Page 77 of Power Play

Bath and story were his. I cleared the table and the water ran through the wall, and under it his whale voices, badly done, reached me across the kitchen.

“That’s not how the mom whale talks,” Iris said, and it came through the drywall.

“How does the mom whale talk?”

“Higher.”

He tried it higher. It was worse. Iris laughed so hard she started coughing, and he waited it out and did it again, worse than before, and I leaned on the counter with a dry dish in a dry towel and laughed without making any noise at all.

When everything had gone quiet I went down the hall and through my own door and pulled it to behind me. The security light two houses over came through the casita blinds in stripes and laid them across the floor. I sat down at the table with the laptop, and I didn’t write. I scrolled to page sixty-one and read the paragraph with his line in it. Then I shut the laptop and picked up my phone.

Me: I have a problem.

The dots came up before I had put the phone down.

Maren: Eli. I have known since the second week of October and I have said nothing, and if you understood how hard that has been for me you would be sending flowers.

Me: I hate you.

Maren: Do you want to talk about it or do you want me to go back to saying nothing?

Through the wall the dishwasher started. He’d loaded it after I left the kitchen. He’d been doing that for weeks, always once I was out of the room and couldn’t take it off him.

David had thanked me loudly and warmly, in front of people, every time, and left the work to me. Eli did the work where I couldn’t see it and never brought it up. It had taken me this long to have anybody set that difference down in front of me.

Me: Not yet.

Maren: Okay.

Maren: The offer doesn’t expire.

Maren: Also, you’re allowed to want things. That wasn’t on the list of stuff you gave up in Boston. Nobody took that one off you.

I turned the phone over on the table.

The water shut off. There was a cupboard, a drawer, the low knock of the pipe, and then quiet, and a man on the other side of the kitchen lying down in a bed I’d made a rule about not picturing. I’d put the sheets on it myself that afternoon. I laid my forehead down on the cool table, both arms stretched out beside it.

I wasn’t afraid he would say no.

I was afraid he would say yes.

CHAPTER 17

Eli

I got up before the sun and went out to my kitchen in the dark, barefoot on cold tile. I found the counter by putting a hand out for it. My feet ached from the floor, the small of my back ached from nothing at all, and my right thumb joint wouldn’t close until I worked it.

Ice clattered into the tray in the freezer and I jumped. I weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds and had played in the league since I was nineteen, and a bucket of ice got me. I leaned my weight on the counter by the fridge and walked the plan through one step at a time, hunting for where it would break.

I got a pen and the grocery pad out of the drawer. The pad had a curl in it from standing by the toaster and it wouldn’t lie flat, so I wrote with my other hand holding it down.

I wrote groceries, then kitchen, then dinner, one under the other.

Under the three of them I wrote her name. The pen skipped on the first stroke of the D and I traced it again, and then I put the pen down, because I didn’t know yet what I meant to do about the fourth line. I counted the letters, all seven of them, which was a new low, and then I tore the page off and put it in my pocket so no one else in the house could count them either.

I took Iris to the store early. She rode in the cart with her heels drumming the mesh and Gerald belted in beside her, the seatbelt threaded twice around his middle. That wasn’t regulation. It got done anyway.

“What are we buying?”