Page 4 of Power Play

I said nothing but couldn’t hold back my grin.

“You should bring her more,” Cole said. “Morale’s been up since she took over practice.”

“She took over practice for forty seconds.” Now I was deadpan.

“Best forty seconds of the camp so far,” Cole said, and skated away.

I thought about it twice during practice. Iris was four years old. She had been managing my unpredictability since she was two. She knew to grab her dragon when plans changed, and to ask can I come with you instead of why isn’t someone coming for me. She was adaptable in a way I was grateful for every day and bothered by in the same breath, because she shouldn’t have had to learn that so young. She’d learned it because I’d needed her to.

I was going to fix it. I’d been going to fix it for months and I kept not doing it because finding the right person felt like an impossible task and I didn’t have time or maybe just not the brain power, so I kept cycling through Kims with their exclamation-pointed apologies and telling myself the system was holding.

During the water break, Ryan skated over.

“You doing all right?” he asked. “You went somewhere in that last set.”

“So obviously, as you know, the sitter canceled at the last minute,” I said. “Third time this month, and I don’t have a backup when that happens. It’s frustrating. I haven’t been able to find anyone reliable. I need to stop cycling through people and get a real nanny. Someone permanent who understands what this schedule actually is and can manage it.”

Ryan looked through the glass at Iris and Maren in the stands. Iris was showing Maren the coloring book from about four inches away, the presentation of something important.

“Griffin mentioned someone,” Ryan said. “A friend of Maren’s. Former teacher. She’s looking for work. She just moved here for a job that didn’t pan out.”

“Personal referrals get complicated.”

“So does bringing your kid to practice,” Ryan said, and pushed off, skating away backward, shrugging his shoulders.

I stood at the boards and thought about what he said. The logic wasn’t wrong. What made me hesitate wasn’t the complication of a referral. It was the thing that happened every time someone new came into Iris’s orbit and Iris attached to them and then they left or fell through or decided the schedule was too much. She handled it without complaint each time. She asked if she could come to practice instead and waited to be told yes and didn’t make it into anything. I was the one who sat with it.

A real nanny. Someone who showed up the same way every time. Someone Iris could count on the way she counted on me. I didn’t know what that looked like exactly, but I knew it wasn’t another Kim with two exclamation points and a last minute text.

I pushed off toward the crease where Griffin was running angles.

“Griffin,” I said. “Your sister’s friend. The one looking for work?”

“Yeah, she came for a teaching job that ended up not being available. Total shit show. She’s cool though.”

“Set it up.”

Griffin read my face and nodded without making anything of it.

I kept moving.

Two whistle blasts from the stands, because Maren had produced a spare from somewhere and was going to answer for that later.

I didn’t know if hiring a nanny was the right thing, but we had to do something. Even Super Dad needs help sometimes, and for Iris, I’d do anything.

CHAPTER 2

Delaney

I ran the math again. It wasn’t improving.

I’d been staring at my banking app until the numbers stopped reading as money and started reading as a personal indictment. The screen threw the only light in the apartment and it put a wash of blue across my knuckles and the bad number in the middle of them. My thumb had smeared the glass over the decimal point. I was barefoot on a couch I rented from a stranger with one leg folded up under my hip, and the ankle had prickled into numbness while I sat there declining to accept the total. I had three months of sublet left if I was disciplined, and two if I kept walking into the bookstore four blocks north on Camelback, which I’d done more often than I wanted to count since I got here. It was a problem. Knowing it was a problem had never slowed me down, and books were the one expense I’d never been able to talk myself out of.

The apartment was beige in every direction. The couch was beige, its cushions still square at the corners because no one had ever broken it in, and I wasn’t helping. The walls were beige. The only proof I lived there was the stack of books on the kitchen table, because the single shelf was full to both ends, and the half-empty bottle of wine Maren and I had worked through while Ryan was hanging out with the guys. The place still smelled faintly of the last tenant’s cleaning products and nothing else. It was a furnished unit designed to belong to nobody.

I’d come to Phoenix for a fresh start, which was either courage or stupidity, and I was still waiting on the verdict. The job I’d built the fresh start around dissolved before I’d finished unpacking. The woman from HR called it budget restructuring, in a voice so practiced it had worn smooth. I sat across from her and said I understood and thanked her for letting me know, and then I walked to my car and sat in the parking lot with the engine off for most of an hour, doing math in my head while Phoenix carried on with its day around me.

I’d left Boston because I’d run out of streets and rooms there that I’d chosen for myself. I loved Boston at twenty-two. By thirty-two I’d stopped looking up at it, and I stayed four more years anyway. David was the reason I was still there after the job and the city had stopped being enough, which said a lot about my judgment.