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“You eat?”

“Not really.”

“Come eat.”

That was all he said. He didn’t mention a green dress, and he didn’t ask how I was. I got none of the careful checking-in I’d had for six years from a man who wanted credit for asking. He’d run his eyes across me once in my own doorway, over the shirt I’d buttoned wrong and the hand I had on the frame, and told me what was happening next. My body went quiet and did as it was told, the same as it had at his dresser with his mouth on the back of my neck. What I’d found out about myself last night wasn’t confined to a bedroom at all.

I went and ate.

His pregame meal never changed. It was plain chicken, white rice, and a pile of green beans he ate without appearing to notice them. I sat across from him with a plate of my own, and his knee found mine under the table and pressed in, warm through two layers of cloth and heavier than a knee needed to be, and he never took his eyes off the green beans. Iris delivered the Mitzi material one more time. He asked two questions about the dog, both serious, and got answers that would have exhausted a lawyer.

Then he put his plate in the machine and took the nap he’d taken before every game of his adult life. Iris lowered her voice without being told. I lay on my own bed in the casita with Zamboni across both ankles. Nothing came through from his side of the house, and I got no work done at all.

He left for the rink well ahead of us.

We got home late, with the streets empty. Iris was in her bed with her shoes still on, because getting them off would have woken her. My throat was still sore from the third period.

He stood in the kitchen with both hands spread on the granite and his head down for a minute. Two of his knuckles were split open and a third had scabbed over. He stood like that first thing after every game, and I didn’t talk to him while he did. I’d learned early on that he’d start talking on his own if I waited.

Then he took himself off for a shower.

I let myself back through my own door and woke the laptop, and the folder was still there, still open, where I’d left it. I read what I’d written that morning, all of it, straight through.

Then I sat back in my chair. I had a man’s mark on my throat, a child’s plastic ring on my table, and my ears still ringing from a building full of people. Across the house his shower was still running.

This might be a real book.

I didn’t say it out loud, and I didn’t write it down anywhere. I sat with it instead, and it didn’t go away, and I let it stay.

CHAPTER 21

Eli

I had the day laid out in my head in order, and had for days. The parade, then the Callahans’ at one, then the drive home in the dark with my daughter asleep in the back, and Delaney in the passenger seat with her shoes off and her feet up on the dash where I’d have told anybody else to put them down.

I hadn’t said any of it out loud.

I put the television on at seven, a brass band a block wide marching along without a sound. Iris came up the hall carrying Gerald by the middle, climbed onto the couch, and got herself arranged with her knees up.

“Is it the balloons?”

“It’s a band.”

“Bands come first,” she said, forgiving it.

The cat came in behind her and sat down on the arm with her tail curled around her feet, uninvited. Zamboni had been in the house less than a week and had already worked out which of us would move for her.

Delaney came out of the casita at twenty past with her hair wet and the sleeves of a green sweater pushed up her forearms. She’d been up early, typing. The keys had been going on the other side of the kitchen wall when I came out to start the coffee.

“Balloons yet?”

“Bands come first,” Iris said.

“Of course they do.” She sat down on the other end of the couch and put her feet up next to the cat, and Zamboni relocated onto her ankles without any discussion.

There were four dishes in my refrigerator she’d made that week. I’d told her Linda would want nothing brought, and Delaney had made a decision about that in front of me without arguing out loud. There was stuffing, sweet potatoes with no marshmallow on them because she had views, a salad, and a pie she’d made at eleven at night after Iris was down. The stuffing had a note taped to the glass in her handwriting. Heat from cold, 350, covered.

At the first commercial she got up off the couch and went to the fridge to check on all four of them.