oh,” she groaned. The same word she used sometimes during sex sounded nothing like its aroused form. “I think I broke something.”  
    Alarm shot through him and he looked up for a medical responder. “Leg? Wrist?”
    “Ego.”
    Adrenaline burst through him as he r self-deprecating laughter clued him in that she was safe and unhurt. “Don’t joke like that!” He bent down and began untangling her ski from the orange mesh. “How did you manage to get the ski through three separate holes?”
    “I’m talented that way,” she grumbled, settling on her back, right leg twisted in a suspicious manner as Mike worked on the left leg. Seeing her in repose, eyes hidden by amber goggles but lips spreading in a