Page 121

Theo had told him he was already insufferable.

Cole: theo said I’m already great, I can tell by the music of it

Griffin: enjoy the freeze boys, nobody’s going anywhere for a few days

Delaney, reading over my shoulder with a dish towel, said, “What freeze?”

“Roster freeze. Holidays.” I turned the phone so she could see it. “League doesn’t let teams make moves around Christmas. No trades, no waivers, from a few days before through the twenty-seventh. So guys can have the holiday with their families and not get a phone call.”

She fell quiet in the good way for a second, turning it over. “They stop trading people for Christmas.”

“They stop trading people for Christmas.”

“That’s kind,” she said, and she meant it, soft, caught a little off guard that a cold business kept one warm week a year. It moved her. A hard thing with a soft edge was news to her, and it stuck with me long after we’d finished the glasses. “That’s actually really kind. A whole league agreed to be kind for one week a year.”

“It’s not forever,” I said. “It lifts the twenty-eighth. Then it’s back to normal.”

“Still,” she said. “For a week, nobody has to be afraid.” She turned back to drying the glass. She’d been living alongside my business since August, and she’d found the one week a year nobody got the call, and she’d decided to be glad of it instead of afraid of the other fifty-one. I didn’t have a reply to it, so I kept quiet and rinsed the next glass and handed it to her.

I cooked the dinner, which was a mistake I made every Christmas and would go on making, because the recipe always promised what no recipe could deliver.

Iris was underfoot in the apron, officially helping, by which I meant standing on a chair I’d pulled to the counter and arranging the same four carrots into a line and then a different line while reporting the carrots’ feelings to Gerald, who’d been given the blue plate and a seat of honor on the counter where he could supervise. I cut an apple for her because she’d decided she was starving at the exact moment I was losing to the oven, and I cut it how I always cut it, into the pieces she’d eat, small enough for the hand she had, and set them on a napkin and slid her carrot line back from the burner, and told her Gerald was not allowed to referee from the stove, and did all of it without putting the knife down.

Delaney was at the far counter working at the potatoes and watching me run the kitchen with a kid attached to it, and when I passed her for the salt I put my hand on her hip and moved her the two inches I needed and didn’t take the hand back. Her breath caught and she held still under it. Iris was a few feet away debriefing a dragon. My thumb found the bone of her hip through the leggings and pressed, once, and I put my mouth close to her ear, low enough that it stayed on our side of the room, and said, “Tonight.”

It wasn’t a question. She knew it wasn’t a question. The color came up her neck in one pass and she looked down at the potatoes and said, “I’m aware there’s a dinner between now and then,” in the flat careful voice she only ever used with me, and I said, “There’s a dinner between now and then,” and let go and got the salt. Behind me Iris announced the carrots were a family now and the small one was the baby. “Good,” I told the carrots. On my way back to the stove I pressed two fingers to the nape of Delaney’s neck. With the other hand I moved Iris’s elbow out of the burner’s reach. To me they were the same job, and I wasn’t going to explain it to anybody.

We ate at the table with the booster on the third chair and Gerald’s blue plate beside it, and the dinner was fine, which was the word for it. Delaney set her fork down. “I need to understand what you expected of this chicken.”

“Excellence,” I said.

“From a chicken.”

“From that one.”

She laughed so hard she got the napkin over her face, out loud, the real one, the one I’d quit pretending I wasn’t keeping track of, and Iris laughed because Delaney had, and I sat at the head of my own table on the fifth Christmas with a woman and my daughter both laughing in my kitchen over a bird, and four years ago I’d have sworn I was done with a table that full, and I sat at it and let it be full and didn’t narrate it to myself.

That night, after, with Iris down in the apron because we’d lost that fight on purpose, what had been coming for a while finally got said, and it got said as the real things always got said in that house, sideways, in the dark, with no run-up.

We’d come down the hall quiet and got the door to its two inches, and I’d had her the first time with her face pushed into the pillow to keep it off the hall, fast, the two of us still half in our clothes, the drawer open and the foil torn before I’d worked her leggings clear of one ankle. The second time was slower, her up over me with my hands run up her thighs, taking what she wanted at the pace she wanted it until she shook apart above me with her teeth set in her own forearm, and I’d pulled the arm down because I wanted the sound, quiet as she had to keep it. Both times we’d gone to the drawer, the small practiced business of it we’d run since November and never once said a word about.

Now we were in the long slow part after, her leg over mine, her hand on my breastbone, the house quiet, and I was most of the way to asleep when she said, into my shoulder, careful, as she only ever was with me, “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.”

“Every time. You always.” She stopped. For a woman who talked in paragraphs she’d gone down to the studs. “You’re always the one who makes sure. The drawer.”

I came the rest of the way awake. “You want to talk about the drawer?”

“I want to talk about what’s in the drawer.”

I turned my head on the pillow and looked at her in the dark. She was halfway into a sentence and not sure she could land it, and I wasn’t going to help her off it. It had to be hers. If I finished it for her it would be mine, and the point was that it was hers.

“I’m thirty-six,” she said. “I’ve been checked for everything a person gets checked for and it’s all clean, I’d show you the paper, I’m the kind of person who has the paper.” A breath. “There hasn’t been anyone since Boston. There hasn’t been anyone but you, if we’re counting. And I’m on something. I’ve been on it all along. It’s not a question of—” She stopped again. “I’m saying I trust you. I’m saying I don’t want the drawer anymore. If you don’t. I’m saying it out loud so you don’t have to guess, because you never make me guess, so I won’t make you.”

I didn’t say a word for a second, because this wasn’t a question to answer fast.

“Same,” I said. Then, because same wasn’t enough, and for once what I had wouldn’t fit inside three words, I turned over and got up on my elbow above her and said the rest of it. “I’m clean, I get checked every season, I’ll show you my paper too, I’m also the kind of person who has the paper. There’s been nobody in this house but you. There’s been nobody I wanted in this house but you, going back further than I’m going to admit lying down.” I put my hand flat on her stomach, palm down, my skin on hers and the drawer across the room where it would stay. “I want to be clear about one thing, because I’ve got a kid asleep in an apron down the hall and I don’t do anything by accident. This isn’t carelessness. I’ve put the same thought into this that I put into anything that matters, and I’m choosing it with my eyes open. There’s a version of me that keeps the drawer because the drawer is careful. I don’t want to be careful with you anymore. I don’t want anything between us I don’t have to have.” My thumb moved on her skin, slow. “You understand what I’m agreeing to?”