Page 33 of Single Pucking Orc

Nora had come over on a pretext so transparent she’d nearly turned back on the grass—Charlie’s rattle, retrieved from her fruit bowl and held out in front of her like a key.

She walked into Rognar’s kitchen to find a compact, cheerful woman of about fifty laying out a folder on the counter with the calm authority of someone about to run a meeting.

“You must be the neighbor,” Deb said, and smiled. She had a tote bag with her name embroidered on it. Deb’s Little Ones. There was a logo. A small yellow sun with a face.

“I’m Nora.”

“Nora.” Deb wrote that down. She wrote it in a notebook that was, Nora saw with a lurch she chose not to examine, better than hers—hardbound, tabbed, color-coded. “Rognar mentioned you’d be around. It’s lovely, having neighbors who pitch in.”

Nora set the rattle on the counter. Rognar was somewhere in the back with Charlie, narrating a diaper change with the doomed enthusiasm of a male commentating on a match his team was losing.

She looked at the laminated schedule.

She didn’t mean to, exactly, but it was on the counter, propped against the toaster, and it was excellent. Feeds, naps, tummy time, wake windows, a column for notes, a column for output, color bands down the side, and the social worker’s visits mapped out for the next two months. It was better than the schedule she would have made. It was better than schedules she had made, for actual paying businesses, that had gone into actual binders.

The trap closed around her ankle. She couldn’t say a single honest word about that schedule. She couldn’t admire it, because admiring it meant explaining how she knew enough to admire it. She couldn’t critique the structure, because the structure was flawless. Everything she felt about it led back to the same door. Behind the door was the sentence I have been running this child’s life in my head for three weeks. She was not opening that door in this kitchen, in front of a woman with a branded tote.

So it came out sideways, because it had to go somewhere.

“It says the bottle’s at eight-thirty.”

Deb glanced at it. “That’s when the agency recommends. First feed after the wake window.”

“It’s at eight-fifteen.” Her voice came out level and precise and utterly betraying. “It’s been eight-fifteen for three weeks. She’s hungry by eight. If you wait till half past she works herself up and then she gulps it and then she’s got wind and the whole morning’s a write-off.”

There was a small silence.

Deb, pleasantly, unclipped her pen. “Eight-fifteen,” she said, and wrote it down, and drew a neat line through the printed 8:30 and lettered the correction above it in a hand nicer than Nora’s, and smiled again, warmly, without a trace of anything at all.

It was the worst possible response. There was nothing to push against. Deb had simply agreed with her, absorbed the correction, improved the document. In doing so she had quietly established, with total kindness, that Nora had walked into a strange kitchen. She had rewritten the feeding schedule of a baby she had no standing over whatsoever.

“Thanks,” Deb said. “That’s the kind of thing that only the people who’re really in it would know.”

Nora took her rattle back and left.

She’d expected the closeness to taper off. She had made a kind of peace with it in advance, the way she made peace with a client leaving—cleanly, professionally, wishing them well. Deb was competence in a branded tote. Deb solved the actual problem, which was that a professional hockey player could not be in two places at once. With Deb installed, there was nothing left that Rognar needed her for. She’d assumed he’d stop coming.

He did not.

He came over Wednesday evening, once Deb had gone, with Charlie freshly bathed and smelling of the lavender wash and half-asleep against him. He sat on Nora’s floor and ate most of a sleeve of the crackers she kept for herself, and told her a long, aggrieved story about Fen’s continuing campaign to get the 4T jersey accepted as a legitimate garment. He stayed two hours. He had no reason to be there. He didn’t appear to have noticed that he had no reason to be there.

Thursday he came over with nothing to eat, which meant he ate her food again. He fell asleep on her couch for forty minutes with Charlie on his chest, while she finished a set of accounts at the desk with the lamp on.

She typed quietly. She didn’t wake him, and told herself the quiet was a professional courtesy.

Saturday, no game, he turned up at eight in the evening and stood in her doorway and said, “You busy?” His tone made it clear he didn’t much care about the answer. She’d said no before she’d decided to. He’d come in.

He kept coming over. There was no feed he needed help with, no crib to assemble, and no crisis in the aisle of a baby shop. Deb had the days sewn up tight and laminated. And still he arrived, in the evenings, with nothing in his hands and no problem to solve. It took Nora four days to understand that this was information, and another day to decide to test it. She didn’t trust information she hadn’t verified.

So she ran the audit in reverse.

She removed the excuse. All of it. Methodically, over a single afternoon, she gathered every foreign object in the house and packed it into the branded tote Deb had, with cheerful thoroughness, left behind. The two bottles, washed and dry. The blanket, folded, off the arm of the couch where it had lived for nine days now. The tin of lanolin off the windowsill. The burp cloth she’d rescued from her laundry, laundered again to be sure. The pacifier from the fruit bowl. The duck bib. The muslin, the rattle, the duck board book.

She got to the sock.

She stood at her desk with the tote in one hand and the duck sock in the other and conducted a short, silent, entirely humiliating negotiation with herself. The terms were plain and the outcome was never in doubt.

She put the sock back on the desk, exactly where it had been, and zipped the tote without it.