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I liked it.

I didn’t like the couch. I liked the rest of it. I liked knowing where the sheet pans were, and the spare batteries, and the good scissors. Best of all was closing it down at night, the back door, the stove, and the kitchen light, in that order, with a hand on each one, because while he was gone there was no other adult in the house whose job it was.

Partway through the trip I fixed the casita door.

It had been catching on the frame since my first day, and I hadn’t said a word about it, because a woman a few weeks into a new house didn’t start filing maintenance requests. I found a screwdriver in the garage with my phone flashlight in my teeth and spent a good long while on the top hinge until the door swung clean. Nobody asked me to. With him gone I’d quit checking whether anything was mine to fix.

When I was done I opened and shut that door over and over for the pleasure of it. It set into the frame with a dull click of the latch every time, with no shove and no lift and no catch anywhere in it. Then I sat back down on the couch with my laptop on my knees, and the phone buzzed against the cushion beside me.

Cole: also for the record the boys want to know if the nanny is coming to a game at some point or if she’s just a voice on the phone

Me: The nanny works nights.

Cole: incredible. i’m reading that out loud

A hotel floor full of grown men in a city I’d never been to had apparently discussed my employment, and I refused to think about it. I thought about it anyway, later, in the dark, stretched out on his couch. Mostly I wondered whether one of them had said a single word back, or had sat on the end of a hotel bed with a bottle of water in one big hand and let Cole do the talking. I knew which one I was betting on, and I typed a paragraph about my heroine’s grocery list as a punishment.

By the last night of the trip there were real pages in notes.docx, plural, and I hadn’t read one of them back.

Then his truck swung into the driveway, and my shoulders dropped before I could get a hand on them, and so much for liking the house better with only me in it.

CHAPTER 7

Eli

I left long before light.

I’d packed my suitcase the night before. The house was dark except for the kitchen light I’d left on for Iris and a thin line of light under the casita door when I passed the side hall. When I backed out, the casita window was lit in the rearview, and I kept checking the mirror for it until I’d turned out of the neighborhood. She was up. Iris would come out to breakfast made, orange juice poured, Gerald’s blue plate on the table.

I didn’t know what she did at that hour. I turned the question over all the way to the airport exit and took the ramp with both hands on the wheel.

I’d done this alone for years, and now the house kept running when I left. It had a shape that didn’t depend entirely on me standing in the middle of it.

The trip was Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit. It crossed three time zones, with a back-to-back at the front of it and a coach who’d been running his power play without me lately.

Griffin was at the gate with his jaw set and his eyes on nothing. He ran on charm and momentum, and when trouble got under his armor he clammed up and worked it alone. Pushing him made it worse.

The phone went off late in the evening in Denver.

It was a photo of Iris at the kitchen table with her elbows out and both fists braced against the paper, tongue between her teeth. The drawing was an airplane with considerable ambition, its wings a little uneven, the body shaded in carefully with black crayon. Below it she’d written in deliberate letters, DADAYS PLANE.

My daughter had drawn my airplane so I’d have it with me. My eyes stung and I had to breathe through it a couple of times before my thumbs would work the phone.

Me: Tell her the plane needs a 44 on the tail.

Delaney: She says Gerald already knows that and is fixing it.

Me: Of course he does.

Delaney: Sleep well. Big game tomorrow.

I sat with the phone in my hand after there was nothing left to answer. Delaney had taken the photo standing across the table, and in the bottom corner of the frame there was a gray sleeve pushed up to the elbow and three fingers braced on the edge of the table to steady the shot.

I looked at three of her fingers on my phone for longer than I’d admit to anybody.

Then I dropped the phone on the bedspread and lay back with my forearm over my eyes. She’d be putting Iris down around now. After that she’d do the kitchen, the lights, and the back door. Then she’d be alone in my house, and she’d take her hair down. She always pulled it down at the end of the day, both hands up behind her head. I’d only seen it a couple of times, and I had it memorized.

I wanted my hands in her hair, and to be the one who took it down. It was a stupid thing to want on a hotel bed, with a game tomorrow and my daughter asleep in a house I paid a woman to sleep in.