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One morning the kitchen smelled like coffee somebody else had made. There was one cup left in the pot. The index card was still on the counter, one corner gone soft from being picked up and set down, even though I hadn’t needed it in days. He’d left it there anyway.

I took my coffee to the kitchen window and let it go cold there. The light came through low and gold at the angle I’d learned to expect, and it lit the drawings taped to the window from behind. In one of them Gerald was in an underwater setting, each orange scale its own careful stroke, with Margaret in the upper left and a figure in light-up sneakers that was definitely Iris.

Beside Iris stood a tall figure with red hair.

I’d been drawn into the archive. I hadn’t been warned. The red-haired figure was in tight against the light-up sneakers, the two of them sharing the same patch of paper, and it hit me that Iris wasn’t considering me anymore. She had decided.

I put a thumb on the edge of the paper, barely touching it.

Then Iris appeared in the doorway in her pajamas with Gerald under one arm, her face arranged around urgent news.

“Margaret decided she doesn’t like the shallow parts,” she said.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning.” She climbed onto her stool. “She says they’re too warm and there aren’t enough fish.”

“What does she think she should do?” I put the orange juice on the table.

Iris consulted Gerald. His response took some time. “She thinks she needs to go deeper,” she said finally. “But she’s scared.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Going deeper is the scary part. That is the whole reason it is deeper.”

Iris nodded. “Gerald says the scary part is usually where the good stuff is.”

“Gerald is very wise.”

“I know,” she said, and poured her own orange juice, both hands on the carton, her tongue between her teeth.

I hadn’t been in the house long, and I’d already stopped calling it temporary in my head.

After drop-off I had two hours and no idea what to do with them. I’d barely had a free hour to myself in six years.

I went to the bookshelf. I didn’t want a book. I wanted to read the shelf, because a row of spines was the nearest thing in the house to reading the man himself.

The bottom two shelves belonged to Iris, the same board books in a rotation she policed personally. The top shelf was his. Now I took my time with it.

On the far right, laid sideways on top of the others because it was too tall to stand with them, was a children’s picture book about a dragon who was afraid of fire.

I weighed it in one hand, top edge sun-faded to pink, the boards gone soft at all four corners. Then I sat on the couch with it on my knees.

The last spread showed the dragon breathing fire out over an empty field at night for the first time, and the illustrator hadn’t drawn triumph on his face. She’d drawn relief. Relief was harder to draw, and I sat there with the book open on my knees and my eyes stinging over a picture of a dragon, because I knew the face she’d drawn. His shoulders were down and his mouth was open, and his years of carrying the fire by himself were finally over.

The copyright page said it was older than me. The spine had been repaired with hockey tape, black gone gray and cracked along the fold, put on by a kid who hadn’t measured it and hadn’t cared. Inside the front cover, in pencil pressed down until it scored the paper, a kid had written his own name. It was three letters, and the E was backwards.

He hadn’t been given that book. He’d taken possession of it himself, in block capitals.

I ran my thumb over the backwards E. Then I put the book back where I’d found it and squared it up so he’d never know.

On Saturday I took Iris to the rink, and nobody had prepared me for it.

It was an optional skate, which Eli explained was optional in the same sense breathing was optional. Iris presented herself in the kitchen fully dressed in a jersey, with a booster seat dragged to the front door, and informed me that Saturdays were rink days and that Gerald had packed.

The cold came up off the sheet and had nothing to do with the sky outside, and the rink coffee I’d carried in from the lobby went cold in my hand inside ten minutes. Iris climbed onto a bench down by the glass, went straight to the spot she’d come for, sat down in it, and set Gerald beside her facing the ice.

I didn’t understand a single piece of what was in front of me. What I had was a very large man moving backward at a speed that made no sense while a younger, faster man came at him with the puck and ran out of ideas a few feet from my bench. He gave the puck up. Eli hadn’t touched him.

Near the end of it he came down the ice on our side, and about twenty feet out he shifted his weight, and without slowing down or lifting his head he knocked the back of his glove twice against the glass in front of Iris and was past us. It made two flat thuds, and the pane shook with both of them.