Page 120 of Power Play

“Yes.”

“Try that again.”

“It’s the best Christmas Eve of my life,” I said, “and I’m trying not to make it weird.”

He raised his eyes to me across a half-built kitchen set with a screwdriver in his hand and the tree lights on his face, and he didn’t tell me it wasn’t weird, and he didn’t tell me it was the best of his too, though it was, I knew it was, because by then I knew everything that happened in that house.

He said, “Hand me the little screws.”

I handed him the little screws. We built a kitchen for a dragon’s owner on the floor at midnight, and it was the first Christmas Eve in a long time, in any house I’d been in, that felt like it belonged to a family, and I didn’t say that out loud either, because some things didn’t get said out loud. I got up in the dark and wrote them down instead.

CHAPTER 27

Eli

I was up before either of them on Christmas morning, which took doing, because Iris had an internal alarm I’d never been able to reset, and Delaney had been up at four writing. I’d heard the typing stop around five.

I got the coffee started and sat in the dark front room a while before the house woke. I hardly ever did that, sat in a room with nothing running and let it be quiet on purpose instead of by accident. The tree was still on; we’d left it on. Gerald’s cookies were gone off the blue plate, a bite out of every one, because Iris was thorough and would check. There was a kitchen set under the tree that had cost me a knuckle. There was a woman asleep down the hall in a bed that used to be the one place in the house nobody slept.

For almost four years I’d run Christmas alone, for Iris, with nobody alongside me. I’d done the stocking and the cookies for Gerald and the one big gift and the small ones and the call to my mother, and I’d done all of it well, as a crew of one. Now I sat in the dark on Iris’s fifth Christmas with the two of them still asleep, my daughter and a woman, and the house was full before anyone in it was even awake. For the first time in almost four years I wasn’t running the morning by myself. I’d wanted that longer than I’d been willing to say out loud, and I sat there and let it be true and didn’t dress it up as anything else.

Then Iris hit the hallway at a dead run and the quiet part was over.

She came in at full speed with Gerald by the neck and stopped dead at the tree, her body braking at once, and said, “He came,” hushed, both hands flat on top of her head, as if she’d lain awake in the night not sure and here was the proof. After that the morning was the morning.

Delaney came up the hall in my shirt and leggings with her hair everywhere and got herself into the corner of the couch with coffee I’d poured without being asked, and watched Iris excavate a stocking, and I sat on the floor with my back against the couch and my daughter in a blast radius of wrapping paper, and I did what I was good for, which was reading a room. Delaney wasn’t handling any of it. Since August she’d been the one with the wet wipes and the garbage bag and the eye on the small parts, and this morning she sat in the corner with her feet tucked under her and let it be messy, and let it be mine, and moved only once, to push a stray curl off Iris’s forehead — no checking my face first, no half second where she weighed whether it was hers to do. She’d stopped weighing it.

Iris opened the kitchen set and screamed. She opened a dragon book and screamed. She opened a wrapped box that turned out to be socks, from my mother, and screamed, because for Iris the difference between a kitchen set and socks hadn’t fully arrived, and I was in no rush for it to. She opened, from Delaney, a small apron her size, orange, with a pocket, and she went silent, which was the big one, and put it on over her pajamas and tied it wrong and wore it wrong for the rest of the day and wouldn’t be parted from it.

There was a gift under the tree for Delaney that I’d gone back and forth on for a while and then quit, because going back and forth was a way of not deciding, and I’d decided. It was small. She’d been at a game in October with her hands jammed in her coat pockets because she’d lost a glove between the parking lot and the seats, and she’d gone without a new pair every game since, because a woman grateful for her salary didn’t buy herself gloves. She made do. So I’d bought her gloves, good ones, wool and lined, in the dark green she wore. It wasn’t a large gift and it wasn’t a loud gift and when she opened it she went as quiet as Iris had over the apron, which I’d counted on. She didn’t say a word. She only held them, and then she looked up at me across a wreck of paper, and I looked back at her, and Iris broke it by demanding somebody cook in the new oven immediately, and we both took the out.

“Where’d that come from?” I said, low, to the woman on the couch, with a tip of my head at the apron.

“The internet,” Delaney said.

“You said that last time.”

“It’s a very reliable internet.”

She’d made the apron. I knew it as surely as I’d known she made the wings. I let it be the internet, and reached up and put my hand on her ankle where it was tucked under her, and left it there, and she let me, in a room full of torn paper with my kid an arm’s length away telling a dragon about an oven.

Later I found the gloves on the hall table where she could reach them on her way out the door, creased at the knuckles, as if she’d put them on and taken them off a few times just to have them. I didn’t mention it, the same as she never mentioned the coffee.

Katya called at ten, on schedule, warm and real, and Iris took the watch into the hall and reported Christmas to her mother in full, the oven and the apron and the book, and came back lit up and unbothered, because I’d built her to be, a kid who got the warm call and didn’t notice who wasn’t in the room. I crossed to the sink and braced my arms on it for a second, head down, and when I turned around Delaney was holding the orange juice, poured and waiting, because Iris always wanted orange juice after a Katya call, and I’d never told another living person that.

My mother called from Winnipeg at noon. Cole texted a photo of himself in a Santa hat he was clearly very happy with. The chat ran all morning under everything.

Kasperi: merry christmas. my gift to this team is that I will say nothing today about anyone’s personal life

Kasperi: that is the gift. it starts now

Cole: I don’t believe you but I’m moved

Ryan: Maren says merry christmas and also the engagement party is February and you’re all coming

Cole: a wedding adjacent event. I will be insufferable

Theo: Tu es déjà insupportable.