Page 21 of Power Play

“You said we’d come back to it.”

Delaney choked on her water and had to get up and stand at the sink with her back to the table, both hands on the counter and the tap off. Her shoulders were shaking, and the rest of her was in on it, down to one bare foot hooked behind the other ankle, and then I looked at my pasta very hard.

When she returned she sat down and picked up her fork and didn’t use it. Her eyes were on me, and her face was wide open, and she didn’t try to close it when I looked back.

“Twenty dollars,” she said.

“Twenty dollars.”

“And a train, and a whole zoo, and a boy in London.”

“Now you know.”

She shook her head slowly and returned to her salad. I sat there thinking about a man who named an animal after his hometown because he was leaving it, and about my daughter, who had never been to Winnipeg and could find Phoenix on a map.

After dinner I did bath and story, because that was mine. That night she quit holding her own head up partway through the second story, and asleep she weighed twice what she did awake.

The kitchen was done when I made it back out. The good pan had been dried and hung back on its own hook, which took knowing which hook it went on.

Gerald’s blue plate was in the drying rack, washed, propped on its edge with the rest.

I hadn’t asked her to do any of it.

Then the phone lit up on the counter.

Cole: okay it’s been a week

Cole: report

Cole: is she still there?

Cole: Ryan says Maren says she’s never leaving

Me: Ryan doesn’t know anything about it.

Cole: so she’s never leaving

I slid the phone down the counter and left it there.

The casita light was on under the door, a strip of it out across the hall floor. Behind the door, faint, she moved around. A drawer opened and shut, the kettle came up to a boil and clicked off, and a chair leg dragged a few inches and stopped.

I headed for bed. The casita door was a few steps from where I stood, and I turned down my own hall instead, and turning away from it took an actual decision.

I lay on my back with the house between us, completely aware of her on the other side of it, and I was going to go to sleep.

I didn’t go to sleep.

Then I got up in the dark and crossed to the kitchen and filled the coffee machine and set the timer so the pot would be full before she was up. The timer needed a couple of buttons and beeped twice to confirm, and the two beeps were the loudest thing in the house. I’d never set it for anybody. It took me no time at all, and I didn’t look at it too closely.

She took one sugar and a little milk, and she could do that part herself.

CHAPTER 6

Delaney

I learned the sounds of the house fast.

The pipes knocked in the morning when the main house shower ran, one low knock and then nothing, and that knock told me Eli was up and I had most of an hour before Iris would be. There was hot water and a man in a shower on the far side of the house, and I lay there every morning doing plumbing math I had no business doing. There was a board in the hallway just outside Iris’s door that creaked under a person’s weight, and before long I was stepping over it without thinking. The only other house where I’d ever done that was my mother’s.