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“He’s on a strike.” She propped Gerald against her cup so that he faced the room. “He’s not gonna sit at the table till we get the cat.”

I put the plate down in front of her. Gerald was an orange stuffed dragon with a bald patch on his tail and one eye reattached with what I suspected was hockey tape. He sat propped upright and squared up to the empty chair across from him, a tiny union rep, and I loved him for it.

“How long has he been on strike?”

“Since the kitten.” Iris considered. “That’s a really long time.”

“It’s practically a career.”

“Daddy said no again,” Iris said. “He’s gonna say yes.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah.” She ate another piece of banana. “He always says no first.”

There was nothing in the sink. I ran the water anyway, with my back to her, because Iris had summed up her father in five words and I wasn’t going to let her see me agree.

Eli came down the hall not long after with his keys in one hand and his hair still damp from the shower. He didn’t work at filling a doorway. He came through it, and the doorway got smaller.

When he wanted the good travel mug from the cabinet above the sink, he didn’t ask me to move. He put his hand on my hip and moved me two inches to the left, one hand, done in under a second and finished before I had a vote in it. His palm covered the bone and the heat of it pushed through my jeans and was still there after he let go. He reached up over my head and took the mug down, his forearm passing by my ear, and cleared out of my space.

There was no more ceremony in it than moving a chair, and he’d been doing it for weeks. Heat ran down the backs of my legs every time. I stayed put right where he’d set me and never remarked on it.

He had a tattoo on the inside of that forearm, Roman numerals in fine black lines. They were Iris’s birthday. I’d worked it out on my own weeks ago, standing right here, and then shut myself in the pantry and carried out a box of crackers so the trip would pass for an errand.

He poured his coffee, and mine after, one sugar and a splash of milk, which he’d started doing early on without a word. He slid the mug down the counter, and it stopped square in front of me. He’d watched me make it once, on my first morning, and hadn’t missed one since. He would have been puzzled to be thanked. One reading was that a man was being considerate. In the other, a man learned a woman in one pass, decided how it would be from then on, and never mentioned it again.

“You went to the thing yesterday,” he said.

“I did.”

“She hasn’t stopped talking about the crown.”

“There was a lot of crown.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“It’s the job.”

“It’s not.” He put the mug down. “There’s a difference between covering the schedule and going. You went.”

I had a professional answer ready, and it had never failed me.

“She wanted somebody in the chair,” I said. “So I sat in the chair.”

His eyes were on me when the sentence ran out. He got about a quarter of the way to a smile and stopped. Then he picked his mug back up and kissed the top of Iris’s head and told her Gerald was welcome at the table any time he was ready to be reasonable.

The garage door went up, and the truck backed out. I gave myself ten full seconds to think about his forearm and what I wanted done with it. I wanted it braced on a wall next to my head. Ten seconds was plenty.

Iris came out of the preschool doors at pickup holding a piece of paper face down against her shirt with both hands.

At home she laid it on the kitchen table and stepped back with her hands behind her, presenting. It showed an orange cat with all four legs on the same side and a long, wavy tail. Beside it, smaller, with green wings and a row of spikes down his back, was unmistakably Gerald, and a line connected their two paws. Underneath, in letters that got bigger as they ran out of room, she’d written FRENDS.

“That’s for Daddy,” she said.

“That’s a good drawing, bug.”

“It’s not a drawing.” Iris had one knee up on her chair. “It’s evidence.”