Page 148 of Power Play

I didn’t know what any of it was going to be. I’d built all of it with my eyes open and no clipboard and no idea where the end was, which back in April had been the most frightening sentence I could think of.

I saved the file. The lamp threw its light out into the room instead of against the wall. Through the open door the house lay warm and unfinished, with everybody in it accounted for and nobody’s bags packed, and I started the next page, because for the first time in my entire organized life I had absolutely no idea what came next, and I couldn’t wait to find out.

EPILOGUE

ELI

I asked Iris first.

I did it at the kitchen table on a morning in June, while Delaney was across town having coffee with Maren and Jenna, because my daughter couldn’t hold a secret for longer than a week and I wasn’t going to ask her to try. She had Gerald in her lap and a cup of dry cereal she was eating one piece at a time. I told her I wanted to ask D to marry me, and I asked her if that was okay.

She put a piece of cereal in her mouth and chewed it all the way down before she answered. She took contracts seriously.

“Does she still get to be D?”

“She gets to be anything she wants.”

“Then she wants to be D.” She offered Gerald a piece of cereal. He refused it, and she accepted his decision. “Gerald says yes. Gerald says it has to be a surprise, and there has to be a cat in it.”

“Why does there have to be a cat in it?”

She gave me a look of deep pity. “Because Zamboni lives here, Daddy.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t.

The ring had been in my underwear drawer for three weeks, pushed to the back under a stack of boxer briefs, in a small gray box with a gold band inside and one stone set low, so it wouldn’t catch on the keys when she typed at four in the morning. I’d thought about that at the jeweler’s for longer than the salesman wanted me to.

Iris lasted four days.

On the fourth morning Delaney came across the kitchen in my gray T-shirt with her hair still flat on one side, and took the whale mug off the counter where I’d set it out, and Iris looked up from her eggs and said, loud and clear, “Is it tonight? Gerald wants to know if it’s tonight.”

Delaney stopped with the mug halfway to her mouth. “Is what tonight?”

Iris went still. She looked at me for help, and I had none to give her. She looked down at her plate and back up.

“Tacos,” she said.

It was not a taco night. We had never once had a taco night. Delaney turned her head and looked at me over the rim of the mug, one eyebrow up, and waited.

“Apparently it’s tacos,” I said.

“Apparently.” She drank her coffee and kept her eyes on me while she did it. Then she set the mug down and kissed the top of Iris’s head and went back across the kitchen to the casita, and Iris and I looked at each other over the eggs and said nothing at all.

So it was tonight, and it was tacos.

Iris had a plan. She told it to me at the grocery store in a whisper half the produce section could hear, standing in the cart with Gerald under one arm. The plan was the orange ribbon from the craft drawer, the ring on the ribbon, and the ribbon on Zamboni, and then Zamboni would walk across the living room to D, and D would see it, and that would be the surprise.

“Cats don’t walk where you tell them,” I said.

“Zamboni does.”

“Zamboni has never once walked where anybody told her.”

“She walks to D,” Iris said, which was true, and I lost the argument the same way I’d lost the argument about the kitten, by being right about everything except the part that mattered.

After dinner I did the dishes and Delaney sat on the couch with her feet tucked under her and a paperback open on her knee, and Iris disappeared down the hall toward her room with the cat under one arm and the craft drawer’s entire supply of ribbon in her fist. She was gone a long time. There was a thump, and a small sound of outrage that came from the cat, and then nothing.

“What is she doing?” Delaney said, without looking up from her book.