Page 134 of Power Play

I turned thirty-seven on a Tuesday in March, and I spent the first hour of it lying in the casita in the dark doing the math I did every year, which this year had a new number in it.

Thirty-seven. He was twenty-six. If I laid our two lives end to end on one of the construction-paper timelines I used to tape across the wall for my kindergartners in fat marker, this is when you were born and this is when the dinosaurs died, there were eleven years of mine before his line even started. I learned to read, lost every baby tooth I had to lose, and finished childhood in Boston before he turned up on the chart at all. The spring I was sixteen and failing my driver’s test for the first time, he was five years old in Winnipeg, the exact age of the children I’d spend fourteen years teaching. I had been somebody’s crush before he had teeth. I did this to myself every birthday, and most birthdays it was a fun private horror I could turn over and put down. This year it bit back, because this year I had a plan, and the plan had a start date, and the start date made the math stop being a party trick.

I got up at four, as I did every morning now, and turned the lamp to the wall so the light wouldn’t cross the gap under the door, and I wrote for an hour. I was writing two people in a kitchen who couldn’t say what they meant. I knew how that looked. A woman had to put it on a page.

Then I made myself stop, and went and washed my face, and decided to have a nice birthday, because I was extremely good at deciding things.

He’d set the mug out. I found it when I went in for coffee, the green one, beside the machine, the lid of the tin cracked so the good beans sat on top, and beside it an index card I had to stand and look at for a second before I understood it.

It was his handwriting, which I’d know anywhere now, all capitals and pressed hard into the card.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. COFFEE’S READY. DON’T CLEAN ANYTHING.

I stood there in his kitchen in my socks and read it over and over. He wrote me index cards. He had for months, since the fall, little ones, propped on the machine, dentist Tuesday 10 and Iris no red dye and your car’s making a noise, don’t drive it, I called someone. I had a crate of them in the casita I’d told no one about and never would, because there was no sane way to explain to another adult that I’d kept a stack of index cards from the father of the child I minded.

I didn’t clean anything. It was the single hardest thing I did all morning.

Iris came out in a party hat she’d made herself out of a paper plate folded in half and stapled directly to a headband, and told me it was my birthday and therefore I had to do what she said, which was a legal principle she’d invented on the spot and would be citing all day.

“It’s the rule,” she informed me. “On your birthday the birthday person has to be obeyed, but also everyone else gets to decide what the birthday person wants.”

“That’s not how birthdays work.”

“It’s how they work in this house,” Iris said, with the flat certainty of a kid quoting a statute, and I laughed so hard I had to put the mug down, right there in the kitchen, where her father, taping a stick at the table, looked up at the sound of it and watched me laugh and didn’t say anything, and the laugh went careful halfway out of me and came out smaller.

I couldn’t fix it. Everyone else got the whole laugh. He got it and it shrank, because wanting him was the one part of my life I’d never once been able to be bubbly about.

Charlotte Pham found me in the preschool lot under the one mesquite and turned my birthday into a town square, as people always did.

“It’s your birthday. Iris told Wren, Wren told me, Wren believes you’re turning either six or one hundred.” She had the baby on her hip and the baby had her collar in his fist, as always, the Pham family a single organism stitched together by fabric. “Happy birthday. How old, if I’m allowed to ask?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“God, you look — okay, I’m not going to say it, every woman hates it when I say it.” She shifted the baby. “Thirty-seven’s a good one. You still have all your knees.”

“I’m cataloguing my knees as we speak.”

Then, because the universe kept a file on me, Iris and Wren came barreling out of the doors and Iris shouted across the lot, “That’s D, she lives at my house, and that’s my dad!” because Eli had come to pickup, which he never did, because he was never home at noon, and there he was, home at noon on a rare day with no game and no practice on it, twenty-six and built for the job and too young for any quarter-zip to cover, and Charlotte’s eyes went from him to me and did a small arithmetic she was far too kind to say out loud.

She’d told me once, early on, that he looked about twelve, and apologized for it, and never said it again, and didn’t have to. I stood in that thin moving shade beside a woman my own age — her baby on her hip, her husband her age inside paying the fall tuition — while the father of the girl I minded jogged across the lot and caught his daughter under the arms and threw her up over his head, and I ran the eleven-year subtraction one more time, in daylight, with a witness. The feeling had a name, and it was a name I only said to the dark at four in the morning. The name was foolish. It wasn’t shame. It was foolishness, which was worse, because a woman could carry shame with some dignity later on and never foolishness. Charlotte had the plain version of a life, the one where the numbers matched and nobody ran subtraction in a parking lot, and I had always wanted that plain version and somehow ended up wanting it from a man eleven years too young to hand it over the ordinary way. I didn’t want Charlotte’s husband, or that life with anybody else standing inside it. I wanted the one throwing his kid at the sky, and no subtraction I knew could make wanting that reasonable.

“He came to pickup,” Charlotte said, carefully, to the air.

“They’ve got a long gap between home games and no practice tomorrow,” I said. “So he’s home with nothing to hit. A bored defenseman is a danger to himself and others. It’s a documented condition.” I said it in the voice I used for serious things, the forms voice, and Charlotte laughed, and the moment passed, because I made moments pass by being funny about them until they agreed to leave.

The district wrote back that afternoon.

I’d sent two applications in January, quietly, from the casita, for the fall — kindergarten, both of them, because fourteen years was fourteen years and the body knew the work. One had gone silent, the polite silence of a form fallen into a well. The other wrote back. A real email, a real name at the bottom, a woman named Lorraine who ran hiring for a district forty minutes from here, out past where the city gave up, and the email said they’d reviewed my materials and would I be available the week after next for an interview.

I read it standing in the casita, and what came up wasn’t relief, which was what a rescue was supposed to feel like. It was dread, low and patient, the dread of a plan I’d made with my own hands starting to work right on schedule. It was a door I’d built myself, swinging open on a room I knew by heart, because I’d lived in that room for fourteen years and left it, and here it was again, repainted, waiting, with a smartboard and a laminator and a rug with the alphabet on it and twenty-two coats on hooks set low for small hands.

The worst of it was that I’d be good at it. I’d walk in and be good at it in an hour.

I wrote back and said I was available, and we settled on a Wednesday, nine forty-five, and I put it in my phone, and I didn’t say one word about it to the man across the house, who set my coffee out and wrote me index cards and had no idea the woman in his casita had an appointment forty minutes past the edge of town and the one blazer she owned picked out for it.

The girls knew the outline of it, if not the details.

Maren: Happy birthday, you absolute treasure. Dinner this weekend, Jenna’s in, no arguing