Page 38 of Power Play

I stood there in full gear with sweat running into my collar, holding a phone in one bare hand. I wanted her. It hit me that plainly, at the boards in front of twenty men. I dropped the phone back in my bag and skated the rest of the session harder than Calloway had asked for.

I got home late in the morning. They were in the backyard, Iris’s voice getting to me first through the glass, aimed at Gerald, who sat on the patio step supervising. I went out the back door.

“D made one,” Iris said, and had me by two fingers, towing me toward the table. “Show him, D.”

Delaney turned a small piece of paper toward me without looking up from capping her markers. It was pencil, with careful lines. She’d drawn Gerald at the school table in Iris’s paper crown, sitting a little stiff, which he did when he was being formal. He looked as if attending had been his own decision and he meant to take it seriously.

“Gerald looks like Gerald,” I said.

“I was very patient.”

I carried the drawing inside. I hadn’t asked her first. I put it on the counter.

She’d drawn him from memory. Gerald had been on the patio step while she was drawing, nowhere near a table. I wondered what else she’d been watching in my house, and whether any of it was me.

I turned it face down and kept two fingers on the edge of it for another few seconds, which was a long time to spend putting down a piece of paper.

The errand was Iris’s idea. She needed more purple paint, which was apparently urgent, and once Iris had ruled on urgency the ruling was permanent. I gave Delaney the card and they left not long after lunch.

Her car pulled in, then the door opened, then Iris’s footsteps came down the hall, and then nothing. Iris always found me when she got home, inside the minute. I got up to find her.

She was in the kitchen, standing dead still by the counter. Delaney was behind her with a hand on her shoulder and an expression I hadn’t seen before, patient and careful, keeping a situation from tipping over.

“What happened?” I said.

“There was an adoption event,” Delaney said. “Outside the pet place by the craft store. A rescue had pens set up on the sidewalk. Iris met a kitten.”

Iris had her chin down and her eyes up and she hadn’t blinked since she walked in. It was the face she used when she’d made up her mind and was waiting for the rest of us to arrive at the same place.

“Was the kitten nice?” I asked.

“Yes,” Iris said. Her voice was completely level.

“That’s good.”

She paused. “It was orange.”

“Mm.”

“Gerald thinks we should get a cat,” Iris said.

“Gerald is a dragon.”

“Dragons can want cats, Daddy.”

I glanced at Delaney. Her eyebrows were up and her mouth was shut and she wasn’t about to help me.

“We’re not getting a cat,” I said.

Iris absorbed this. She picked up Gerald from the counter and carried him out of the kitchen without hurrying. Her position was registered. She could wait.

“She’s not done,” Delaney said.

“I know.”

Bedtime took longer than usual. Iris wasn’t pushing. She’d taken the no and shelved it, which was the more dangerous move. She worked the kitten into the story I was reading. When the princess met a cat, Iris noted that it was orange, very small, and very smart.

The orange kitten had been at the shelter for six weeks. Iris had gotten that out of the volunteer and delivered it once, clearly. She’d gotten one other fact and she delivered that one differently.