Page 85 of Power Play

“He says it fits.”

“He’s not wrong,” Eli said, and that was the end of the process.

Gerald ate dinner that night for the first time since he’d taken his position. Iris loaded the blue plate herself and announced the end of the strike to the table with tremendous formality. Eli said the strike had been well run and that he respected the outcome, and Iris said Gerald had asked her to say there were no hard feelings, and Eli said there were some hard feelings on his end but that he would get past them.

Before the evening was out Zamboni had knocked a spoon and a marker off the counter, each with visible intent, the marker rolling the length of the kitchen to stop against the baseboard. She stole a hair tie off my wrist while I was loading the dishwasher and ran it under the couch, and that was the last anyone saw of it. She approached Gerald, considered him, and hissed. Gerald took this without comment.

When the house had settled she found Eli on the couch with his laptop and the video from the Vancouver game. She climbed straight up the front of him with her claws in his shirt, pulling threads out of the cotton, and she hauled herself up his ribs and settled in the hollow under his collarbone and put her chin down and shut her eyes.

Eli didn’t move. He sat on the couch with a laptop balanced on one knee and didn’t move his weight for most of an hour. He watched the video. He made a note and brought his hand back to where it had been, and he didn’t touch her, and he didn’t look down at her. There was a purr going in her without a break, loud for the size of her.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with a dry dish towel while a six-foot-three defenseman held dead still so a two-pound kitten could sleep on him, and what it did to me wasn’t tender. I wanted him on top of me on the floor of his own living room with the cat displaced and the laptop shut. I wanted that big careful body to stop being careful, and I wanted to be the reason.

I let myself into the casita and opened the laptop and wrote page after page without stopping. They were filthy. I didn’t delete one word. My hands shook on the keys through the first page and then they steadied.

Apparently that was how we communicated now.

I was fine with it.

CHAPTER 19

Eli

I wouldn’t have bet a dollar in October that the second sleepover would go easier than the first. It did.

She asked to go, which was new. She brought it up herself at breakfast, Wren’s name and all, with a spoon in her fist and a proposed start time.

“Wren’s mom said I could. She said it’s fine. She said ask you but she already said yes.”

“That’s not how permission works.”

“It’s how it worked,” Iris said.

I drove her over at four. She climbed the walk with Gerald’s tail dragging along the concrete behind her and shoved the front door open with her shoulder and didn’t look back at me. Wren’s mother came out onto the step while I was still at the curb and gave me a wave that said she is fine, go home. I put the truck in gear and drove away from my own daughter, dismissed, years into the job.

I got home to an empty house. I hadn’t heard it that quiet since we moved in. There was nothing running in the kitchen to listen for and no board creaking outside a door. There was a crayon on the living room floor, purple, worn down to a stub, and I picked it up on my way past. Zamboni shot out from under the couch and screamed at me about it.

“She’s back tomorrow.”

I made dinner, and not the version Iris would eat. I’d found a recipe on my phone in the rink parking lot with the screen tipped away from the window, in case Cole was within a hundred yards. It was a piece of fish with lemon and butter, in a pan that was supposed to hold one temperature and drifted off it the second I turned my back.

It cooked up fine. Fine was the word. I hung over a piece of fish that had gone a minute past white in the middle and I was furious. I’d wanted the dinner to be excellent. I hadn’t left myself any room to miss.

Delaney knocked not long after dark, four quick ones high up on the door, with the bottle already clinking against the frame.

“I brought wine,” she said, “and I want to say something about it before you say anything.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to have a whole face about it.” She stepped inside and put the door shut behind her with her elbow. Her hair was down, and she was in a green dress I’d never seen before, and I lost track of where I was standing in my own kitchen. “I don’t drink on the clock. I have not had a drink in this house since August, and I want credit for it, because it was a rule I made and kept.”

“I know.”

“You do not.”

“Week two. Somebody at book club sent you home with half a bottle, and you poured it down the sink.”

She stopped with the bottle halfway to the counter. “That’s alarming,” she said.