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“No.”

“Then why is it fancy?”

I crouched down to her level, because she’d asked me a real question. “Because sometimes it’s a good day,” I said, “and on a good day the good plates come out. That’s all it is.”

She squinted at me for a good long time with her mouth pushed to one side, and then she let it go. “Okay. I’m going to ask you again tomorrow.”

“You do that.”

Then she got the blue plate out of the rack, carried it to the table in both hands, and set it at the corner with nothing on it. She stood Gerald up behind it facing the room, which he hadn’t done since the strike started.

“He’s still not eating,” she said. “He’s only sitting.”

“That’s a start.”

“It’s not a start.” Iris pushed his tail down flat so he’d stay put. “It’s sitting.”

Dinner ran long. I boiled the perogies in batches and fried them in butter until the edges turned gold, and from the stove I had every seat at the table in front of me. I’d cooked at the same stove since we moved in and never had this much to look at.

“Okay,” Delaney said, pointing a fork at me. “Explain the sour cream situation.”

“There isn’t a situation.”

“There are three kinds of sour cream on this table.”

“The bacon goes on top of the sour cream,” Iris said, from the authority of one afternoon’s experience.

“Thank you, Iris. Your father is stonewalling me.”

“He does that,” Iris said.

Delaney put her fork down and turned to her with her entire face lit up. “He does that? How long have you known him?”

“My whole life,” Iris said, and got back to work on her square perogies, and Delaney laughed so hard she had to sit back in the chair.

She’d eaten a dozen by then, and she ate the next one with her eyes shut. There was butter on her bottom lip after it and she got it with her tongue, and I lost track of which side of the batch I’d turned. Iris ate the squares, all ten, every one structurally unsound, and refused a single circle on principle.

“Will they still be here tomorrow?”

“There will be perogies in this house until you’re old.”

“Good,” she said.

When I set the next plate down in front of Delaney she was still smiling at the middle distance with her chin on her hand. She raised her eyes to me, and I didn’t drop mine, and neither did she. We kept at it well past what two people had any business doing at a table with a child at it. I was thinking about the counter behind me and what I wanted to do to her on it, and none of it was fit to think with my daughter three feet away holding a square perogy.

I did the bath and then the book, and she was out before the second page. I stood in her doorway afterward. She was asleep with the whale dress folded over the end of the bed, where she’d made me put it so it would be there in the morning.

Then I walked back up the hall and Delaney was at the sink.

She’d done the pans. She’d done all of them, the good plates too, and she was rinsing the last plate with a towel slung over her shoulder. She didn’t turn around when I came in.

“She’s out?”

“Second page.”

“The dress killed her.” She set the plate down and pulled the towel off her shoulder and still didn’t turn around. “I’m going to say one thing about today, and then I’m going to go, and you are not going to answer it, because if you answer it I will have to make an evening of it.”

“Go ahead.”