Page 137 of Power Play

Cole: Theo says we smile tonight. I got the important part

Kasperi: He said there’s still work. You got the easy half

Cole: forty-four you’re quiet. say something. you blocked shots with your face to get us here

Me: Shoulder. Not my face.

Cole: he lives!!!

I put the phone in my bag. I’d typed good game, deleted it, and left the chat, and by the time I’d pulled my jersey over my head Cole had added me back. He always did. I’d stopped treating it as a fight I could win.

On the plane home Theo sat beside me and didn’t talk, which was why I sat beside Theo. Near the end, over the dark, he said, low, in French so the row behind us caught none of it, “You’re going home to it or you’re going home from it. You’ve had the same face for weeks.” I told him, in French, I didn’t have a face. He said it was the face. Then he put his headphones on, because Theo always said the one true word and then made it extremely clear he was done.

I found it the next afternoon, and it was Iris who put it in my hand. It was always Iris who put things in my hand.

She’d set herself up at the kitchen table with the blue plate of crackers and a fistful of markers and Gerald propped in the booster to supervise, drawing Gerald on scrap, because she liked the back of used paper better than the clean pad I bought her, and I didn’t understand it either. She’d drawn an orange dragon with green wings and a crown, and she brought it over to me.

“It’s Gerald being king,” she said. “You can keep it. But it’s a loan.”

“Understood.”

“That means I get it back.”

“I know what a loan is.”

I took it, and she went back for more crackers, and I turned it over to pin it to the fridge, and the other side wasn’t scrap.

RHODES, DELANEY ran across the top in bold. Under it was a phone number I knew and an address that was mine, and then a life laid out in the flat language of a document, a whole woman pressed down to fit a page a stranger would skim. Fourteen years, early-childhood and kindergarten education. She’d listed a district in Boston and a certification number. Near the top, the required objective said she was seeking a classroom where she could build an early foundation children carry for life.

My daughter had drawn a king dragon on the back of the woman who’d built hers.

I stood at the fridge with it and the ice bag sliding off my shoulder and read it twice, and the second time was worse than the first, because the first time I was only taking in the words and the second time I understood what the paper was. It wasn’t a daydream. Nobody formatted a daydream. Nobody put a certification number on a wish. This was a woman who had sat in the casita at four in the morning and made herself fit on a page so she could hand it to a stranger and start a life that didn’t have my address on it.

I folded it back along the crease it came with, which told me she’d folded it before, which told me it had been in a pocket or a bag, which told me more than I wanted.

I knew the casita wall ran behind the kitchen. I’d known for months what she did at four in the morning on the other side of it, and I’d let her have it, the one room a person got to lock. I’d thought what she built in there before dawn was the typing, the story, the document she slammed shut if I got near it in daylight. I’d been quietly proud of it and never told her that part, a woman doing work that was only hers. I stood at the fridge with a page that had a certification number on it and understood I’d had it backward from the start. The typing wasn’t the exit. The typing was the one part she was keeping. This was the exit, flat and formatted and folded to fit a pocket, and it had been in the house while I was counting standings and calling the quiet tidy.

Then I did what I was ashamed of and would do again, because I didn’t have a better move.

I told myself a story.

The story said it was a backup. A responsible person kept a résumé current, the same as a careful one kept a spare in the trunk, not because she planned to blow a tire but because she was the one who checked the pressure. It said she’d been a teacher for fourteen years and of course she’d have the paper ready, of course she’d keep her hand in. It didn’t mean she was going. It was a scrap in the recycling my daughter drew a dragon on, and people recycled what they weren’t using. I built the story standing at my own fridge, fast and clean, the same as all the ones I’d built for Iris, and I nearly believed it, and the part of me that played a position whose entire job was reading where the play was going before the puck got there stood off to the side and watched me lie.

I didn’t put it on the fridge. I didn’t put it in the recycling either. I folded it one more time and put it in the drawer where I kept what I didn’t have a place for yet, under the spare phone charger and the warranty for a blender we didn’t own, and I shut the drawer, and I didn’t say one word about it to anyone, because to say a word I’d have to have the next one ready, and I’d been out of next words since February.

The not-saying got loud that night. We made the silence roar by how carefully we stepped around it.

I did bedtime. Iris wanted the book about the dragon who was bad at sharing, and then she wanted it again, and then she wanted to know if the playoffs meant I’d be gone more, and I said some, and she handled it the same as everything else, by negotiating. She’d allow the away games if I brought back the little hotel soaps, which she collected for reasons known only to her and Gerald. I agreed to the soap tax. I cut the overhead and left the hall light, and set Gerald where he kept watch, and she caught my hand on the way out and pressed it, careful, as she’d been with everything since my knee, and said, “Don’t let them hit you anymore,” and I told her it wasn’t really up to me, and she said then I should skate faster, and I said I’d pass that along to the coaching staff, and I’d have signed it in blood.

Then I came out to the kitchen and Delaney was at the counter, and the résumé in the drawer was in the room with us before either of us said a word.

She was washing the blue plate, which didn’t need it. I set her cup out for the morning, the green one, by the machine, and cracked the tin, and didn’t say I was doing it, the same as every night. We moved around each other in a kitchen we both knew down to the drawer that stuck, and the air had weight in it, the weight that settled before a hit both of us had seen coming from the far blue line, and neither of us got out of the way.

“You clinched,” she said, short and careful, in the voice she only used on me.

“Last night.”

“I saw the city lost its mind.”