Page 40 of Power Play

“You got the door closed?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s not good.”

“No.”

He got up and fell in beside me down the corridor and didn’t ask a second one, which from Kasperi was the same as a hand on the shoulder.

I ran the Calloway conversation once on the drive and then I put it down. The actual problem was where my head landed in the gap. It never happened during the play. It happened in the half second before, the fraction where the brain reached for the loudest item in the room. For as long as I’d played, that space had been ice. It had been angles, sticks, and where a guy’s hips were pointed. Now it was the backs of her knees when she reached for the top shelf. Monday, third period, a winger had driven down my side, and I’d been thinking about the backs of her knees.

The backs of her knees had made me three reads late, and Calloway had noticed. My life wasn’t as private as I’d been assuming. Keeping her at arm’s length had worked so far, with her in the casita, me on my side of the house, and Iris steady between us. I didn’t take apart things that worked. I was going to have to take this apart anyway.

I parked in the driveway, got out, and walked up to the gate.

Every square of concrete from the driveway to the front step had chalk on it.

There were spirals, and handprints, hers and Iris’s, the small ones inside the bigger ones. A snake ran across three full squares with a face at one end and, for reasons that would be explained to me, a hat. There was a sun with seventeen rays.

A row of ten orange cats ran along the edge, each one labeled, and most of the labels said the same word, FLUFY. The tenth was double the size of the others and had a crown.

Across the middle of the walkway, in block letters that got bigger as they ran, somebody had written my name, with the I stacked up at an angle on top of the L because the writer had run out of pavement and refused to start over.

ELI.

I stopped at the gate with my backpack still on my shoulder and read my own name off my own sidewalk. Nobody had ever put my name on a sidewalk for me before, and I stood there and let it land.

Delaney was crouched by the front step with her back to me, filling in the edge of a cat. There was chalk dust up one forearm to the elbow and more of it across the back of one thigh where she’d wiped her hand without checking. Her hair was twisted up off her neck and coming loose.

She had one palm braced on the concrete to reach. I thought about putting my mouth on the place where her shoulder ran into her neck. I didn’t want it vaguely. I wanted it as a plan, with an order of operations, and step one was taking her hair the rest of the way down. I had a step five. There was a step eleven.

Iris saw me.

“Daddy!”

She crossed the yard at a dead run and I got my backpack off my shoulder in time to catch her. She had a full coat of chalk dust on both hands and she put both of them on the back of my neck. She talked into my collarbone about Reggie, who was the snake, and about the sun, which had seventeen rays because seventeen was Ryan’s number and this was apparently significant.

“Ryan’s got nothing to do with the sun.”

“Gerald says he does.”

I set her down. She dropped back to work.

Delaney hadn’t stood up when Iris yelled my name. She finished her line, then brushed her palms together and came up off her heels and turned around.

There was orange chalk on her cheekbone.

“There’s leftover Thai,” she said.

“You wrote my name on my sidewalk.”

“Iris wrote your name on your sidewalk.”

“There’s an I sitting on top of the L like a hat.”

“She ran out of sidewalk. She adapted.”

“She’s in preschool.”