Page 16 of Power Play

“This household has one rule about the pasta.” He was being towed while he said it. “Eat the pasta.”

I stayed put in the kitchen, and my eye ended up on the bookshelf by the table. Board books filled the bottom shelves. The top shelf was different. Three books were wedged in upright at the end because there was no room left in the row, a literary thriller, a history of hockey, and a quiet novel I’d read myself a while back on a Saturday in Boston, the one about a man and his father.

I lifted it off the shelf. The spine was cracked in two places, the soft breaks a book got from being pushed open and gone back to, and one of the two was about eighty pages from the end, where the novel stopped being about a house and started being about a man who couldn’t say what he felt out loud to his own father. I’d put it down in the same place.

I slid the book back into its slot, spine flush with its neighbors, like I’d been caught going through his underwear drawer.

From the living room Iris’s voice ran on, and then he laughed. It was short and it was real, and it was the first unguarded sound out of that man since I’d knocked on his door. The sound was low, and it went straight down my spine and settled a lot lower than a laugh had any right to.

I let that sit a beat too long. Then I got the pasta out and ate it cold at the kitchen table, and the sounds of the next room carried across the open middle of the house. Iris was explaining, Eli was asking follow-up questions, and Gerald was being consulted.

It was a household that worked, making ordinary noise. I hadn’t known how hungry I was for the sound of one until I was sitting right next to it with a fork in my hand.

By the end of the first day, the casita was more mine than the sublet had ever managed to be.

I made tea in the good kettle and sat on the bed holding the mug and let the day settle on me. The main house was quiet past the door. A security light two houses over put a hard white patch on the block wall, and nothing crossed it while I sat there.

I pressed my palm to the bedding beside me. It was cool and thick.

He was my employer, and his daughter had decided on day one that I was hers. Being picked by a small child didn’t come with a decline option.

I was also going to make a complete fool of myself over that man if I didn’t get out ahead of it tonight.

Maren had texted call me after the first day hours earlier and I hadn’t answered it, because Maren Callahan would have the entire situation diagnosed before I finished my second sentence.

Me: first day was great. iris is a delight.

Maren: and?

Me: goodnight, maren

Maren: Delaney Rhodes.

I shut the screen off.

Then I went back through the casita door into the dark house, because I’d kicked my shoes off inside the front door after the last trip to the car, as if I lived there.

They were sitting next to Iris’s, my burgundy flats and her light-up sneakers side by side under the bench, in the order a person put shoes down without thinking about it.

I picked mine up and stood there in a stranger’s front hall with my own shoes in my hands, listening to a man’s house settle around me, until I got embarrassed about it.

Then I put them back where they’d been, and went to bed.

CHAPTER 5

Eli

I didn’t work out the coffee right away.

The pot was full every morning when I stepped out of the shower, before Iris was up. The first morning I put it down to an accident. The second I blamed the same accident twice running, which wasn’t how accidents worked, and I knew that while I was pouring.

The third morning I got out early and the kitchen light was on before me. A yellow wedge of it lay out across the hall floor and stopped short of my bedroom door.

She had her back to me at the counter in a gray sweatshirt that hung to mid-thigh on her, the cuffs gone soft and rolled back off her hands, and her hair was still up from sleeping and sliding down out of it on one side. Her feet were bare on my tile, and so were her legs, up to where the sweatshirt stopped, and I had no information about what was under the sweatshirt and my brain put in a request anyway. She had the reservoir under the tap and she was watching the water climb, not awake yet, nothing else in her face at all.

I got to the end of my hallway and stopped short of the kitchen, my palm on the wall beside the light switch, the paint cool under it.

The want got there ahead of the thought. If I crossed the tile and put my hands on her hips and set my mouth on the back of her neck, right where the hair had come down, she wouldn’t have moved. A man didn’t get to think that at six in the morning about a woman who worked for him. I thought it anyway, and then I made myself walk into the kitchen at a normal pace.