Page 87 of Power Play

“Two years.”

“And Iris?”

“Iris was not planned. Iris was a Tuesday.”

Delaney laughed, and then stopped, with her eyes on my face.

“I was all in about ten seconds after she told me,” I said. “I want you to know that part, because it’s the only decision in my life I’ve never once turned over. I was twenty-one and I had no idea what any of it involved and I did not hesitate at all.”

“And Katya?”

“Katya tried.” Neither of us said anything for a second. “She tried for fourteen months. And she was good at some of it. Then she said she couldn’t, and she was telling the truth, and she left soon after.”

“Eli.”

“Don’t.” I put my hand down on the cloth hard, and both forks jumped. “Not the sorry. She didn’t do it to be cruel. She was twenty-four and she was drowning and she had the honesty to say so out loud instead of staying and being somewhere else for twenty years. It took me a year and a half to get there. I was angry for the first year, and I didn’t let anybody see it, and then one day I worked out that I could carry the anger or I could carry Iris and I did not have the hands for both.”

Delaney’s foot had slipped off my chair and she was sitting forward with her elbows on the table.

“So you put it down,” she said.

“I put it down.”

“And nobody was there when you did it.”

I hadn’t ever put it that way to myself, and it didn’t get smaller when I turned it over. “No,” I said.

She laid both palms on the tablecloth, one on each side of her plate. “I think a twenty-one-year-old got handed a baby and a job that eats men alive,” she said, “and everybody who tells that story tells it as the hard-luck version, and nobody has ever once said the obvious thing to you out loud.” She waited until I had to meet her eyes. “You did it. Since August I have never seen that child wonder whether somebody is coming. Not once. That is not luck and it is not Katya and it is not the schedule. That is a person who decided.”

My ears were roaring, the same as before warmups, and I sat there in my own kitchen chair and couldn’t get one word out.

“There it is,” she said, quietly. “You have no idea what to do when somebody hands you something.”

“No.”

“Well. Get used to it.”

She got up and came around the table. My chair legs scraped on the tile when I turned it to face her, and she put both hands on the sides of my face and tipped my head back. The green dress had a zip down the back. I’d seen it when she reached for the glasses, and I’d been thinking about it since the fish.

“I’m going to stop talking now,” she said.

“Okay.”

“That wasn’t a complaint about the talking.”

“I know what it was.”

I stood up. She put both palms on the front of my shirt and left them there, her fingers spread so wide the tips of them were on bone, and she didn’t push.

“Bedroom,” I said.

“That’s not a question.”

“No.”

The color climbed her throat and into her face in one pass. She didn’t argue, and she’d argued with me about a piece of fish through half of dinner. She liked being told. She turned around and walked out of the kitchen, and I followed two steps behind her, and her heels stopped dead when she crossed onto the rug inside my door.

My room was cold; I ran it that way. There was nothing on the nightstand. I’d cleared the monitor off it in August and hadn’t put another thing back. I left the door standing open and the hall light fell across the mirror over the dresser.