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I lay under a stripe of parking lot light and thought about a lamp left on in Phoenix. In Calgary the team had put us in a hotel with blackout curtains that didn’t quite meet in the middle, and the unit under the window ran and quit and ran again.

She left it on. I’d worked that out weeks back. Road nights the casita light stayed on until I was in the house, and since I wasn’t, it burned until morning, and neither of us had ever mentioned it.

I hadn’t touched her since the night I put my hand on her thigh against her own door, made her tell me what she wanted, and then did nothing about it. The seam of her leggings was still under my thumb whenever I let myself think about it. It had been most of a month. I’d said I’ll get you one and meant it as a promise with a date attached, and then I’d gone back to cutting bananas into seven pieces.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted. It was Iris. She noticed every change in the house from the far end of the hallway, and I wasn’t going to let her work out anything that big on her own before anybody had told her.

Cole found me in the lobby on the off day with a coffee in each hand.

“You’re doing the thing,” he said.

“Resting my legs.”

“You’re doing the thing where everybody assumes you’re concentrating and what’s actually happening is a whole conversation with yourself.” He handed me one of the coffees, sat down in a hotel bathrobe over street clothes, and turned his phone toward me. It was an orange cat wearing a small knitted hat.

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’ve sent me nine of these.”

“Fourteen,” Cole said. “I’m building a case. Kasperi’s got a folder too, all Finnish rescue sites. One of them says the cat is available for friendship.” He put the phone away. “How’s the strike going?”

“Holding.”

“Holding. A dragon has been refusing to come to the table in your house for weeks and the word you pick is holding.”

“He sits on the counter now. Facing away. Iris puts food on his plate anyway and tells him he can eat when he’s ready, and then she washes the plate herself and puts it in the rack. She’s not breaking.”

Cole sat back with real admiration. “That kid is going to run a union.”

“She’s four.”

“She’s still beating you, buddy.”

He was right.

I called a little before her bedtime, and Iris got the phone before it finished ringing.

“Daddy!”

“Hi, bug.”

Then she talked. Gerald was still on strike but had permitted a cracker to be placed near him, which she wanted me to understand wasn’t the same as eating it. There had been an incident at preschool involving a boy named Emerson and a glue stick, in which she had been slightly involved. She told me about a cat she’d seen from the car.

“What color?” I said.

“Orange,” Iris said. She’d told me that before.

She had the phone right up against her mouth, every hard consonant at double its size. I put my head back against the headboard and let my kid narrate a Monday at me, and didn’t interrupt her.

Eventually she ran out. Then, off the phone, at a volume that carried through the house, “D. D. It’s Daddy. You have to say goodnight.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

“It is necessary.” She was aiming the phone directly into my eardrum. “You have to say goodnight to people.”

Fabric dragged across the receiver, and the phone changed hands.