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I brought out a sandwich cut in triangles and a cup of grapes. The knife had dragged through the bread and the second triangle came apart at the point, so that one was mine. The concrete threw heat up into the backs of my legs. The yard smelled of hot dust and the citrus tree two houses down, and I thought, sitting there, this was the smell I would take with me when I left Phoenix.

“D,” Iris said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

I swallowed a grape whole.

“No,” I said.

She turned her head and gave me her entire attention. “Why not?”

I had a kit for that question. Some people have one and some people don’t. That’s a grown-up question, bug. I had used all of them in a classroom and every one had worked. I sat on a hot back step with a triangle of sandwich in my hand and couldn’t find one of them.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Iris took that. She had an excellent policy about not knowing.

“I think you should have one,” she said, and picked her sandwich back up.

Iris lay down for her rest under protest and spent it telling Gerald about Emerson in a whisper that carried the length of the hall.

I sat down at the kitchen table with the laptop and wrote a page and a half. I read it back out loud under my breath to be sure, and it was terrible. I gave the hero a different build to get some distance from the man in the house, and by the end of the page he was six-foot-three again. Then I gave him a temper, and he declined it in the next paragraph. I couldn’t invent a man, because there was one living down the hall, and every sentence I put down turned into him.

I was reading the second paragraph out loud again, quieter, when Iris said, “What are you doing?”

She was in the kitchen doorway with Gerald hanging from one fist and a crease from the pillow down one cheek. Her socks had worked halfway off her heels and the empty toes of them flapped out in front of her feet.

I shut the laptop. I did it fast, and the lid clapped.

“Working.”

“On what?”

“A story.”

She got to the table without a sound and studied the closed laptop with the same face she used on a present before she was allowed to open it, her chin down almost against the lid, her breath fogging a patch of it.

“Is it a secret?”

“Yes.”

She dropped her eyes to Gerald, and then brought them back to me. “Can Gerald know?”

“Gerald can know.”

“Is it about a dragon?”

“No.”

“Is it about a cat?”

“No.”

“Is it about a person?”

“It’s about a person.”

Iris nodded slowly with her eyes narrowed, and whispered all of it into the side of Gerald’s head, and then she asked if she could have the yogurt with the thing on it.

I got her the yogurt. I peeled the foil off and she took it out of my hand before I had the spoon in it.