Page 86 of Power Play

“You asked.”

“I did ask. I regret it. The point is I’m off tonight. Your daughter is in Peoria being fed hot dogs by a woman with no fear, and I would like a glass of wine with a man who is not my employer for the next sixteen hours.”

“Okay.”

“Say the thing back to me.”

“I’m not your employer tonight.”

“Thank you,” she said, and got two glasses down out of my cupboard without checking which cupboard.

She’d said sixteen hours. I did the math on it standing at my own stove and had to turn the burner off.

We ate at the table. The booster seat was still on the third chair. Moving it didn’t come up, and we both ate around it.

She said it was good. I told her it was fine. She put her fork down and asked me what precisely I had expected of a piece of fish, and I said I’d expected it to be excellent, and she laughed so hard she had to grab her napkin.

“Eli. Do you hear yourself? You wanted the fish to be excellent.”

“The recipe said it would be excellent.”

“The recipe lied to you. That is what recipes do. They are written by people with four hours and a photographer. It’s a really good piece of fish. You are not allowed to be disappointed about it in front of me.”

“Noted.”

Then she reached across and lifted the last bite off my plate with her fingers and ate it without taking her eyes off mine, and licked the butter off her thumb, and I put my glass down because I didn’t trust my hand with it. I didn’t trust my voice either. I had hours of plans for her mouth and she’d just told me she knew.

We talked for a long time, and it came easy now. We didn’t clear the plates. The only light left in the room was the one lamp in the living room behind me, which lit half her face and left the other half dark. At some point she hooked one foot around the leg of my chair under the table, shoe and all, and left it there.

She told me about Boston. I’d had the short version since her first few weeks here, two sentences she had ready for anybody who asked. This was the long one, and she told about half of it to the tablecloth.

She’d spent six years with a man who thanked her for everything, all the time, warmly, and for most of those years she believed that was what being loved sounded like.

“He wasn’t cruel,” she said. “I need that understood, because people want a villain and there isn’t one. He was so grateful. He thanked me for booking his own mother’s birthday dinner.”

“You booked his mother’s birthday dinner.”

“Every year. Six years. And I would sit there while he told the table how lucky he was, and everybody would look at me with their heads tipped and their mouths soft, and I would smile, and I would be planning the next one in my head while it was happening.”

I shut my mouth. I was busy wanting to drive to Boston.

“You’re supposed to say something here,” she said.

“I’m thinking.”

What I finally said was, “He let you carry all of it and called it a compliment.”

Her mouth went unsteady, and she put the glass down. “Yes,” she said.

“That’s not gratitude. That’s an arrangement he liked. You’re letting me carry some of it here. You leave the dishwasher for me twice a week now and think I haven’t clocked it.”

“I do that on purpose.”

“I know. I know everything that happens in this house,” I said. “It’s the one skill I came with.”

Then she asked about Edmonton, and I told her, straight through, which I’d never done. Cole had pieces. Ryan had different pieces. My mother had the version a mother got, with the first year cut out of it.

“How long were you together?”