Page 19 of Power Play

“Gerald is well-informed,” Delaney said, with complete sincerity.

Iris was satisfied. She bent back over her pasta.

“He gets it from his mother,” I said.

I said it into my plate. I wasn’t trying to be funny. It was a line I’d used before, and it usually sailed past people, and I’d said it mostly to find out whether it would go past her.

It didn’t go past her.

She laughed, and it wasn’t the polite noise adults made at a table with a child at it. She put her fork down and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth and laughed out loud, in my kitchen, at a joke about a stuffed dragon, the laugh cracking in the middle of itself, and Iris put her head up and demanded to be told what was funny and had to be told that Gerald was funny, which Iris accepted as self-evident.

Her free hand came down on the table and the water shook in the glasses. She let it run itself out and then picked her fork back up as if nothing had happened, and I sat there having heard it.

Nobody had laughed like that in my kitchen since we’d moved in.

I wanted to hear it again, closer next time, with her head back like that on my pillow and me the one who’d done it to her. I studied my plate until my face was doing what I wanted it to do. My ears were hot.

“Can Gerald be a bear?” Iris said.

Delaney put her fork down. “Gerald is a dragon, kiddo.”

“He could be a bear if he wanted.”

“He could not, because he is a dragon.”

“Winnie is a bear.” Iris set her own fork down too. The matter had gone formal. “Tonight is the bear one. The one where they get stuck.”

“They are always stuck.” Delaney turned back to her salad. “I read that book to five-year-olds for fourteen years. I could recite the honey chapter at gunpoint.”

“You know he’s from Winnipeg,” I said.

She kept chewing for a second before it landed.

“I’m sorry?”

“Winnie the Pooh.”

Delaney set her salad down with tremendous care. “Eli.”

“Mm.”

“Are you telling me, at your own table, in front of your child, that Winnie the Pooh is Canadian?”

“He’s named after Winnipeg.”

“He is a bear. In a wood. In England.”

“The bear he’s named for was from Manitoba.”

She had her phone half out of her pocket.

“Put that away,” I said.

“Eli, I am a kindergarten teacher. I have read that book five hundred times. I have done all the voices, including Owl, who is difficult. If this is true it is a professional emergency.”

“Daddy!” Iris said. “Tell it.”

So I told it, and I didn’t get far before the interruptions started.