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“No,” I said, and took it, and rolled it, and tucked the ends. “I’m good at the fragile ones. It’s documented.”

She laughed again, worn down to the thread of it, and bumped her shoulder against mine, and we kept going.

By dark the front room was a wall of boxes to the ceiling, labeled in Steph’s hand in black marker, KITCHEN and LEO ROOM and FRAGILE DO NOT STACK, and the kitchen where I sat held exactly four unwrapped glasses, the everyday ones, kept out for the week they had left in a house that had stopped being one.

Iris had fallen asleep on the one couch still standing, in her coat, with Gerald face down on the floor where she’d dropped him, and Leo was asleep against her, the box-helmet off and crushed under his arm. Steph stood in the doorway of her own living room with her arms crossed and looked at the sleeping kids and the stacked walls of her life, and she had her face organized, the face I was still learning to put on, the one she’d said a person got good at.

“He lands at eleven our time,” she said. “He’ll call when he’s in the room. He always calls from the room.” She wasn’t talking to me. She was keeping the fact where she could reach it. “A week and we’ll be there too. Then it’s just the next thing. It’s always just the next thing.” She picked Gerald up off the floor and set him on the arm of the couch by the sleeping kids, carefully, facing them, as though he were on watch. “Thank you for the glasses. You didn’t have to.”

“Newspaper and me,” I said. “We come as a set.”

I got up off the floor, newsprint gray to the wrists, in a house that had been a home at Christmas, with the glasses wrapped and the star poking through the plastic by the door and a little girl asleep who wasn’t mine on any piece of paper in any building anywhere, and I stood in the middle of the boxes while the arithmetic finished landing, and I didn’t say one word of it out loud.

CHAPTER 29

Eli

I knew she was scared because she got efficient.

It took me a few days to read it, because a scared Delaney didn’t look like anybody else’s scared. She didn’t go quiet and she didn’t go anywhere I could point at. She got faster. The lunches got made the night before. The forms came back to me signed before I’d found the pen. She started answering Iris’s questions a half beat sooner than she used to, as if she’d lined the answers up in advance in case there wasn’t time later. She did the dishes she could’ve left. She filled the car with gas on a day she had nowhere to be. The casita door, which never used to close all the way, started closing all the way. A woman building a go-bag didn’t pack it in front of anybody. She got quietly good, overnight, at being ready to leave a room, and it read as competence, so everybody thanked her for it.

Brandt had been gone a few days. The room still had a hole in it where he used to sit and block things with his face, and the guys had started talking in the chat again, carefully, as men did when they’d all privately checked their own contracts and didn’t want to say so.

Kasperi: Who takes his parking spot?

Cole: Nobody takes the spot. The spot is retired. Hang a banner.

Theo: Trop tôt.

Too soon, Theo meant.

Cole: It’s never too early. It’s how we cope.

Cole added Eli Kovac to the conversation.

I’d left it again that morning. Cole put me back every time, within the hour, without a word about it. I let it sit. I had the one conversation I needed to have, and it wasn’t on my phone.

I’d cleaned out Brandt’s stall with him the morning he flew, because somebody had to hold the bag open and nobody else could do it without making a speech out of it. He took the photos down himself, Steph and the kids, and a laminated card Leo had made him that said DAD in letters going downhill off the end of the paper. He didn’t say much. Neither did I. I handed him tape and I told him the one true thing I had, which was that he’d blocked more shots with his body than any man I’d played with and that it had counted, and he gripped the back of my neck for a second and then zipped the bag and went to catch a plane his family wasn’t on yet.

I kept index cards in my stall, one line each in my own hand, things I didn’t trust myself to find under the lights. Stay center. Let him come. Nothing here. I’d pulled one before the Harker game in December and it had kept me steady, a wall at my back. I believed in the cards as I believed in cutting the banana into seven, all the way, because a thing written down and followed was a thing a man didn’t have to decide twice at the worst second of a night.

I wrote one that week and put it in my wallet, and it said tell her about the clause, and then I carried it around for days looking for the hour.

She’d been carrying things back to the casita. I didn’t catch it until a morning that week, when I reached for the green mug she drank out of and it wasn’t on the hook, and I stood there with my hand up at an empty peg longer than a grown man needed to stand at a mug hook. I let it go. People moved their own cups. I told myself that, and I’d have believed it, except for the efficiency, and how she’d started saying I’m fine with the corners filed off it.

It was a home game I didn’t have until seven, so the morning was mine, which put it in Iris’s hands. I had her at the counter on the stool with the bad leg, the one I kept meaning to fix and hadn’t, because she’d decided it was her stool and a kid’s loyalty to a defective object was total. I was cutting a banana into coins. There were seven of them, because six was wrong and eight was too many, a ruling she’d handed down in August and never revisited.

Delaney came up the hall at twenty past, dressed, hair up, the green mug in her hand, so she’d made her coffee in the casita off her own little machine instead of out of the pot I set the night before. I set one cup’s worth in the pot every night. I’d done it since September. I’d never mentioned it and she’d never mentioned it and this was the first morning in a long time the pot had a full cup still in it at eight.

“Morning,” she said, to Iris first. “Morning,” she said to me, second, and shorter.

“Coffee’s on,” I said.

“I made some.” She lifted the green mug half an inch, proof of work. “Thanks though.”

Iris held up a banana coin at arm’s length, presenting a medal to the room. “Seven,” she reported. “Gerald gets zero because dragons don’t eat fruit. He eats knights.”

“Gerald has refined taste,” I said, and set the knife flat on the board, square to the edge.