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Then she got back on top of the covers on her side of my daughter and said, “Go to sleep, Kovac. I’ll listen.”

I did. I was out almost at once. The last thing I registered was her hand crossing over and settling on Iris’s back, next to mine, not touching it.

When I woke the room was gray and the fever had broken. Iris was cool under my hand and damp all over, and the collar of my shirt was wet through where she’d sweated it out against me. Delaney was asleep sitting up, her head tipped against the headboard, one arm still where she’d put it. The pencil had fallen out of her hair and was lying on my pillow.

I slid out from under Iris by degrees and went down the hall and put the coffee on. I got Delaney’s cup out, the green one with the whale on it and the chip she always turned away from her mouth, and set it down.

The paper bag from Linda was still on the counter, with only the broth taken out of it. I unpacked the rest in the half dark. There were three plates under foil with our names on them in marker, and Delaney’s glass dish, washed, and a fourth plate at the bottom that nobody had written a name on, with a slice of her own pie on it. It was the ugly side. Linda must have cut it while I was on the bathroom floor with Iris, and she’d put it in the bag and mentioned it to nobody.

I put the oven on to 350 and waited while the stuffing started to smell like food again. I was heating a Thanksgiving dinner before the sun was properly up, for three people, two of whom were asleep down the hall in my bed. It was the obvious move to make. I didn’t examine it any further than that.

CHAPTER 22

Delaney

I got Iris back Friday morning, a different animal. Thursday she’d been a limp hot bundle with her father’s shirt in her fist. Friday she hauled herself into the booster seat and asked for eggs like she’d never been sick a day in her life.

“I was very sick,” she told me, with her fork upright in her fist and a yellow smear of yolk drying along her jaw. “I was the sickest. Daddy did the syringe. Gerald watched. He didn’t like it. He said it was a lot.”

I drank my coffee at the window while she drew an enormous orange cat on the driveway, gave it a crown, and then an extra tail. This is the best morning I have had here, I thought, those exact words, and then my back hurt.

My back hurt. That was all it was. Iris’s foot had been jammed into my hip for half the night, and I’d slept sitting upright against a headboard in my clothes. The glare off the driveway was a great deal harsher than it had any right to be in November.

I made a decision about all of this, the stupidest of my adult life. I decided it was fine.

Saturday I got Iris down for a rest she didn’t want, shut myself in the casita bathroom, and took my temperature, having decided on the walk down the hall that I wasn’t telling anybody the number.

It read a hundred and two point one. The face in the mirror had the color of a dishrag somebody had left in the sun.

Iris didn’t need me breathing on her. Eli had a game and then a road trip and didn’t need another patient. They were good reasons, and none of them was the real one.

I was the help, and I’d never minded it. What I hadn’t told anybody was that the money had gotten good. I’d come to the casita with a hundred and forty-one dollars between me and asking my sister for rent, and a figure sat in my account now I hadn’t seen since I was thirty-one. Every piece of my life ran downstream of a job, and a person could stop being right for a job. A woman didn’t say I can’t do today to the man who paid and housed her. Never mind that she’d been in his bed on Tuesday.

So I didn’t say it.

Iris, meanwhile, had become a doctor. One day nursed by a professional, and she’d surfaced with a vocation.

“You have to have the small sips. Not the big ones. Daddy says.”

“I’m having sips.”

“That was a big one. Gerald saw. Gerald is a nurse,” she said, in the voice she used for correcting a factual error, “and you’re doing it wrong.”

I made pasta and pushed a plate of it from one side to the other with a fork. Then Iris climbed down, reached up, and pressed her hand across my forehead. It was her father’s move down to the last detail, the small arm at full stretch, her face completely serious.

“Hm,” she said, and didn’t elaborate, and walked away.

I laughed so hard I had to hold the counter, and then I had to keep holding it, which was new.

Eli got home from the rink that night. I came up off the couch fast and the room tipped, and by the time he was through the door I had a damp towel folded into quarters and no idea why.

“Hey.”

“Hi. She’s down. She ate everything. Temperature’s been normal all day.”

“Good.” He put his keys in the dish and kept his eyes on me after he’d said it. “You eat?”

“I ate with her.”