Page 127

I didn’t clock, because I was too busy being right, that I’d just laid out every reason on earth I’d never leave and not one of them had been her. I’d handed her a floor and called it a gift. She’d said Iris is lucky and not we are, and she’d turned the mug a half turn my way with her eyes down, my own move come back to me, and when she went back to the pan she washed the clean one a second time.

She came to the game and sat in the family seats with Maren beside her and Iris up on the rail in her orange sweater with Maren’s fist in the back of it. I found them on my second loop as I always did, and put a glove up, and Iris waved with her arm straight out, and Delaney raised two fingers off the rail at me, the signal that had stopped me skating in December.

We lost, three to two, a bad bounce off a skate in the third that nobody on the planet could’ve read. The room was quiet after in the honest way, not the Brandt way. Cole dropped onto the bench beside me with his hair still wet and said we’d get the next one, which was what a guy said after a loss, and then he said, lower, “House feels better this week. You look less like a guy counting exits.” I told him to mind his own stall. He said my stall was the room’s business and always had been. I kept my foot up on the roller and thought about the kill I’d blown and about a woman washing a clean pan, and the two didn’t connect, because I didn’t let them.

She was by the pillar after with Iris asleep on her shoulder and Gerald’s tail wound in one small fist, and she looked tired and warm and she said you’ll get the next one, which was the right thing, and I took Iris off her without waking her and we drove my family home.

Iris went down in her clothes. I wasn’t losing that fight at ten at night. Delaney was in the kitchen when I came back up the hall, rinsing out the green mug, and I came up behind her and put my mouth on the back of her neck under her hair where the skin was warm, and she stilled against the sink, and then she leaned back into me, in the body, as she always did before the rest of her caught up.

“Hey,” I said, against her neck.

“Hey.”

I turned her around. I had her face in one hand and I tipped it up and kissed her slow, the losing night going out of me, and she kissed me back and got a fist in my shirt, and I walked her down my hall and pushed the door to its two inches, and we didn’t need the drawer anymore, hadn’t since Christmas, and neither of us said a word about it because we’d said what it needed, once, out loud, on Christmas night.

After, she lay with her head on my chest and her hand flat over my heart, and I had my fingers in her hair, and the hall light was on and my door stood open its two inches for Iris, and I thought, lying there, that I’d had a good week. I’d lost a hockey game and I’d fixed what was wrong in my house, which mattered a great deal more than a hockey game, and the woman I was keeping was warm and heavy and breathing slow against me, exactly where I meant to keep her.

“Still with me,” I said. It didn’t come out a question.

She was quiet a second longer than she used to be.

“Yeah,” she said, into my shirt, where I couldn’t see her face. “Still here.”

I put my hand on the back of her neck and held it there, under her hair, where her pulse ran slow against my fingers, and I thought about the index card in my wallet with its one line done, crossed off, handled, a thing written down and followed that I didn’t have to decide twice.

She went to sleep, or did a good enough job of it that I let myself believe her, and I lay awake in the dark, sure I’d fixed it.

CHAPTER 30

Delaney

I started with the mug, because the mug was easy to explain to myself.

It was mine, the green one with the whale on it, chipped at the rim, the one I’d brought from Boston in a box of things that survived the version of my life before this one. It had lived on the hook by his pot since August. In the first week of January I carried it back down the hall to the casita and set it on the little shelf over my own little machine, and I told myself it was so I could have coffee before I came up, before the day started, before I had to be the person the day needed. That was true. It also wasn’t the reason, and I’d gotten very good, over a careful few weeks, at putting a true reason in front of the real one so I’d never have to look the real one in the face.

The cardigan went next. It was the long oatmeal one I lived in, which had migrated to the back of the kitchen chair sometime in the fall and stayed there, because anything that sat on a chair long enough started to belong to the chair, and I’d liked how it belonged there, I’d liked it more than I’d let myself count. I took it off his chair one morning and hung it on the back of the casita door. The chair looked wrong for a day. Then it was just a chair again.

The paperback was the last of the easy ones. It had sat on the end table by the good lamp since October, dog-eared at a page I kept not finishing, and I put it back on the shelf under the casita window where my books lived, and the end table had a clean rectangle in the dust where it had been, and I wiped the rectangle away so there wouldn’t be a shape where the book used to be.

There were smaller ones after that, so small I couldn’t have defended them. The second toothbrush, the backup one I’d kept in the hall bathroom for the nights I didn’t make it down to the casita, went into my own drawer. The spare phone charger I’d left plugged in by his side of the bed came home in my pocket. A hair tie came off the kitchen windowsill, and then a pen. Each one was nothing. Each one was an object I wouldn’t have to collect later, in the afternoon, in the box, in front of anyone.

Iris noticed before he did, which tracked, because kids kept inventory on a house more closely than anybody over five bothered to. “Your sweater’s not on the chair,” she told me one morning, frowning at the chair as though it had committed the error. “It lives on the chair.”

“It’s having a rest in my room,” I said.

“Does it want to come back?”

“Maybe later, bug.” It was the first lie I’d told Iris on purpose in a long while, and it sat in me all day, because she’d looked at the chair as if it were missing a tooth.

His kitchen got cleaner. I couldn’t have told anyone, because it sounded like nothing, because it was nothing, a mug and a sweater and a book, and I couldn’t go to a person and say I am dismantling myself out of a house one small object at a time and the evidence is the counters are very tidy now. He didn’t notice. Why would he? A man noticed a mess arriving. Nobody noticed a mess leaving, and I was leaving the same way, quietly, over weeks, in pieces small enough no single one of them was worth a conversation, until one day the only thing of mine still in his part of the house would be me, and then that, too, could be carried out in an afternoon.

I was bubbly at coffee, and it was real. It wasn’t a costume. I met Maren and Jenna at the place with the good cortados one morning while Iris was at school, and I was funny, and I was warm, and I talked in paragraphs, and I meant all of it.

Maren: Running five min late. Ryan took my car keys instead of his again

Jenna: He does not know his own car

Maren: He knows it. He just likes mine. Order me the oat one