Page 94 of Power Play

“She has an oven,” I said.

“She has four dishes going in it and a house to feed. She’s not doing arithmetic on mine.” She got the pie out and looked at it with her mouth pressed together. “It’s ugly.”

“It isn’t.”

“The left side’s ugly.”

“Then eat the left side.”

She laughed at that, the big one, no warning on it, and Iris turned around on the couch to find out what she’d missed. I sat on my own couch on Thanksgiving morning with my daughter’s heels against my thigh and a woman in my kitchen laughing at a pie, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was getting away with this.

When I leaned across Iris to check the chest clip on her car seat she put her hand flat on my cheek and kept it there a second longer than she usually did, and her palm was warm. Kids ran warm.

“Wren was sick,” she said.

“When?”

“Tuesday. I sat next to Wren. Wren’s mom said it was fine.”

“Sounds like Wren’s mom.”

I shut the door. Delaney was coming down the walk with the pie in both hands, and I got it off her and put it on the floor of the back seat where it wouldn’t slide, and I said nothing about Wren.

The Callahans’ street was full by the time we got there. The garage door was up. Music came out of it.

“How many people?” Delaney said.

“Depends who couldn’t get home. Twenty. Twenty-five.”

She sat there a second with the stuffing on her knees. “Right,” she said, and got out.

Tom Callahan had the bird in the side yard on a rig he’d built himself and a beer in his hand at half past twelve, which told me he’d been up since dawn and considered the hard part done. He shook my hand and then took my shoulder with the other one, which was what he did instead of saying anything, and he looked at Delaney for about a second and a half.

“Tom,” he said.

“Delaney.”

“I heard.”

“I keep hearing that,” Delaney said.

“It’s a small building.” He tipped the beer at the dish in her arms. “That going in the kitchen?”

“If there’s room.”

“There’s no room. Linda’ll make room.” He crouched down to Iris’s height without any production about it. “You know what’s in that pan?”

“A turkey.”

“That’s right. You hungry?”

“No,” Iris said.

He glanced up at me, once, and went back to the bird. I kept thinking about the glance for the rest of the afternoon.

Inside, Linda had the kitchen and three people in it doing what she told them, and she came at Delaney with both hands out and took the stuffing and read the note taped to the glass.

“You wrote the temperature on it.”