Page 30 of Power Play

“Daddy, you were gone for so long,” she said, into my neck.

“Eight days.”

“That’s very long.”

“It is,” I agreed.

Delaney was at my stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and the garlic about to catch. She got the burner down to low without taking her eyes off the pan.

“Hey,” she said. “Good trip.”

“Won them all.”

“I know. Iris drew documentation.”

The documentation was on the refrigerator, DADY WINS in a version for every city, with Gerald credited as the source on every one.

“She was very confident,” Delaney said. “She defended the position through one direct challenge from a woman at the grocery store, and she hasn’t conceded an inch.”

“Gerald’s reliable,” I said, and let Iris pull me away.

It took most of an hour for what was happening in the kitchen to land on me. Iris came out to the living room with a question about the little crackers, and she brought it to me, because Delaney had sent her. “Ask your daddy,” Delaney had told her, easy, with no weight on it, and it carried across the room to me.

I said yes. I would always have said yes, and the answer was never the point. For eight days somebody else had been the person in the house who decided about crackers, and at some point in the last hour she’d handed it back.

Her laptop was open at the end of the counter with pages on the screen and the cursor blinking at the end of the last paragraph. I didn’t ask.

Iris went down on the couch in the middle of a sentence about Margaret.

The sentence just stopped. I came in from the kitchen with a dish towel in my hand and Delaney already had one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and was straightening up with her, Iris’s face turned into her collarbone. Gerald had slipped off onto the cushion.

I set the towel down. I crossed the room and slid my hands in under hers.

There was no graceful way to do it. My forearms went in along the insides of hers and took the weight, and her hands were pinned under Iris until she could work them free, and one of Iris’s feet had hooked against her hip, so I had to stand there and wait while she got it loose. My knuckles never left her ribs, just under the curve of her breast, and I knew where every one of them was. Not a word of it could be said out loud, because the point of the operation was that Iris stayed asleep, so we did all of it in silence at a distance of about four inches.

It took a few seconds. It was the longest I’d stood that close to a woman in years.

Then I had her and Delaney didn’t. I settled Iris’s head on my shoulder and met Delaney’s eyes over the top of it. Neither of us spoke. I carried my daughter down the hall.

When I came back out she was standing in the middle of my living room holding a pillow against her front with both arms around it, and the linen closet door was open behind her.

“That’s not one of mine,” I said.

“It’s from the casita.”

“I know where it’s from.” I stopped at the end of the hall. “How many nights?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Delaney.”

“Eight,” she said.

I waited her out.

“There are three bedrooms in this house.”

“There are two bedrooms in this house and an office with a rowing machine in it.”