Page 115 of Power Play

Delaney was sorting Iris’s drawer when I got back from the morning skate midweek, folding clothes that didn’t need folding into a drawer that didn’t need sorting, which was what she did with her hands when her head was elsewhere, and I’d learned to read it, as I’d learned to read everything in that house.

I’d been a father all week and nothing else. I’d handed my kid off and gone to the rink and come home to an empty routine and run it anyway, set the coffee out the night before for a woman who was right down the hall, kept the shape of the days so the days would still be there when Iris came back into them. It was what I did. I built the structure and kept it standing and didn’t talk about it.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I know.” She folded a shirt the size of a dish towel. “I like the drawer right.”

I stepped up behind her and checked the drawer, which was, in fact, right. Then I put two fingers on her hip and moved her two inches to the side, the same move I made when she stood between me and a kitchen drawer, except I didn’t need anything behind her. There was only her, and I left my hand on her hip and she stilled under it with a shirt half folded in her hands.

“You’ve been in here four hours,” I said, by her ear. “Doing a drawer.”

“It’s a very complicated drawer.”

“Delaney.”

“The drawer has a lot going on.”

I turned her around by the hip and took the shirt out of her hands and set it down, and for a second everything else crowded into the room with us, my own bed down the hall and a house with no child in it and days of her laughing through a wall, and I had my thumb moving along the bone of her hip and her breath had changed and she was looking at my mouth, and I was a man who’d cut a banana into seven pieces that morning for a daughter who wasn’t even home, and both of those were true in the same hand at the same time, and they met right there under my palm.

Then my phone went off on the kitchen counter, loud, with Iris’s voice carrying down the hall.

Iris: Mommy’s taking me to the game. Daddy I’m coming to your game!

Delaney stepped back first. She always stepped back first when Iris was in the room, even by proxy, even through a wrist twenty minutes away, and I let her, because she was right and I wasn’t, and I took my hand off her hip and we were a nanny and an employer sorting a drawer again, like that, that fast, and I hated the speed of it and didn’t have a right to.

“She’s coming to the game,” Delaney said.

“Yeah.”

“With Katya.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She picked the shirt back up. “I’ll—” She stopped. She didn’t finish it. There was no end to that sentence without a question in it about where she sat.

Katya brought Iris to the game and sat her in the family seats, in Iris’s orange sweater, and Iris had both hands on the rail and her chin over it through the first period, and I found her on my second shift and put my glove up, and she waved with her arm out straight, and her mother caught her by the sweater, and it should have felt like every other game.

Delaney came too.

She came because she always came, because all fall she’d been the one in the seat next to Iris holding the back of her sweater, and because Maren asked her, and because not coming would have said more than coming, and she sat on Iris’s other side with her coat on her lap and her hair down and no small person to handle, and when I looked up into that section between whistles, there were the three of them in a row, my kid and the woman who left and the woman who stayed, and I couldn’t fix it from the ice and I had a game to play so I played it.

I knew how hard it was for her to sit there. All fall she’d had a job in that seat, a role with edges to it, the woman holding the sweater, and that night the job was taken and she’d come anyway and sat in the same seat with her hands empty and no title to put on, there as what, exactly? The ex sat on the far side of my daughter, I was down on the ice, and there wasn’t one word in the building for the fourth corner of it. She clapped when we scored. She stood when the building stood. She did it all perfectly, and even from the ice I could tell she was pretending to be a woman who belonged in that seat, and I couldn’t give her the one word that would have made it true, because I didn’t have it in a form I could hand up into the stands during a hockey game.

We won. After, at the pillar where the families waited, Katya had Iris up on her hip half asleep and Delaney stood a careful three feet off, and Katya looked at her over Iris’s head and said, warm, “You’re Delaney,” and Delaney said, “I am,” and Katya said, “She talks about you more than she talks about hockey, and she talks about hockey a lot,” and meant it kindly, and Delaney said, “She’s easy to talk about,” and two women were gracious to each other across my sleeping daughter, and I couldn’t have said which one of them I wanted to apologize to.

I got home before she did. She’d taken her own car to the game, with Iris going back to the hotel with Katya, and I stood in my own dark kitchen with my tie off and listened to the house be empty, which it almost never was. There was no monitor charging on the counter and no small ears down the hall. There was nobody in the house I had to keep my voice down for, and nobody I had to keep hers down for either.

Her headlights came across the ceiling. The casita door opened and didn’t close, and then she was in the kitchen doorway in what she’d worn to the game, coat already gone, her hair still down from the game, where she’d sat pretending to belong. Neither of us said a word about the drawer. We’d both been carrying it around since that morning in Iris’s room, and there was nothing left to say that wasn’t just doing it.

“Iris is at the hotel,” she said.

“Until tomorrow.”

“I know. I did the arithmetic in the car.” She came in off the doorframe. “There’s nobody in this house but us until tomorrow, and I have been quiet since August.”

“You have.”

“I’m tired of the drawer, Eli.”