Page 117 of Power Play

Katya looked at the watch, and then at me, and set it back down on the counter carefully, as if it weren’t hers to keep, and she didn’t bring it up again. She put away what had crossed her face, because she was good at that. We were both good at that. It was the one thing we’d ever been good at together.

“I’ll call Sunday,” she said.

“She’ll want that.”

She flew out the next morning and I took my kid to the airport to say goodbye and brought her home, and the house filled back up with her all at once, Gerald on the counter and the booster back in the rotation and the ice machine reviewed one final time for the record.

I picked the watch up off the counter that night to charge it. The screen came on with Dad and Delaney, and under them sat the third field, blank, a gray line where a name would go, waiting on somebody I hadn’t put there and wasn’t going to and couldn’t, because the person it should have been had set it down on my counter and flown home.

I was sure of my life. I had a daughter who knew to the bone that nobody was coming to take her away, and a routine that worked, and a protected contract in the one city I’d sworn I’d never move her out of, and I was sure of all of it, which I almost never was of anything.

There was one line on that screen I wasn’t sure of at all. It had Delaney’s name typed into it, right there, reachable from anywhere, any hour, no reason required, the same standing I’d given one other person on earth, and I’d done it without a word to her or to myself about what it meant, and I stood in my kitchen at eleven at night holding my daughter’s watch and understood I’d put Delaney in the one place I protected hardest and had never once told her she was in it.

Through the casita wall, the typing started.

CHAPTER 26

Delaney

I had the house back to myself by the time Katya’s flight was wheels-up, and the first move I made was to put on a pot of coffee and stand in the middle of the kitchen doing absolutely nothing, which was a luxury I’d forgotten the shape of.

The week had wound me up without my clocking it, which was what happened whenever I refused to face my own life head-on. I’d spent it being there and being no one. A child I loved had gone off with a mother who loved her differently, and I’d sat one seat down from Iris in a hockey arena wondering what the word was for a woman in that seat. I’d kept my face organized the entire time, and keeping it there had left me wrung out.

Then Iris came home and the house filled up and I got to quit, because nobody could keep a face organized around Iris. She simply walked through it, and within an hour she had me on the floor rebuilding Gerald’s hotel out of couch cushions to the exact blueprint of a building she’d stayed in all week, including, she was firm on this, an ice machine.

“The ice machine goes here,” she said, placing a throw pillow with the gravity of a surveyor. “It makes the sound. You have to make the sound.”

“What’s the sound?”

“Krrrrsh. You do it. Krrrrsh.”

“Krrrrsh,” I said.

“Louder. Gerald can’t hear.”

I made the sound louder for a dragon’s benefit and a professional hockey player walked in from the garage mid-krrrrsh and stopped in the doorway, and I didn’t stop, because I never broke character for an audience, and Iris said, “Daddy, do the ice machine,” and Eli, with his keys still in his hand, said “Krrrrsh,” flat, correct, three stories tall, and Iris accepted it and I had to go put my face in a cushion.

He couldn’t teach her to skate. I wanted to get this part right, because it mattered, and because I turned it over a great deal afterward.

It wasn’t that he didn’t try. He tried as he did everything, early and prepared, with the sharpened skates and the little helmet and a plan, and we went to the rink on an off-morning when the public ice was empty and he got down on one knee in front of her on his own home ice and went straight to the lesson.

He started with edges. He’d forgotten, completely, that there was ever a time he couldn’t do this. To Eli the ice was the floor. He stood her up and she clutched his two fingers and her ankles rolled in and he said, kindly, patiently, “Push out with the inside, like this,” and showed her, and she stared at her own feet like they’d betrayed her, and he said, “You’re on your edges, bend your knees,” and she tried to bend exactly one knee, and she came down onto the ice in a pile of snowsuit, and she looked up at her father, the best skater in the building, and her face crumpled.

“I can’t do the edge,” she wailed. “I don’t have the edge.”

Eli, who’d stood in front of full arenas without changing his face, knelt on the ice in front of his crying kid and didn’t have the first idea what to do, because what she needed was for it to be easy and he couldn’t make it easy, he could only make it correct, and those turned out to be different jobs.

I skated over.

I’d laced up because somebody had to hold the door and carry the water and I wasn’t going to do it in boots on ice, and I pushed off and crossed the rink to the two of them without a single plan in my head, which was the only way I’d ever been able to do anything well.

“Hey, dragon,” I said, and sat right down on the ice next to her, all the way down, in the cold and the wet, so we were the same height. “You know what’s funny about ice? Nobody’s good at it. Everybody falls. Your dad falls.”

“Daddy doesn’t fall.”

“Your dad falls so hard sometimes that other men clap.”

She considered this.