Page 32 of Single Pucking Orc

He found her after, in the tunnel, when the ice had cleared and the great grinding drone of the Zamboni came up through the boards and swallowed every other sound in the building. Charlie was asleep against his chest, worn out from being worshipped, a small warm weight breathing slowly into the crook of his neck. Nora had the diaper bag repacked—of course she had, she’d repacked it, everything zipped, everything squared—and she held it out to him.

He didn’t take it.

Instead he leaned down over the sleeping baby between them and kissed her, short and certain. The Zamboni covered the sound of the bag hitting the floor.

When he straightened, she picked up the bag back and put it over her shoulder, her face composed. Only her eyes gave anything away, and only for a second.

“That’s twice you’ve done that without checking,” she said levelly.

“I know.”

“I’m not complaining.” She adjusted the strap. “I’m keeping records.”

CHAPTER 10

There were eleven foreign objects in Nora’s house. She knew that because she walked through her house with a notebook and counted them, the way she’d count a client’s till at the end of a shift. Writing it down didn’t help in any way she could identify.

She started in the kitchen because that was where the evidence concentrated. Two bottles in the drainer, upended, clean, the little rings and nipples laid out beside them on a folded tea towel that was not hers either. That made a twelfth. She folded the towel into her drawer and refused to count something she’d absorbed. On the windowsill above the sink sat a small tin of nipple balm. Lanolin, the label said, which was a polite way of saying it was rendered from the workings of a cow. She’d bought it herself, at the pharmacy, in the daytime, standing at the counter like a person with a stake in the matter.

Item four was a burp cloth. It was in her laundry. She’d found it that morning tangled in a pillowcase and had stood holding it for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time.

Item five was the blanket over the arm of the couch, where it had been for six days. She hadn’t moved it. She had, on at least two occasions, sat on the other cushion so as not to disturb it, which was not what a rational person did with someone else’s blanket.

She cataloged the rest. A pacifier in the fruit bowl. A single small board book about a duck—another duck, the house was becoming a wetland—wedged between her ledgers on the office shelf. A muslin square. A bib with a duck on it, because of course there was. A rattle she’d confiscated during a client call and never given back.

Item eleven was the sock.

The duck sock. It had lived on her desk for going on three weeks now, and it was, at this point, less an object than a decision she kept declining to make.

She sat down at the kitchen table with her coffee and looked at the number.

The coffee was the part that bothered her most, if she was honest, and she tried to be honest inside her head if nowhere else. Rognar knew how she took her coffee. Not roughly. Not cream, I think. He knew the exact amount of milk, and the fact that she took it in the green mug with the chipped handle because the others were too heavy first thing, and that she wanted it hot enough to be slightly unwise. He turned up with it correct.

She worked backward. She was good at working backward. Half her job consisted of reconciling an ending to a beginning that had to have existed. Three weeks. She went through every morning she could reconstruct, every doorway conversation, every handoff of the diaper bag, and she couldn’t find the transaction. She hadn’t told him. There was no line item where she’d said this is how I take it. He had simply learned it because he had paid attention.

That was the coffee. The nap was worse, because the nap was something she’d done herself.

Charlie went down at ten past one. Not one o’clock. Not one-thirty. Ten past, reliably, the little face going slack and cross around one-oh-five and then gone by the quarter hour. Nora knew this. She hadn’t been told this either. She had observed it, the way she observed everything, and then—this was the part she’d caught herself red-handed only that morning—she had arranged two client calls this week around it. She’d moved the Petersen call to two. She’d told the Aldridge woman she couldn’t do one, would two work. She’d built her professional day around the sleep schedule of a child who was not hers, in a house that was not this one, and hadn’t noticed she was doing it until it was done.

She underlined eleven twice, which changed nothing.

And then there was the count she was not going to write in the notebook but carried anyway, because she carried the numbers of everything.

Five.

The kissing had happened five times. She wanted to be clear with herself about the mechanics of that, because clarity was the only tool she had left. Once on his front lawn, against the side of his truck. Once on her step. Once in a tunnel under the noise of a Zamboni. Once in his kitchen while he stirred something with one hand and Charlie slept in the sling and Nora had come over to return a—she couldn’t even remember what, which told her something. And once, most recently, in her hallway, with a bag of groceries hanging from her hand, the cans knocking against her leg the entire time. She hadn’t put the bag down. Putting the bag down would have been an admission. Holding it had felt, insanely, like a form of control.

Five. A truck, a step, a tunnel, a kitchen, and a hallway. She knew the number because of course she knew the number. She drank her correct coffee and constructed the argument, properly, the way she’d once sat across a boiling pot from him and laid down terms. She was good at terms.

Item one: she was twenty-nine, she was single, and she was in possession of a next-door neighbor who was, objectively, ridiculous to look at. This had been true for months before there was a baby involved. The tension had been there since the second week—she’d cataloged it and filed it under not acting on it, and the file had held.

Item two: an attraction that had simmered for the better part of a year was, statistically, going to boil over eventually. That was thermodynamics. It carried no obligation. People enjoyed each other. Adults did this all the time, in a controlled fashion, without anybody having to give up their independence or reorganize their life around a duck sock.

Item three, and this was the one that mattered: enjoying the attraction did not mean she had signed anything. There were no terms she couldn’t walk back. It was, she decided, an extraordinary item. Non-recurring in character even if it happened to recur. It didn’t affect the underlying trend, which was that she liked her life exactly as she’d built it and intended to go on liking it.

It was a good argument. She’d have presented it to a client without a second thought. She’d have talked them right through it and they’d have thanked her. She finished the coffee and did not believe a word of it, which she also declined to write down.

Deb started on a Wednesday, and Deb arrived with a laminated schedule.