Page 18 of Single Pucking Orc

CHAPTER 5

“This is not a negotiation,” Rognar said.

Charlie disagreed. She had been disagreeing since twelve-forty. That was when he’d gotten her down for the first time and stood over the crib without breathing, the way a male stands over a puck that might still be waved off. Then he had gone to bed, and at ten past two she was awake again.

The second time it took forty minutes to get her back to sleep. He did it exactly the way Nora had shown him. He held her against his chest so she wasn’t looking at the room, slowly patted her back, and made the slow ridiculous radiator noise. It worked. It simply took forty minutes to work, and he had spent most of them certain he was doing it wrong.

The third time it took fourteen minutes.

He was much too tired to be pleased about it, but he noticed. Nobody ever got better at something by being good at it. You got better by being bad at it at two in the morning and then doing it again at four. Which was roughly where they were now, at four-forty-seven, with the window still black and his daughter wide awake and delighted about it.

“Here’s my offer,” he said. Charlie regarded him solemnly over the edge of the burp cloth. “You sleep. I sleep. Everybody’s happy. It’s a good deal. I’d take it.”

She blew a bubble at him.

“Okay. But you’re negotiating from a position of weakness, and I want that on the record.”

The rocking chair was the one piece of furniture in the room he hadn’t had to build. At some point in the previous six hours it had become the most important object he owned. He sat down in it. Charlie went heavy against his chest with the boneless finality of a person who had won. Across the room, the stuffed dragon watched them both from the dresser. The unicorn had been relocated to the corner after he caught sight of it at three in the morning and briefly mistook it for an intruder.

“Don’t tell anyone about that,” he murmured.

Her hand found his beard and closed on it. He meant to put her down. Instead he woke in the chair when his phone alarm went off at 5:30, for a 7 a.m. practice he had somehow forgotten was on his calendar. That calendar belonged to a different male—a male with eight hours of sleep and no daughter.

The alarm had woken Charlie too. Warm, furious, damp at the edges, her little face screwed into that pre-cry knot that had by now imprinted itself onto the inside of his skull.

“I know. Big day yesterday. Big day.” He got the bottle going one-handed, which was a skill he did not possess at midnight and apparently did possess now, forged overnight in the fires of desperation. “You and me, we had a rough start, but I think we’re finding our rhythm. Don’t you think? Little bit?”

Charlie looked at him with the flat contempt of a landlord.

“Tough crowd.”

She took the bottle. She took the whole bottle, which was the first unambiguously good thing to happen since two o’clock the previous afternoon. He stood in the grey not-yet-morning of a house filled with half-unpacked boxes and held his daughter while she ate, and something like satisfaction settled in his chest.

Then he looked at the clock. 5:58. Then he remembered practice.

Which was when he remembered the point of the frantic phone calls yesterday—to a nanny agency, to a daycare, to a woman named Deb who came highly recommended and had a waitlist. None of it could start today. Deb had to interview him. The agency needed forty-eight hours and a background check. The daycare had laughed at him, kindly, and put him on a list.

“No,” he said, out loud, to no one.

He drank his coffee standing up because sitting down seemed dangerous. Charlie sat in the bouncing saucer thing on the kitchen floor, hitting a plastic sunflower with real conviction. He considered his morning from several angles and did not enjoy any of them. Practice was at seven.

Technically he didn’t have to go. Tarmek had excused him until further notice, which had been a genuinely kind thing to do and which he had no intention of accepting. Further notice was how a male stopped being on a team. He’d seen it happen too many times. First they worked around you. Then they planned around you, and then one day the schedule simply didn’t include you and nobody could remember when that had happened. Also there was a preseason game on Friday. Also, and he admitted this only in the privacy of his kitchen, he wanted very badly to skate for an hour and think about absolutely nothing.

He looked through the kitchen window. Across the strip of lawn, a light was on in the house next door.

“No,” he said again, with less conviction, and went to get dressed.

Fifteen minutes later he was on Nora’s doorstep. She answered the door in a robe with a mug in her hand and her hair pulled up and her glasses on. She took one look at him and the baby and the diaper bag and the wild sleepless eyes and her lips firmed.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thank you. I’ve been up since two. And four. And four-forty-seven.”

“Did she sleep?”

“Eventually. Three times.” He shifted Charlie higher. “The radiator thing worked. I want you to know that I have never felt stupider in my life, and I’d do it in front of the entire league if it got her down.”

“Good,” she said.