Page 24 of Power Play

“Hat,” said Iris, from waist height, in the voice she saved for adults who were slowing things down. “It’s a hat, D.”

“It is not just any hat,” Eli said.

I pictured him at eleven, skinny, in a barn, with a knitted hat pulled down over his helmet by his father, and then up at the current version filling the corridor, and had to do some fast work on my face.

Then he said, “You didn’t have to bring her.”

“She had a booster seat by the door this morning.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She does that.”

Then, with his eyes down past my shoulder and one hand hooked through the strap of his bag, he said thanks for coming in.

The next week, book club argued about the ending of a novel for most of an hour, and my voice was carrying inside the first few minutes and I didn’t pull it back in. I had strong opinions about the husband, who couldn’t say what he needed and let the marriage carry the blame for it, and halfway through I caught myself describing him in the same terms I used to use about David, complete with the small generous excuses I’d always supplied on his behalf without anybody asking. I switched to the prose style and drank some wine.

Maren caught it. She let it go past without comment.

When the argument wound down and the others were talking among themselves, Maren leaned toward me.

“And Eli?” she said.

“Fine.”

She picked up her wine and said nothing. She drank some of it and kept her eyes on me over the rim, which was a question with better posture.

“He’s a good employer,” I said. “Direct. Consistent. Iris is thriving.” I paused. “He reads. Not just hockey. He had the Alderman novel on the shelf, the quiet one about the father and son, and the spine was cracked in two places, which means he went back to it.”

I stopped. Then I said it anyway. “There’s also a children’s book about a dragon who’s afraid of fire on the adult shelf because it doesn’t fit anywhere else and he kept it anyway. I read it last week. I don’t know what to do with any of this.”

Maren set her glass down. “A dragon who’s afraid of fire.”

“I’m assuming Gerald. I didn’t ask.”

“Of course you didn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “He asked me three times whether you’d be comfortable in the casita before you moved in. He went to the store twice about the towels. He texted me a photo of the east window at seven in the morning, before practice, asking if the light was good enough.”

I tightened my grip on my glass. “He texted you a photo of the window.”

“At seven in the morning.” She took a sip. “About the light.”

I pictured Eli Kovac, six-foot-three, standing in an empty casita with his phone up, taking a picture of a window so he could ask whether the light would do for a woman he’d met once. He’d have frowned at the screen. He’d have taken it again.

Then I thought about the blue plate, and the backup crackers, and the index card still on the counter long after I’d stopped needing it.

“So,” she said, eventually. “Fine.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. “Fine is a complicated word,” I said.

“It really is.”

On the way to our cars she fell into step beside me. “There’s no rule that says anything has to happen,” she said.

“Nothing is happening.”

“I know. I’m saying there’s also no rule that it can’t. That’s all.”

He was at the bookshelf when I came in, putting Iris’s board books back in her order, and he didn’t move away from it when the door shut behind me.

“How was it?” he said.