Page 47

It was word for word. It had traveled straight from a doorway on Tuesday morning into a man’s mouth on page forty-one, and I hadn’t even slowed down for it.

I could take it out. The scene would survive a single cut. I left it in. Then I wrote two more pages on top of it so it would be buried, which wasn’t what a person did to a sentence she planned to delete later.

This had stopped being a book about a man with big hands. At some point it had turned into the place where I put what I wasn’t going to say out loud, and I’d just put one of his lines in there, verbatim, and left it.

I saved it. I didn’t close the laptop.

CHAPTER 11

Eli

I dropped my daughter off for her first sleepover on a Saturday afternoon with hours to spare before a seven o’clock puck drop, and she walked through the door and never turned her head.

She’d been building toward it for weeks. It was going to be Sophia’s house, with Sophia’s mother, and every night Gerald got a status briefing behind a mostly closed door, and nearly all of it carried out into the hall.

The sleeping bag got packed and repacked. It was slick nylon and it carried, so I tracked the operation from the kitchen without getting out of my chair. The second pass had a flashlight in it and a banana. I removed the banana. We had a conversation about it that I lost on the merits and won on the grounds that I was taller.

I slept the two hours I slept before every game and came out of it a little after two.

She did it for the last time then, sitting on the floor of her room with everything laid out in front of her in an order I couldn’t follow, checking each item against the next before she moved it. The afternoon sun printed the slats of the blind across the floor and up over the bag, and she’d parked herself in the brightest stripe of it. She had one sock on.

I leaned a shoulder on the jamb. I’d put the suit on at two thirty, because I wasn’t coming back to the house between Peoria and the rink, and my daughter looked up at me from the floor and told me I was dressed like a wedding.

Gerald was on the bed, not in the bag or beside it, propped against her pillow and facing out into the room.

“Gerald’s staying,” I said.

“Gerald doesn’t do sleepovers.”

I waited. There was obviously more.

“He said it’s not his thing.” She put the flashlight in and pulled it back out. “He said he would rather be here.”

“Did he say why?”

She looked up at me then and paused while Iris decided how much of it I was getting.

“He said somebody should be here,” she said, and turned back to the bag.

My daughter had arranged, through a dragon, for me not to be alone in my own house. There wasn’t a lot to say back to that. There was a run in the paint of the door frame beside my shoulder, and I set my thumbnail in it and left it there.

Somebody would be here, too, besides the dragon. Delaney would be here all night, in the casita, with the house between us and nobody else in it. I didn’t bring that up with Gerald.

“He knows a lot,” Iris said, to the sleeping bag.

Sophia’s house had dinner on, garlic and browning meat, and it reached the porch ahead of the door opening.

Beth opened the door before I knocked. I’d stood behind her in the preschool pickup line for as long as Iris had been in preschool and sat in a folding chair next to hers at the fall festival, and her number had been in my phone since the spring. She made a friendly remark about how tall I was, which everybody did, and for which I had never had a good answer.

Iris didn’t hear any of it. She’d spotted Sophia over Beth’s shoulder and was gone, leaning into the house while her feet were still on the mat.

I crouched, and my right knee cracked on the way down.

“Rules.”

“I know the rules.”

“Tell me one.”