Page 18 of Power Play

That put me behind her with my chest an inch off her back and my forearm past her ear. She smelled like the green shampoo and a hot pan with garlic in it, and there was heat rising off the back of her neck, and she didn’t move. It was one inch. I could have closed it by breathing in.

Coming down, my arm crossed her shoulder, the width of it in one pass, cotton and then the shape of her under the cotton, warm from being against her all day.

She didn’t duck out from under me, and she didn’t lean back into it either. She took the box out of my hand and said thanks and turned back to the stove, and I was left with my arm half up in the air and no plan for it.

Delaney moved away from the counter. “There’s chicken. Needs another twenty minutes.”

“You don’t have to stay for it.”

“Already started. I’ll finish it.” She folded the dish towel into a square and hung it on the oven handle. “I’ll get out of your way after.”

“You’re not in my way,” I said. It came out more direct than I’d meant it to. She moved through my kitchen like she’d always been in it, and her getting out of the way was wrong on its face.

She turned from the stove and looked straight at me, green-eyed and direct, not loading it. I kept my eyes on hers longer than was comfortable for either of us.

“Okay,” she said, and turned back to the stove. I got Iris off her chair and carried her down the hall.

Delaney finished what she was doing while I ran Iris through the bath. From the bathroom her work carried down the hall, a pan lid, the oven door, and no voice at all. She didn’t narrate. The sitters had narrated every step of it.

When I brought Iris back out in her pajamas, the counter had two plates on it, the casita light was on, and the kitchen was empty. I put Iris in her chair with hers and ate mine standing at the counter, and tried not to think about the fact that she’d put out two plates and not three.

Katya called one morning. The phone was face up on the table between Iris’s empty cup and the crusts off her toast, and it buzzed and worked itself sideways across the wood.

Iris heard it and launched up out of her chair with her mouth already open and her face lifting, which only happened with Katya. I handed it over and walked down the hall.

From there I got the briefing, Gerald’s current position on cucumbers, Margaret’s recent updates, and D, who Iris described as very tall and funny and knowing about dragons.

I put my back against the hall wall, cool through my shirt, and listened to my daughter tell her mother about a dragon.

Katya was good on the phone. Iris finished those calls glowing.

She ran the phone down the hall to me, happy, and headed off to brief Gerald on it. I went back to the kitchen and braced my forearms on the edge of the sink and stayed there until my shoulders dropped off my ears.

Delaney hadn’t been in my house a week, and she already had the shape of it. She hadn’t asked and I hadn’t told her. She came through the casita door with the green whale mug in both hands, read the kitchen in one pass, crossed to the fridge, got the orange juice and set it on the table, because Iris always wanted orange juice after a Katya call, and I’d never said that out loud to another living person.

She was in the gray sweatshirt again. There was a pillow crease down one side of her face. I kept my eyes on the orange juice instead.

“She seemed happy,” Delaney said.

“She always is, right after,” I said.

Delaney nodded and put her face back in her mug. She didn’t add to it. She’d called it right. Then I started on the breakfast dishes.

After lunch she took her keys off the hook, and the front door shut behind her, and then it was Iris and me. We had a full negotiation over the wrong cup and an afternoon on the living room floor being handed crayons in an order I had no say in.

She came in at six with her hair down and a paperback under her arm and didn’t say where she’d been. I didn’t ask.

The next evening I made dinner, pasta and salad and bread from the bakery two blocks over. When it was done I put a plate together for Delaney and left it on the counter, because I didn’t want to stand there and tell her I’d cooked for her.

She came in when Iris called for her, saw the plate, and her eyes cut to mine across the kitchen. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I made extra,” I said, which was true and stopped short, and she seemed to hear where it stopped, because she sat down without pushing it. “Thank you,” she said.

The kitchen hadn’t been that full in a long time. It was my mother’s pasta, the one with the wine and the garlic that couldn’t be hurried, and Gerald was at his spot with the blue plate and the empty cup.

Delaney asked about Margaret’s recent developments. Iris corrected her on a point of whale taxonomy, flatly, with a mouthful of pasta. Delaney accepted the correction without flinching, asked two follow-up questions that were the right two questions, and updated her position on the shallow-water controversy.

“Gerald agrees with you,” Iris said, to Delaney. “He says Margaret’s right about the tidal patterns.”