Page 79 of Power Play

“Okay,” she said. “I have questions, and I want you to know that the questions are not going to stop.”

“D,” Iris said. “We’re making perogies.”

“I heard the word and I did not connect it to reality.” She came across the kitchen slow, one step and then a stop. “Eli. There are four trays.”

“There’ll be six.”

“Six trays.”

“You always make too many. That’s the point of them.”

“That is not a point. That is a symptom.” She got to the counter and put one finger down beside the card and didn’t touch it. “Is this a recipe?”

“It’s most of one. She never wrote the amounts down. She used to say you know when it’s right when it stops sticking to you.”

“Eli, that is the single most Canadian sentence anybody has ever said in my presence, and I want it embroidered.” She rolled her sleeves. “Give me a job.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I am aware that I do not have to do this. Put me to work before I go and find my own.”

I gave her the crimping.

That put her at my left elbow, because there was one workable stretch of counter and both of us were working at it. Her forearm brushed against mine the first time she reached across for the filling, warm, dusted, the fine hair on it catching the flour, and she didn’t mention it and I didn’t either. After the third time I quit keeping count.

She had flour to the wrist, and a smear of it along her jaw where she’d rubbed an itch with the back of her hand. I wanted to take it off with my thumb. Then with my mouth, starting at the jaw and working down. I didn’t.

She was terrible at the crimping. Her first batch leaked. The next one split open the length of the seam and dumped its filling out onto the tray in a warm lump, and she said a word she immediately apologized to Iris for, and Iris said it back to her experimentally, at volume, to find out how it sat in a room.

“Out of the question,” Delaney said, and then she had to brace a hand on the counter, because she was laughing too hard to hold the edge of the dough.

I checked the onions.

The onions were black. They’d cooked past smoking, and there was a crust welded to the bottom of the pan that I’d be soaking off in the morning. I’d played professional hockey in front of crowds that wanted me dead, and I burned a pan of onions black in my own kitchen because a woman laughed with flour on her wrist.

“Something’s burning,” Delaney said.

“It’s fine.”

“It is extremely not fine, it’s—” She got there first, got the pan off the heat with a dish towel and shoved the window over the sink open with the heel of her hand, and the smoke rolled out into the yard. She turned around and leaned back against the counter and folded her arms and grinned at me with her hair halfway down out of the knot and a stripe of flour across one cheekbone.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing at all.”

I got more onions out of the bag. I’d bought extra. I didn’t tell her that either.

We finished late in the afternoon with six trays.

I sent them both to get cleaned up and I set the table properly, with the good plates I only hauled out at Christmas, a folded napkin at each seat, and the water glasses that matched. I set three places and left the corner alone.

Iris came back in a dress. She hadn’t been asked to put on a dress. It was the one with the whales, which she’d only ever worn to birthdays. She stopped at the edge of the kitchen and did a full survey of the table, and her eyebrows went up into her hairline.

“Is it somebody’s birthday?”

“No.”

“Is it a holiday?”