Page 9 of Power Play

The second thought came in right behind the first, and it was about the wet piece of hair on the side of her neck and what I would do with a handful of it, and there wasn’t a respectable inch in it. I wanted to wind it around my fist, tip her head back, and find out if the rest of her ran as warm as the skin at her temple, damp from the walk across the lot.

I had her name and no more than that. She was here to take care of my daughter.

I put those two facts to myself in order, and neither one helped.

I stood up and shook her hand. Her grip was brief and direct and there was no performance in it, and her hand was warm from outside, and I kept it longer than a man shaking hands had any business keeping it. There was grit off the lot on her palm and a damp along the base of her fingers, and my own hands had been cold since the first hour of the morning.

Her eyes came up and stayed there past the end of a handshake.

“Eli Kovac,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “There’s a lot of you on the internet.”

Cole snorted into his coffee.

I released her hand. I’d been researched, and I didn’t know which photographs of me she’d sat with.

“Sit down,” I said, and then had to move a chair that had been in the right place to begin with.

She sat in the chair to my right, in front of the water Cole had put out. She crossed her legs under the table and her knee stopped a hair short of mine, and I moved my chair back, and I was annoyed about the distance and more annoyed about the chair.

I asked about unpredictable schedules. She named a school year and said, “I had a boy whose mother got her shift changed on her twice a month with no notice. He was never the problem. The problem was everybody in that building deciding in advance that he would be.” Then she quit talking. Most people kept going, because a silence made them think they were failing a test. She left it in the middle of the table and waited for me to pick it up.

When I asked what she would do about a last-minute change, she gave me the real version, which included the phrase and then I would be annoyed about it for about ten minutes in the car, and I had to turn my face to the window.

My eyes went to her mouth while she talked. I’d catch them at it and drag them up to hers, and her eyes were worse.

Cole didn’t last.

“Can I ask something?”

“No.”

“It’s about Iris.”

“It isn’t.”

“Eli.” He spread his hands. “I have sincere questions about childcare philosophy that I believe are material to this process.”

She waited. She wasn’t going to rescue either of us. She’d stopped drinking her water to watch, and her mouth had pulled crooked with it.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Cole turned the full apparatus on her. “What do you do when a kid won’t eat what you put in front of them?”

“Depends on the kid and the food. Some of those are worth a fight. Most of them aren’t.”

“What if they’re being unreasonable for no reason?”

“Little kids are unreasonable roughly forty percent of the time. It isn’t personal and it isn’t a character flaw. You pick your forty percent.” She moved the water glass Cole had set out for her an inch to the left. “What do you do?”

Cole blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“When somebody in your life is unreasonable for no reason. Since we’re comparing philosophies?”

Nobody in the room spoke, Cole included.

“I usually escalate,” Cole said.