Page 145 of Power Play

Iris had the run of all of it, which she’d had since September and nobody had ever once tried to take from her. She went stall to stall collecting goodbyes with the gravity of a small head of state, and the men who’d just lost got down to her level one at a time and gave her their full attention, because a little girl asking whether their summer had a dog in it was a mercy on a day like that, and they knew it.

“Griffin is getting a dog,” she reported back to me, scandalized and thrilled. “A real one. Not like Gerald. A different kind.”

“A complementary animal,” I said.

“Cole says he’s my uncle.” She considered this. “He is not my uncle. But I let him.”

I laughed out loud, big and helpless, right there in the middle of the room, and heads came up at the sound of it. One of them was at the far stall in a gray t-shirt. He didn’t turn around, but the back of his neck tightened, and he’d heard it the same as he heard everything, through a wall.

I understood the room now, which I hadn’t in August. It was a roomful of men whose worth lived in the plays that hadn’t happened, the goals they’d prevented, the nights they’d kept close, none of it on any sheet anywhere, all of it packed into boxes now and shipped home. I’d signed on for the invisible part of a loud job. I stood in the gutted room and loved it with my eyes open, as I’d decided to love the rest of it.

Jenna had asked me to come, officially, which was the reason I gave people and only half the reason I was there.

“I need two women in that building who don’t want a quote from me,” she’d said on the phone, running on espresso and almost no sleep. “Maren’s doing exit physicals all morning and I’m running the last media availability of the worst week of the year and if I don’t have coffee with you two afterward I’m going to lie down on the snake in the carpet and let it have me.”

So I was there for coffee, and for the dragon’s stall, and because the house had gone so quiet and so good since the morning of the forms that I’d started wanting to see the man in the place where he was most himself, just as he’d watched me come in off the parking lot in August, before either of us knew.

I wasn’t supposed to be in the room for the media part. I was in the hallway outside it, with Iris on my hip reading the nameplates, when it happened.

Cleanout day had a ritual at the end, the last availability of the season, where the reporters went stall to stall and asked the dead-season questions, the ones with no game attached, about what went wrong, what the summer held, what next year looked like. Nobody was guarding anything by then. The season was over, there was no game to win, and a locker room in May was the most honest a locker room got, which I’d learned from the inside by accident.

Through the gap in the door, Eli was at his stall in a gray t-shirt with a half-packed bag at his feet, saying three words at a time to a man with a recorder, because that was how he handled them, present and minimal, giving the camera no more than it asked for. I’d read a season preview once that mentioned he was a single father in one buried clause and then moved on, and I’d respected the closed door of it before I’d ever met him. The man had guarded his daughter’s privacy for four years as if it were the one loss he couldn’t survive, because it was.

The reporter asked him what next year held.

It was a dead-season question, a throwaway. Players answered it with same thing, get healthy, come back hungry, and everybody wrote it down and went to the next stall.

Eli put down the roll of tape he’d been holding. He looked straight at the recorder, which he never did.

“I’ve got my daughter,” he said. “She starts kindergarten in the fall. And I’ve got my partner. Delaney. We’re staying in Phoenix. I’m not going anywhere.” He let a beat go by. “That’s the part of next year I actually know.”

The hallway went bright, and the sound dropped out of it.

Jenna was against the far wall with both arms crossed over her tablet. Her job since he came to Phoenix had been to keep Eli Kovac’s private life private, to field the questions he wouldn’t answer and never let anyone catch the door open, and now he’d thrown it open himself, in front of a recorder, on purpose. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. She found me through the gap in the door, in the hallway with his child on my hip, and her eyes filled, and she didn’t organize her face at all, Jenna Brooks, who organized faces for a living.

On the night of the eleventh, in his kitchen, I’d told him there was a word for the arrangement, and that which one of us said it first made no difference to anybody on earth.

I’d been right about anybody on earth. I’d been dead wrong about me.

He’d said it first, in daylight, at his kitchen table, on purpose, after waiting out a series, and now he’d said it again into a recorder in a room full of strangers on the one day of the year when there was nothing to win or gain, spending years of hoarded privacy in a single sentence because he’d decided I was worth more than the quiet. It made no difference to anybody on earth who said it first.

It made all the difference to me, which I finally understood he’d known before I did.

He came out of the room a few minutes later with the bag over his shoulder and found me in the hallway where I’d stayed, because my legs had made the decision to stay before I’d consulted them.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” He took Iris off my hip and onto his own without breaking stride, and she wound a fist into his collar and kept reading nameplates over his shoulder. Then he put his free hand flat on my hip and moved me two inches to the left, out of the path of a camera crew coming the other way, with no ceremony and no question, same as he shifted anything in his orbit he’d decided to keep safe, and I let him, because being moved by that hand without being asked was as close as I got, in a building full of strangers, to being handed proof I was his to keep track of.

“You said it into a recorder,” I said, short and careful, in the only voice I ever used with him.

“I did.”

“Jenna cried. I watched her do it. She’s going to deny it.”

“She’ll deny it.” He looked at me for a second past the word, reading me as he read the kitchen in the mornings, and he seemed satisfied with what he found. “You good?”

“Cole’s going to lose his mind in the chat.”