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I tried it plain the first time. “You have to eat something before you go.”

“I ate at one.”

“You ate at one and you’re on the ice at seven. I have watched you take a banana out of that bowl on your way to the door and call that a plan. A banana isn’t a bridge across six hours, it is a gesture toward one.”

He was at the counter with his backpack up on his shoulder. On game days he got quieter by the hour, and by the time he walked out the door he was down to a handful of words and none of them were for me.

I put the container in his hand anyway. It was chicken and rice, still warm. I’d timed it at the stove so it would be. The bottom was hot, and he shifted it up onto his fingertips.

He weighed it in one hand. Then he raised his head and met my eyes.

“You made this at three,” he said.

“I made extra at three.”

“There is no extra. That is a portion. That is one man’s portion of chicken and rice in a container with a lid on it.”

“Then somebody made a mistake in the kitchen and you are the beneficiary of it. Go to work.”

His mouth opened and shut again. He kept his eyes down on the container instead of me, and then he put it in his backpack upright and zipped the pack closed around it with more care than a zipper needed. Iris rounded the corner at speed with Gerald by one wing and delivered her pregame instructions from a foot and a half away. He took them standing completely still, and asked two follow-up questions.

“Gerald says score two.”

“Gerald’s ambitious.”

“He says two is reasonable.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” He got down and she folded into his shoulder and he held the back of her head in his palm. “Bed at eight-thirty.”

“Eight forty.”

“Eight-thirty.” He straightened up. His eyes came over her head to me and settled. “I’m back around eleven.”

“I know where I’ll be,” I said.

I hadn’t meant it the way it landed. The words were out before I could weigh them. His hand stopped on the strap of his backpack.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

Then the door shut, and the truck pulled out, and the rooms went flat, as they always did when the largest thing in them left. I told myself a woman could cook a man chicken without it meaning anything, and then I scrubbed a pan that was already clean.

Bedtime went as bedtime went, with a bath, two books, and the negotiation over whether Gerald required his own pillow, which he did, which he’d required every night since I moved in and would require tomorrow.

“Is Daddy playing right now?” Iris said, on her back, in the dark.

“He’s playing. They’re partway through the second.”

“Are you going to watch it?”

I hadn’t planned to. I’d planned to fold the laundry and be a professional adult in somebody else’s living room.

“I think I might,” I said.

“You have to watch the rest of it.” She was very serious about it. “Not just the parts with him.”

“Why not just the parts with him?”

“Because that’s rude,” Iris said, with real feeling, and rolled over.