Page 25 of Power Play

“Good. We argued about a novel for forty minutes. Strong consensus that the ending was wrong.”

“Which book?”

I told him. His chin dipped. “I haven’t read that one. I’ve read her first one.”

I came over and stood at the shelf with him.

“The one set in Iceland?” I said.

“Yes.” He took his time with it. “The first half was better. She lost her nerve in the middle. The ending she wrote was the one she thought she should write instead of the one the book needed.”

I stared at him.

“What?” he said.

“That is exactly it. I’ve been trying to articulate that for two years and you just said it in one sentence.”

His mouth went up on one side and stayed there while he talked. “The Iceland book is better than its reputation,” he said. “People gave all the attention to the obvious one.”

“Everyone rewards the obvious one,” I said. “The quiet ones don’t get their due.”

He thought about it. “No,” he said. “They don’t.”

I wasn’t sure he was still talking about the book. His hands were loose at his sides, and my eyes went to those hands and didn’t leave. They were big and blunt, with a healed split across one knuckle and the nails cut down short and square.

We talked for a while longer. He gave his opinions without padding them. When I pushed back on one point his jaw moved once and he stopped talking, and then he said I might be right, and he meant it. I’d had six years of conversations that were hollow right through, and now I had this.

I got a glass of water at his sink in the middle of it, and I was still holding it, standing four feet from him with my back against the counter, when I said it to myself in those words. I wanted to kiss my employer in his own kitchen with his daughter asleep down the hall. Whether he’d let me start it or those hands would come up and take over, I had no idea.

I put the glass down and pushed off the counter toward the casita door.

He put his hand out for it. I picked it up and gave it to him, and he took it around the wet rim where my fingers were. His hand closed over mine, cold glass on one side and the heat of his palm across my knuckles on the other, and his face didn’t change at all. He ran it under the tap and set it upside down on the rack.

My hand was warm where his had been. I was thirty-six years old, and I was warm about a drinking glass.

I said goodnight. He said goodnight. I went through the casita door and waited in the dark before I turned the lamp on.

I told myself I was going to read. I opened a blank document instead. The cursor blinked.

I’d been carrying an idea around for a while. It wasn’t an idea yet, just the outline of one, a story that had lived at the back of my head since a Saturday afternoon in Boston with a glass of Malbec and a hero who said what he wanted without apologizing for any of it. Writing it down would have meant taking it seriously, and taking it seriously would have meant admitting out loud that I wanted it, and I’d spent six years being careful about what I claimed to want in front of another person.

I typed one sentence. It was bad. I’d written it to sound impressive instead of saying what I meant. I deleted it and wrote another.

Then I quit trying to write a good sentence and wrote a true one.

The third one was better. It wasn’t good, it was truer, and that mattered more that night. I wrote a fourth and a fifth, and stopped reading back over it, because reading it back meant deciding whether it was worth continuing.

I had a paragraph that might be the start of a book. The hero in it had large hands and said what he meant without apologizing for it, and I hadn’t built him. I’d been watching him.

I still hadn’t given him a name. Naming him would have meant deciding, and deciding was finished for the night.

I saved it as notes.docx and went to bed.

Not long after that he left on a long road trip, and the routine came together on its own.

Road nights, the document said, I was in the main house until he was in it, and on those he wasn’t in it at all, so the couch was mine. The first night I sat upright in an armchair until two in the morning with my shoes on, listening for a car that was in another state. The second night I brought a blanket. A few nights in I had my own pillow from the casita and a system. The pillow went back to the casita well before any light. The blanket got folded into thirds over the arm of the couch, where it had been on my first day. I flattened each fold with the heel of my hand. By the time the sky turned gray at the edges there was no evidence anybody had slept in the living room.

I did that every night he was gone. I had a house that wasn’t mine running under my hands, and nobody to hand it back to at the end of the day.