Page 42 of Power Play

“Nobody told you she’s still there.” My daughter put her chin down on her fist and looked at me with an interest I didn’t care for at all. “I didn’t tell you. D didn’t tell you. How do you know?”

“It was on a sign.”

Delaney didn’t say one word. She got a bite of pad see ew onto her fork with total composure and looked at the middle distance, serene, a woman who had heard nothing at all.

“Well,” she said eventually. “That’s settled, then.”

“Nothing’s settled,” I said.

“Nobody said anything was settled.” She reached for her water. “I was agreeing with Gerald about a hypothetical.”

“Reggie’s gonna wash away,” Iris reported.

“Next time it rains.”

“We can draw him again.”

“Or something else.”

She thought about it. She had rice on her chin.

“We could draw a cat,” she said.

I let it sit. Delaney left it alone. She looked at me over the top of Iris’s head and I didn’t look away, and then we both went back to our food, having agreed about a cat without either of us saying so.

She worked for me. She slept through a door off my kitchen. If this failed, my daughter would lose somebody for real. I’d spent weeks reciting that list. It had stopped being a list of reasons and turned into a price.

Iris fell asleep against my arm around the last of the rice. She only did that in places she trusted. She tipped over all at once and got heavy, her breath warm and sweet with mango against my forearm, and I sat there in the cooling dark with my daughter’s weight on one side of me and the word temporary stopped fitting anything I was looking at.

I carried Iris in. She surfaced on the way through the door to tell me the snake’s name again. Then came the bath, a book, the dark, and the settling.

When I got back out the step was empty. Her light was on. I didn’t go in.

The drawing was still on the counter, blank side up. It had been lying there for days. I didn’t put it on the refrigerator. The refrigerator was Iris’s, and everything on it was public.

I carried it down the hall to my room and opened the drawer that held Iris’s birth certificate and her hospital bracelet and one photograph from Transcona. The drawer stuck at the halfway point and I had to lift it to get it past. I put the drawing in there and pushed it shut, and my hand didn’t come off the handle for a few seconds after.

CHAPTER 10

Delaney

I’d turned up at a preschool event for a child who wasn’t mine, and everyone in the room had assumed she was, and I hadn’t corrected a single one of them.

A woman named Charlotte had leaned across the craft table and said your daughter has your patience, and I’d said thank you, and passed her the glue. I’d had the rest of the sentence right there in my mouth. She’s not mine, I’m the nanny, I just work here. It would have meant a few seconds of mild social awkwardness and then back to gluing sequins onto paper crowns.

At some unmarked point in my weeks in this house, I’d stopped being a woman who corrected people. I used to correct people for a living.

The next morning I was at his counter cutting a banana into the seven pieces Iris required, not six and not eight, arranged on the plate in a curve, because Iris had decided in August that bananas were a shape and the shape had rules. I could do it without thinking, which left my head free to wander into rooms it had no business in.

Iris came in with Gerald hooked under one elbow and her hair standing straight out over her left ear. She climbed into her chair and counted the banana silently, with one finger, touching each piece.

“Seven,” she reported.

“Seven.”

“Gerald doesn’t want any.”

“Gerald never wants any.”