Page 41 of Power Play

“She’s advanced.” Delaney looked me in the eye without blinking, her chin a half inch higher than it had been. “There’s also mango sticky rice. I mention it without agenda.”

She didn’t move toward the house, and she didn’t fill the quiet either. Most people did. With me, she never did.

“Come inside,” I said. “Eat with us.”

I’d said versions of that sentence plenty of times. Every one of them had a reason under it to hide behind. This one didn’t, and her face changed before I was done saying it.

“I have things to finish.”

“They’ll keep.”

“It’s reheating. It’s literally reheating.”

“Then it can wait thirty minutes.”

She stood there on my sidewalk with her arms crossed and chalk on her face and made me wait. Ten seconds went by, then fifteen. I gave her all of them, out on my own front walk with the keys biting into my palm. The thought I had while I waited was that it was a good thing she worked for me.

If she hadn’t worked for me, I would have crossed the yard on what her face was doing and put my hands on her. I wanted to take her inside and put her up against the kitchen counter and find out what she sounded like when she stopped being reasonable. I was hard standing on my own walk in the daylight, and I rode it out on the spot.

What I did instead was cross the yard for a much smaller reason.

I put my thumb on the chalk on her cheekbone and took it off. It wasn’t a light pass. The chalk had dried there, and I rubbed the same inch of her more than once, my fingers along her jaw holding her still for it. The pad of my thumb came away orange.

Her skin was warm from the sun and damp right at the hairline. Her jaw fit my hand. I could smell her shampoo and the chalk and the hot concrete lifting off the walk, and the chalk was the only excuse I had, and it was down to a smear.

She let me. She didn’t step back and she didn’t say one word through any of it. Her pulse ran under two of my fingers below the jaw and it wasn’t running slow.

I took my hand back.

“Iris has things to tell you about Reggie,” I said.

It landed wrong, though not by much, and we both knew it. Her eyes dropped to my mouth and lifted again, and her mouth moved. It never got all the way to a smile.

“Fine,” she said. “Let me wash my hands.”

She walked past me up the step and into the house, and I put my eyes on her back and left them there until the door shut.

We ate outside, on the front step above the chalk, because Iris said so and there was no appeal.

The sun dropped low over the western wall and the chalk lit up under it, my name across the middle turning briefly gold before the light moved off it.

Iris ate the mango sticky rice first. I let her. Not long ago I’d have said a word about vegetables. On Iris’s other side, Delaney’s eyebrows lifted about a millimeter and settled, and she said not one word about it.

“Kasperi says orange cats are boys,” Iris announced.

Delaney’s head came up. “Kasperi says what?”

“Eighty percent,” Iris said, quoting a source. “He looked it up on his phone.”

“Gerald wants a boy,” she added.

“She’s still there,” I said.

It left my mouth before I understood what I’d done. Iris raised her head. Delaney’s fork stopped.

“Who’s still there?”

“Eat your rice.”