Page 95 of Power Play

“I wrote it for him,” Delaney said.

Linda hummed. She put the dish down, moved two things off the counter without appearing to decide to, and slid it into the second oven, and she didn’t say one word about the note.

Maren found us in the hallway of her mother’s house with a dish towel over her shoulder.

“You came,” she said to Delaney.

“I was invited.”

“You were invited three weeks ago and you said you’d see. Boston not an option?” She said it lightly, while straightening the towel, and she didn’t look up while she asked it, which was the only reason it got answered.

“Flights are four hundred dollars each way and I’d have had thirty hours on the ground.” Delaney said it with nothing underneath it. “My mother does a lunch at noon and is out the door to my aunt’s by three. It’s a good lunch. It’s not thirty hours’ worth. Also I’d rather be useful on Friday than sad on a plane.”

“There it is,” Maren said, and handed her the towel. “You’re on potatoes. My brother’s already ruined one batch.”

Griffin had, and he’d built a case about why it was the potatoes’ fault, and he presented it at length while she took the masher off him. Cole was in the living room on the floor with his back against the couch, and when Iris came in he said her name loud and long with both arms thrown wide, and she climbed over his legs and sat down in the middle of them and let him put his hat on her. Cole had lost both parents at fifteen and had been coming to this house for Thanksgiving since his first season in Phoenix, and he’d checked with me more than once in October whether I was going to be there, which hadn’t been about me.

Theo was at the end of the counter with a glass of red he’d brought himself, having a disagreement with Kasperi about whether the dish in front of them was a salad.

“It has no leaf in it.”

“It has fruit,” Kasperi said.

“Fruit is not a defense.” Theo turned around and lifted the glass half an inch at me. “Kovac. Ta fille a volé le chapeau de Westbrook.” My daughter had stolen Westbrook’s hat.

“She’s allowed.”

At two, Ryan came through the back door with a platter and Tom followed him with the second one, and Linda called the house to a stop and made everybody stand around the island while she said the one sentence she always said, which was that she was glad they were all where she could see them. There were twenty-odd people in the kitchen. Delaney was on the far side of the island with the towel still over her shoulder and her hip against the counter, holding a serving spoon she hadn’t been asked to hold, and Linda’s arm came around her waist for one second during the sentence and came off again.

Of everything that day, that one second was what I took home with me, more than any of the food.

Iris quit at three, and I knew it before anybody else in the room did. She came and put her arms up at my knee in the middle of a room full of people she liked, which she never did. I got her onto my hip and her head went straight down on my shoulder.

Her forehead was hot against my neck. It was a dry heat, built up over hours. Her heart was going faster than the day accounted for.

“Hey, bug.”

“I’m not sick,” she said, into my collar.

“Didn’t say you were.”

Linda was across the room and then she wasn’t. She got the backs of two fingers against Iris’s temple and behind her ear, and her face did nothing at all, because she’d spent a career not letting her face do anything in front of a parent.

“Hundred and one, hundred and two,” she said quietly. “It’s dry. When did she eat?”

“She didn’t.”

“No. Sweetheart, does your stomach feel loud?”

“Yes,” Iris said, with enormous dignity.

“Bathroom’s the near one,” Linda said to me, and moved a chair out of my way with her foot.

We made it. The tile in there was cold straight through both knees of my jeans and I had all of my daughter’s hair in my left hand, off her face and clear of her neck.

Delaney opened the door partway and stopped in it. “Oh no,” she said, to Iris. “Oh, buddy.”

“It came out,” Iris told her.