Page 124 of Power Play

Nobody had made it funny. More than the eggs going cold or the word tonight, the missing joke told me the size of it.

I went over at two, because Steph texted the family thread a flat little line about boxes and I was in my car before I’d finished reading it. I told myself it was decency. It was also that I couldn’t sit in that house one more hour doing the math I’d started doing at the breakfast table.

Iris came with me, because there was nobody to leave her with and because Leo was there, and the two of them vanished into the wreck of the living room the instant we were through the door.

The house had been a home at Christmas. I’d been in it on Christmas Eve, briefly, dropping off a tin of the cookies Iris and I had burned the first batch of, and there’d been a tree in the window with a lopsided star and Leo’s drawings taped up the length of the hall and a smell of cinnamon baking. Now the tree was down and bagged by the door, the star sticking out through the plastic, and the hallway walls had bright rectangles where the frames had been, and the front room was cardboard to the ceiling.

Steph answered the door with the baby on her hip and tape dust in her hair and a brightness turned up so high I could see straight through it.

“You did not have to do this,” she said, and let me in, and didn’t let me back out.

I wrapped glasses. That was my job, assigned without discussion the moment my coat was off, because somebody had to and I was there. She had a stack of newspaper on the kitchen floor, the real kind, from the recycling, and I sat down on the tile with it and did it as my mother had taught me, laying a sheet flat, setting the glass on its side at the corner, rolling, tucking in the ends.

“Bubble wrap is a scam the moving industry runs on grieving people,” I told her, because she was standing in the doorway watching me and holding the baby too tight and I needed to give her face a job. “Newspaper is the only acceptable medium for glass. It has been since before either of us was born. Anybody who tells you different sells bubble wrap.”

She laughed, the first real one, cracked down the middle. “God, I’m going to miss you being weird.”

“I’m not weird. I’m correct. There’s a difference, and it’s documented.”

She was going to miss me, future tense, and the future tense had a flight on it now, a week out at most. Since October she’d been my evidence a person could sit in that section with no title and still get handed half a bag of pretzels, and in a week the evidence flew to Buffalo and the section closed back into a wall of polite backs with me in the middle of it. I made the joke because the joke was easier than the truth of it, and she took it, because she needed it easier too.

She came down onto the floor with me, the baby parked in a laundry basket between us with a wooden spoon, and we wrapped her wedding glasses, the set with the gold rim, one at a time, and she talked. She talked as people did when the alternative was the quiet. The lease had six months left and the landlord was being decent about it, which somehow made it worse. Leo’s spot at the preschool would pass to the next kid on the list by the end of the week. She had a cousin in Buffalo. She’d never seen snow that stayed.

I did the hall while she took a call from the realtor. Leo’s drawings came off the wall one piece of tape at a time, a sun with eyelashes, a hockey player who was all stick, a family of four with a dog they didn’t own, and I pressed them flat between two sheets of cardboard, careful at the corners, because I wasn’t going to wad up a little boy’s hall into a trash bag while he could watch me do it. The bright rectangles stayed on the paint where the frames had hung. I ran my thumb over one and it came away with a year of somebody’s life in it, fine and gray, and I wiped it on my jeans and kept going.

“He called me from the parking lot,” she said, rolling a glass, not looking up. “Jonah. Before he even came home to tell me. He didn’t want me to hear it from the group thread, the wives’ one, it moves fast.” She taped the end of a bundle down. “We did this in Hartford. Before Phoenix. I told myself Phoenix was the one where we got to stop doing this.”

“I know,” I said, which was a lie. I didn’t know. I’d never once known it from the inside, and I kept my eyes on the gold rim and rolled.

Leo pelted through with Iris behind him, both of them in a game that had rules only they could see, and he had a box upturned over his head for a helmet, and for one second Steph’s face came apart entirely and then went back together because he’d stopped in the doorway.

“Mom. Is my bed coming?”

“Your bed’s coming, baby.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. Every piece.” She didn’t let her voice do anything. “Go find the dinosaurs. They’re in the green box. Put the green box by the door so it goes on the truck.”

He went. She looked after him, and then down at the glass in her hands, and said, quietly, to the glass, “You do it enough times and you get good at saying it like it’s nothing.” She wrapped it. “That’s the part nobody tells you. You get good at it.”

This was the math I did on the Brandts’ kitchen floor, with newsprint on my hands and Iris’s laugh coming through the wall, and it wouldn’t stop once it started.

Steph had a ring. Whatever else was coming apart, there was a marriage under it, a legal fact with a license filed in a county building, and when Jonah Brandt got put on a plane his wife got put on it too, eventually, the family loaded onto the same decision because the decision had been made about all of them at once. They were a unit the league moved as it moved him, one box at a time, because they came together on the paperwork. It was terrible and it was theirs and nobody was going to leave anybody in a parking lot.

Steph had a lease, six months left on it, with her name on it. It was hers to break, and the landlord was being decent about the breaking, because she’d stood in an office once and signed a document that said this house was partly hers until a date.

I had neither of those things, and it had never once occurred to me to want them until I sat on a kitchen floor helping a woman I liked pack up behind a man who’d been gone since lunch.

I had a casita with its own door off the side hall, and the real lock on my life sat in a drawer in a kitchen I didn’t own, in the shape of a single sheet of paper I’d signed in August with a hundred and forty-one dollars to my name. It was a nanny agreement. He’d been embarrassed by it, had slid it across the counter and said Maren made me, it’s just for the taxes, and I’d signed it without reading the one line that mattered, because I’d been grateful and because I hadn’t yet been in his bed.

The term of engagement read through the end of the season.

I wasn’t married. I had no lease. I had a piece of paper that ran out when the ice did, and I’d only lately understood that the season didn’t end when I’d thought it did, that there was an April and then maybe a May past it, and that the life I’d built myself around was a job with a date on it, and the date belonged to him.

Jonah Brandt had a career where somebody else decided, and his wife went where he went because she’d married the deciding. I had a career where somebody else decided too. The difference was that when my decision came, nobody would put me on the plane. I’d pack the box and carry it to my own car.

“D.” Steph was holding a glass out to me. I’d stopped. I’d been sitting with a flat sheet of newspaper across both knees, going nowhere. “You don’t have to do the fragile ones. I can do those.”