Page 103 of Power Play

“I’m thinking I’m going to have to be a person by dinner,” I said. “With a form to fill in.”

“You’ll manage. You’ve had practice.”

He was so unbothered by the size of what had just happened that I laughed, and had some difficulty stopping.

“Eli. Do it again?”

His hands stopped. Then they started again, and the side of his mouth pulled.

“When?”

“I don’t know. Soon. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s a game day.”

“After the game, then,” I said, and heard myself say it, and didn’t take it back.

He took my face in one hand and turned it up and looked at me with his mouth open on a word he didn’t say. “Okay,” he said.

Then I collected Iris and a backpack of four shirts and no pants, listened to a full account of a dog named Mitzi, put a pot on for macaroni, got out the form for the winter performance, and nobody looking at me had the first idea.

I’d spent my adult life believing those were two different women, the one who ran the household and did the forms and the one who could be put on her knees and told she was beautiful, and that a person had to pick one. I worked out, at his stove, that I was the only one who had ever made me pick.

“D. It’s bubbling over.”

It was. The starch foam had climbed the sides and hissed on the burner. I moved the pot off the heat and the water settled, and I pressed my palm flat to the counter where the sun had lain across my hands that morning, and kept it there.

CHAPTER 23

Eli

I had the coffee on by five, a cup left in the pot for her, and couldn’t have named one thing about the cup I drank myself.

The window over the sink was black at six. I turned on the light over the stove and looked at the refrigerator door.

The drawing was dead center, pinned up by the taco magnet. Iris had done it in crayon, pressing hard, on a sheet that had been folded in half and flattened out again. Four figures stood in a row, holding hands. A tall one on the left wore an orange shirt with the number four-four on it. Next to him stood a woman with a lot of red hair shooting off her head in every direction. Then came a small one in a purple triangle, and on the end an orange shape with green wings. The wax stood up off the page in ridges under my thumb.

The names ran underneath in the letters she was still fighting with, big and crowded and going downhill off the ends of the arms. DADDY. DELANEY. IRIS. GERLD. The D in DELANEY had been gone over twice until it came up shiny.

She’d spent the road trip with a sick woman on my couch, a cat, and a dragon in a dish towel, and what she made out of it was a row with the four of us in it and every letter of Delaney’s name in the right order.

I got the eggs on. Iris padded up the hall at ten past six with Gerald hooked by the neck in one fist and told me that Wren’s dog had eaten a sock and that the sock was fine. I said the sock had been lucky. She said the sock had been brave, and she got no argument from me.

Delaney pushed through her door at twenty past in a gray sweater with her sleeves pushed up, and she said good morning to my daughter first and to me second, and she crossed to the pot and poured out the cup I’d left in it, milk first, her hip against the counter while she drank the first inch standing up.

Then she looked at me over the rim for about as long as it took to say a short sentence, with the steam wetting her upper lip, and sat down with Iris.

That look was everything, and I carried it through the rest of the day. She’d said it the day before, on my bathroom counter with her hair wet. After the game, then. She hadn’t taken it back, and I’d left her every chance to.

The room filled up, men arriving with coffee they didn’t need. Griffin had half his gear on with his hands wrapped around a cup of tea, which no one had ever made fun of him for, because he’d been stealing us points since October.

Kasperi sat down beside me with his phone out. “Harker’s played two games since we saw him. Two fights. One with a guy smaller than my mother.”

“Put the phone away.”

“I’m only saying it out loud. In case it matters.” He put the phone away. “It matters.”

In Chicago, on the road trip, I’d gotten my first good look at their power play from my knees. The puck caught the top of my right skate and left a bone bruise. It stayed out of the net, which was the job.