Page 74 of Power Play

“Is Daddy mad at Gerald?” she said, at a red light.

“No. Daddy thinks Gerald is a very serious negotiator.”

“He is,” Iris said, satisfied, and twisted around to the window and the man walking three dogs out there, and I didn’t think about the counter for the rest of the red light, and then I did.

The main house was empty by the middle of the morning, and I stripped the beds and sang while I did it, because there was nobody home to hear me. The fitted sheet on Iris’s bed wouldn’t come off the last corner until I put a knee in the mattress.

I hauled the wet sheets out of the machine into the basket and carried it on my hip, and the damp soaked through my shirt at the waist and sat there cold. I stepped over the loose board in the hall without dropping my eyes to it, because I’d known it was there since August. I knew which drawer had the spare batteries and which one stuck. I knew that when the freezer emptied its tray while Iris was in the bath, she called it thunder, delighted, and her father had never told her it wasn’t.

I stood on the back patio with the basket on my hip, and I knew this house down to the loose board. The only other house I’d ever known that well was the one I grew up in.

I pegged the sheets out. The line was hot to hold and the pegs had dried brittle in the sun, and two of them snapped in my hand.

Pickup was at noon.

There was a line of cars, a woman with a clipboard and a whistle she never blew, and a knot of mothers standing in the one piece of shade the lot had. Every car in the line idled with the air conditioning on. I had a place in that shade now, next to Charlotte Pham.

Charlotte had a four-year-old named Wren and a baby on one hip, and she talked to me like I had been there for years. The baby had a fist in her collar and the shoulder of her shirt was wet through where he had been chewing it.

“Iris told Wren her dad plays hockey,” she said. “Wren has concluded this makes him famous and would like to meet him.”

“He does play hockey.”

“Is he famous?”

“He’s a defenseman. Nobody’s famous.”

Charlotte moved the baby to her other hip, then squinted at me.

“Sorry, I’ve been assuming. Are you and Iris’s dad⁠—”

“I’m the nanny.”

“Oh.” Her eyebrows jumped and then settled back down where they started. Then she laughed at herself. “God. Sorry. You come to everything and you know all their names, and I had you down as the wife in September and never checked.”

“That’s the nicest thing anybody has said to me this week. I’m going to think about it in the car.”

“Now I’m embarrassed.”

“Don’t be. I’ve been mistaken for a lot worse.”

She laughed. The line shuffled forward. Then she said, “How old is he, though? He looks about twelve.”

“Twenty-six.”

“Oh,” Charlotte said again, lower.

I didn’t tell her that no part of him had felt twelve the night before, with his hands on my knees and his mouth making me forget my own middle name.

I got Iris. She marched out with a paper plate in both hands, macaroni glued to it in a long curved shape, and told me it was a whale before I could guess, and it was, a little, from the right side. I pulled out of that lot with the air conditioning roaring and Charlotte’s second oh riding in the passenger seat.

“Emerson was wrong about another thing,” Iris said, from the back.

“What a run he’s having.”

“I know!” Iris said, so outraged that I laughed out loud with my sunglasses on and both hands on the wheel.

She wanted lunch on the back step because the kitchen was too indoor.