Page 15 of Power Play

“He likes the blue plate,” Iris said.

I switched it.

The morning had a shape as soon as I knew the order. It went orange juice, then eggs, then toast cut on the diagonal. The eggs took the heat fast and set brown and lacy at the edges, and the smell of the toast stayed in the kitchen for an hour afterward. I cut the first slice straight across and Iris turned her face on me from across the table with the patience of a woman giving me one more chance.

“Triangles,” she said.

“Triangles.” I put the offending rectangle on my own plate and started over. “That one’s mine now. It has to live with what it did.”

She ate everything. After breakfast she walked me through what mattered about the house in the order she’d decided was logical. She showed me Gerald’s secondary blanket, the correct way to address Margaret, the blue whale who lived in her drawings, when discussing ocean topics, and three drawings taped to the kitchen window, positioned for the way the morning light came through them.

I got into that light with her. The drawings glowed, and Iris was at my hip.

I’d been carrying my shoulders up around my ears since July. They came down in that kitchen on their own.

I was going to be okay here.

“Gerald picked those ones,” Iris said. “He said the colors are right.”

“Gerald has excellent taste,” I said.

“I know,” she said, with complete sincerity, and took my hand because we had places to be. Her hand was small and sticky with orange juice and completely sure of itself. She’d decided this was fine and she was three steps ahead of it and tugging me along.

He came home in the middle of the afternoon.

The sound of the truck reached me first, that engine, which I apparently knew by ear after one morning, a fact I chose not to examine. Then the front door opened, and Iris dropped her crayon and crossed the living room at full speed. He caught her with one arm, no adjustment, no bracing, and swung her up. She wrapped her arms around his neck and her sneakers kicked against his ribs and he didn’t register it.

He was still in the gray t-shirt.

Of course he was.

I was in the kitchen with a dish towel in my hands, damp and cold from the last of the dishes, which helped, because it gave me a place to point my eyes besides him.

“Daddy, Gerald says the peas were good today,” Iris said into his shoulder.

“Gerald’s coming around on peas,” he said.

“I told him they taste like outside and that helped.”

He lifted his eyes over the top of her head to me, and then past me to the kitchen. It was one quick sweep, and it took in the clean counter, the dishes done, Iris’s shoes by the door, and Gerald’s blue plate in the drying rack. His shoulders came down a half inch. He didn’t ask how it went. He’d read the answer off the counters and that was enough for him.

He moved her to his other arm, and I looked at his forearm while he did it, and I thought about being moved.

“She ate everything,” I said. “Including the peas, which I want on the record, because she negotiated me down to four and then ate eleven.”

“Gerald endorsed the peas,” Iris said.

“He’s reliable on the peas.”

I hung the towel over the oven handle and got Gerald off the counter, where he’d been supervising since lunch. Eli was right there now, and the smell off his shirt came with him, ice and rubber and cold air out of the rink. I passed the dragon over and his fingers came over the back of mine on the way past, warm and dry and there for maybe half a second. Then Gerald was under his arm and he wasn’t looking at the dragon or at me.

He set Iris down and she grabbed his hand. He let himself be pulled toward the living room and glanced back at me. “There’s pasta from last night in the fridge. If you want it.”

“I would love the pasta,” I said. “I want to be clear that I’m going to eat all of it and I’m not going to be weird about it.”

“Nobody said be weird about it.”

“Some households have rules about the pasta.”