Page 17 of Power Play

She didn’t say good morning. Neither did I. She slid the reservoir back in and hit the switch, and the machine started its low grind. I leaned on the far end of the counter with my hands in my pockets and waited for the pot to fill.

I thought about setting the machine the night before. I didn’t do it, and I knew each morning that week I hadn’t done it.

She took one sugar and a little milk. I got that off her sideways at breakfast one morning, never turning my head, which was how I learned most of what I knew about people. From then on I left one cup in the pot when I headed out the door, and I didn’t think about why.

The house sounded different with another adult in it. Ever since we’d moved in, every noise after Iris was asleep had been either me or the refrigerator, and now there was a door opening and closing, water moving in a pipe, and a woman laughing in the casita well after dark.

She fixed the snack drawer almost right away. She didn’t announce it. She moved two things, and now the drawer worked, and I opened it that night and admired it longer than a grown man ought to admire a drawer.

I had a system, Iris, hockey, everything else, in that order. I built it after Katya because I needed a frame to build the days on, and it had worked ever since. I wasn’t going to let it get complicated by a woman who knew where the orange juice was.

I told myself that in a kitchen that smelled like her shampoo, with the cup in my hand gone cold while I said it.

By the end of the week Iris was calling her D. No one had proposed it to her. She was briefing Gerald on the day’s schedule at breakfast and mentioned D over and over before I worked out she didn’t mean a letter of the alphabet.

“D is coming to get me today,” Iris said, mostly to Gerald.

“Delaney,” I said.

Iris turned to me. The patience on her face was considerable. “That’s what I said.”

Gerald had no comment. I drank my coffee and let it stand.

There was a folder in my head by then that I had no intention of opening. A different one was filling up on my laptop, two pages on a Vancouver forward who tipped his stick before he cut, and Calloway hadn’t asked me for one word of it. The laptop folder was easier. Nobody in it had bare legs.

Practice ran early that morning in an empty building, and I was a step off all the way through it. Theo caught it.

He set down his water and skated past me on his way back out. “Tu es en retard d’un temps,” he said, without turning his head. He was telling me I was a beat late.

“Je vais bien,” I said. I was fine.

He made a noise that disagreed with me and skated on.

Ryan pushed off the boards and fell into step on my left. We did a full circuit in silence, which was Ryan’s way. He was putting a sentence together and would say it when it was built.

“Cole’s going to be a problem about this,” he said.

“Already is.”

“Mm.” We ran another circuit. “Maren likes her,” he said, and didn’t add to it, and didn’t turn to see how it landed. He said it flat and certain, without ceremony, which was how Ryan said anything that mattered.

He peeled off to his position. I worked my edges and thought about Maren’s judgment, and about Ryan saying it at all, and about the coffee in the pot.

She was in the kitchen when I got home that evening.

She had garlic going gold at the edges in olive oil, thyme stripped off the stem, and a pan sitting across two burners. The house smelled lived in, not occupied. Iris was at the table with every crayon she owned and several I was fairly sure were new.

“She ate everything at lunch,” Delaney said, without turning around. “Gerald tried the cucumber. Results were mixed.”

“Gerald’s working up to cucumber.”

“That tracks.”

I set my keys down. Iris dropped the crayons and grabbed my hand, hers sticky, crayon worked into the heel of it, and started in on the drawing project, and I crouched to her level and asked the right questions and tracked Delaney around my kitchen from down there without turning my head.

She reached up for the cabinet over the stove. It sat high. She got up on her toes with one hand braced on the counter, her body going long with the reach, both heels off the tile, the t-shirt coming untucked at the back, and she meant to get it herself. I put Iris’s drawing down, stood up, and crossed the tile behind her.

I reached over her and brought the box down.