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“It’ll get worse.”

She almost smiled at that. She dried a dry plate. I had the drawer in my head, the paper in the drawer, the crease that meant she’d carried it, and I had a question the size of a fist I’d been carrying since a night in February when the typing was the only sound of her left in the house, and we stood there a few feet apart and I did what I’d sworn I’d never do to my daughter and did it to Delaney instead. I kept the house calm by keeping my mouth shut.

“You okay?” I said. It was two words, the coward’s vocabulary.

“I’m good.” She put the plate in the rack. “Tired. The season’s long.”

“Getting longer.”

“I know.” She said it quiet, to the sink, two words with the wrong weight hung on them, and for one second the truth was all the way out in the open between us. A longer season wasn’t good news to her. It only pushed the drop farther out, and she thought I couldn’t see it. I saw it. I still didn’t reach for the real sentence, because I didn’t have it, because over years I’d built a man who could do anything in that house except ask a woman to tell him she was leaving.

I crossed the floor and set my hand on her hip and moved her the two inches that turned her from the sink to me, the move that used to change her breathing, and she let me, she came the two inches, and she put her forehead against my chest and her hands flat on my shirt and we stood there in the dark kitchen with the hall light on and my daughter asleep and a folded résumé in a drawer, holding on to each other in the one language we’d never once gotten wrong, and not saying a single word in the one we couldn’t get right.

“You’d tell me,” I said, into her hair. I didn’t lift it into a question, and we both heard I’d kept it flat so she wouldn’t have to answer it.

“I’d tell you,” she said.

It was a lie, and I let it stand in my own kitchen, and we both knew it, and neither of us let go.

The eleventh came.

It came on a Tuesday, as ordinary as any other, with Iris wanting eggs and a cup I’d set out the night before already carried off to the casita by the time I got to the kitchen. It was the last game of the regular season, a sellout, the snake banner up, the crowd on its feet by the anthem. We won it, because we were good now, and the horn went, and nothing ended.

I’d been circling the eleventh of April for weeks without knowing why I was circling it, and it came and went and the season kept going. We shook hands with nobody, because a regular season didn’t end that way. Our first round started Thursday, the real season, the long chase a man dreamed about, and the fans stayed on their feet because they knew it too. There was more hockey coming, weeks of it if we were good, into May.

I looked up at the family seats out of a habit I’d never break. Iris was on her seat with both fists up. Delaney was beside her in a jersey with my number on the back that she’d put on in the players’ lot in December, standing, clapping, her face open, no part of it kept back, because in that building nine rows up she could want me in public and nobody would ever make her pay for it.

I stood at center ice having gotten what I wanted, a season that wouldn’t end on the eleventh, and it hit me, finally, all the way, that the one person in my life who had been counting on it to end was up there in my jersey cheering for the clock to keep running, and that in some district I couldn’t name there was a classroom with her name fitted onto a page, and that the two of us were skating full speed at a line neither of us had the words to call, and the last question left was which one of us got there first.

CHAPTER 34

Delaney

I had built my whole life around the eleventh of April, and then the eleventh of April arrived on a Tuesday and declined to do its job.

I’d had the date for months. It was on the second sheet of the schedule I’d made in September, taped at the back, red pen, the column running down through the winter and stopping cold on that one square with PLAYOFFS TBD written under the last row in my own capitals. I’d turned the sheet over in March and finally read it, and after that I’d run my entire exit off it, down to the day. The interview was behind me. The offer was in my inbox, a real one, a kindergarten position with twenty-odd five-year-olds and a start date the second week of August, from a principal out in Mesa who had shaken my hand with both of hers and said we’d be lucky. In the calendar in my head, the season ended on the eleventh, I packed the casita over a long, gentle week, one box at a time, and I drove east into the rest of my life with my dignity intact and nobody the wiser about the part in the middle.

It was a good plan. I’d been proud of it, as proud as a person could be of a plan for leaving a place she didn’t want to leave.

Then they clinched on the ninth, and the eleventh came, and the Sidewinders won their last regular-season game going away, and the building shook, and Cole did a lap with his jersey over his head, and the season didn’t end. It kept going. It had another season stapled to the back of it that I had written three letters about on a square of paper and never once believed in.

I stood in the family seats with Iris on her seat beside me and her fists in the air, and the date I had built my life around wasn’t real, which was a horror only a professional organizer could fully appreciate. There was no eleventh. There was a series, and after that maybe another series, and the end of all of it was a door out past the end of my eyesight, and nobody could tell me where it was, and I had a job in August either way.

“We won,” Iris informed me, in case I had missed it.

“We did win.”

“Daddy did a check and the man went over.” She demonstrated the man going over with both hands and a sound effect. “Gerald saw.”

Gerald had seen. Gerald saw everything. Gerald was in my bag with his tail and one wing hanging out, wearing the paper crown Iris had made him that afternoon and taped under his chin so it wouldn’t come off in the excitement, which she had explained to me at length was a safety measure, because a crown that fell off during a goal was a crown that could be lost forever.

“That’s responsible,” I’d told her.

“I’m very responsible,” she’d said, and I had laughed out loud in the kitchen, big and helpless, because she’d said it in the flat, affronted voice her father used to end an argument, and because Eli had been standing at the counter tying his tie in the window’s reflection and had nearly smiled when he heard me laugh, before he put it away.

The group chat didn’t stop going off from the parking garage all the way home.

Cole: we are in the playoffs and I will be saying it all week