Page 108 of Power Play

I’d watched her sleep before. I’d done it in October, from a doorway with a dish towel in my hand, telling myself somebody had to turn the lamp off. I wasn’t telling myself anything at three in the morning in December.

Iris had already lost one woman. She’d been too young to keep any of it, and I’d built her life since then around the fact that no one else was ever walking out of it. I’d made the rule in Edmonton with a fourteen-month-old asleep on me, her weight across my chest. Nobody comes into this house who is going to leave.

I’d let a woman in anyway, into the kitchen and the car and the bedtime routine. If this broke, Iris paid for it first, and Delaney’s paycheck was drawn on my account, so she didn’t lose a boyfriend, she lost everything she had in Phoenix in one afternoon.

She was thirty-six and I was twenty-six, and I’d have signed for it right then with a pen in my teeth.

Calloway had said everybody’s sure in December. He was wrong about one guy.

I put my hand on the back of her neck under her hair, where the skin was damp and her pulse ran slow against my fingers, and she hummed in her sleep and moved eight inches toward me and put her forehead against my chest, and I lay there in the dark in a house with my whole life asleep in it, and I knew exactly what this was.

CHAPTER 24

Delaney

I woke in his bed with daylight full in the room and no procedure for any of it, which was its own small emergency, because I had a procedure for everything.

There was a procedure for the morning after the first time, back in November, and the morning after the second, and all the ones between. Get up before he did, be in the casita by the time Iris padded up the hall, surface at the kitchen door in a clean sweater with the household running in my head, as though I’d slept where a nanny slept. I’d been good at it. I’d told myself it was for Iris. It was at least a little for Iris.

The light, though, put it past seven, and out in the hall a little girl was awake and narrating, and I was in a man’s bed with his name across my shoulder blades and a mark under my jaw I hadn’t seen yet but could feel when I turned my head. The procedure was in pieces on the floor with my jeans.

The door stood open two inches. He’d gotten up at some point and opened it. I lay there and listened to Iris tell someone — Gerald, almost certainly Gerald — that today was the performance and that the performance was tonight and that she had eleven words and that one of them was a secret. I counted the beams across the ceiling. I didn’t have eleven words. I had maybe two, and one of them was oh.

I got up, put my sweater on under the jersey because I wasn’t walking down that hall in only the jersey in daylight with his daughter awake, and stopped in the bathroom to see the mark on my neck. It was going to need a scarf, in Phoenix, in the one week a year a scarf was defensible.

He was at the stove when I came out, back to me, and he didn’t turn around, and he’d already poured the coffee, one cup on the counter by the pot with the milk gone in, the color I took it. He never mentioned it. I’d stopped thanking him for it early in the fall, and the not-saying had become its own ritual, bigger than the coffee.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning.”

That was it. Iris was in her booster with a blue plate across from her for Gerald, who had been served half a banana he wasn’t going to eat, and she looked up at me with her father’s exact eyes and said, “You slept late.”

“I did.”

“Daddy said let you.”

“That was nice of Daddy.”

Eli put a plate in front of me, eggs the shaky way, and on his way past he put two fingers on my hip and moved me two inches to the left so he could reach the drawer behind me, and left his hand there a beat longer than the drawer needed, and then took it back. I stared hard at my eggs. I was thirty-six years old and a man had moved me by the hip in his kitchen and I’d forgotten the word for fork.

“The secret word,” Iris said, “is not dragon. People think it’s dragon. It’s not dragon.”

“Noted,” I said.

“It might be dragon.”

I ate my eggs while the two of them ran the morning, and the strangest part was how unstrange it was. Nobody announced anything. There was no conversation about what last night had been, or what this breakfast was, or whether the woman in the jersey was the help or the houseguest or the woman he’d taken to bed. He refilled my cup when it got low. I caught the orange juice before Iris tipped it. He cut her toast into the four triangles she required and set the crusts on Gerald’s blue plate, where they would be honored and not eaten, and I reached over and straightened the collar of her pajama top without thinking about it, and his eyes came up and caught me doing it, and one side of his mouth tipped up and flattened out again.

We’d crossed a line, and it should have felt new. It didn’t. We’d crossed it so long ago that this side of it was simply where we lived now, and I couldn’t have explained it to anybody, least of all him. We hadn’t become a family overnight. We’d been quietly running one for months and had only stopped pretending we weren’t, and the morning after was the morning after nothing, because the real beginning had happened back in September.

The costume was finished and hanging on the back of the casita door, and I had made it, and I wasn’t going to say so.

I wanted it on some record that making a dragon costume for a child in a city that sold exactly one style of dragon costume, a flimsy purple getup with a hood, when the child in question had strong and documented opinions that dragons were orange because orange was the best and Coach said so, was no small undertaking. I’d done the wings at the casita table, orange felt on wire, the same orange as Gerald, with the scallops cut by hand because the first set had come out as kites and a kite wasn’t a dragon. I’d put a ridge of felt spines down the back of a hooded sweatshirt. I’d made a tail that clipped on and could be removed for sitting, because a child couldn’t sit on a tail, a fact I’d learned the hard way.

I’d done all of it at four in the morning, mostly, which was when I did what was mine.

I’d handed it to her the week before with no ceremony, because ceremony made her suspicious, and she’d put it on and run three laps of the house roaring and then stopped dead in front of the hall mirror and gone completely silent, which from Iris was the highest review there was. She hadn’t asked where it came from. In her world good things simply arrived, which was either the best part of her life or the one that scared me most about it, depending on the hour.