Page 40 of Single Pucking Orc

His hands were clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that his knuckles were white. He only lasted a few minutes before pride got the better of nerves. Then he went and knocked.

She opened it in a dark green dress that clung to the body that had been against his on a counter with her hair down, and no glasses, and whatever he’d rehearsed left the building entirely.

“You match,” she said, looking at the shirt.

“I’m going to kill Fen.”

“Don’t. I like it.” She grabbed her coat, then stepped out and pulled the door shut. “You parked.”

“I did not park.”

“Your truck is on the street. You live next to me. You parked on the street.”

“I’ve asked you not to keep records.”

The Broken Stick sat two blocks off Main Street, a low brick building with a neon sign in the window that had been half-dead for as long as anyone could remember. It smelled of char and hops and fried food. Booths down one wall. A long dark bar down the other. Somewhere a jukebox was losing an argument with a hockey broadcast.

“Four years,” he said, waiting for her to take a seat in the booth at the back, the good booth. “You’ve done these books for four years.”

“How do you⁠—”

“You told me. At the fence. March, I think. You said you’d never eaten here.” He slid in across from her. “You’ve sent Grimshaw an invoice every quarter since he bought the place, and you’ve never had the pie.”

“I don’t remember telling you that.”

“You told me a lot of things at the fence. You thought you were being unfriendly.”

The waitress came. He ordered without a menu. She watched him do it, and he watched her watch him, and it was the best three seconds of his week.

Two booths down, working extremely hard at a basket of fries, sat Fen and Jensen.

They were not looking over. Fen had his back half-turned and his neck at an angle that would need a physiotherapist by morning. Jensen was reading a laminated drinks menu with the focus of a male defusing a bomb. Neither of them glanced across even once, which was how he knew they’d been briefed, probably by Grimshaw, probably by text. Under the studied indifference the pair of them were as pleased as two enormous idiots could be.

“Your teammates,” Nora said, “are pretending not to watch us so hard they’ve stopped blinking.”

“Ignore them. They’re not teasing. That’s the terrible part. If they were teasing I could work with it.” He picked up his water. “This is worse. This is them being happy.”

She laughed, and it changed her whole face, and he lost the thread of whatever he’d been going to say next.

They talked. It turned out to be easy, which he hadn’t been sure about. Banter over a fence was one thing, and banter over a child was another, and this was a table with nowhere to hide,. He’d half-braced for it to go stiff. It didn’t. She asked about before, and he told her.

He told it lightly. Junior hockey at fifteen, billeted with strangers in three different towns. The Andersons, who were kind, and the other family, who weren’t.

He’d learned fast to be easy, to be the kid the family liked having around—because the kid they liked got fed properly and the kid they didn’t got a lot of closed doors.

“So that’s where it started,” she said. “The easy thing.”

“Probably. I’d have to ask a professional. I’ve been told I should ask a professional.” He turned his glass. “There was a year I didn’t get the contract. I was twenty. Everyone I came up with got signed and I didn’t. I spent a year working the loading dock at a distribution warehouse in a town I won’t name. Skating at six in the morning before shift on a rink a guy let me into because I fixed his Zamboni once.”

He told it like a good story, timed for the small laugh, and got it.

And she stopped laughing halfway through when something recalibrated behind her eyes. And he knew she’d caught that there was a lot behind the lightness. She didn’t say anything about it, which he was grateful for, and it made him want to tell her the true version some night when it wasn’t a first date.

Then it was her turn, and she told him about Summer.

She did it the way he’d just done his—light, funny, timed. The addresses, she called them, and counted a few off on her fingers with a comedian’s rhythm. The apartment above the yoga studio, the friend’s farm during the pottery phase. The four months in a van that Summer had described as an adventure and Nora had described, at eleven, as a van. He laughed at all the right places.

Then she said, in exactly the same dry, funny register, “When I was nine the power got cut off. She’d forgotten the bill. It happens, it’s fine. So I found the account number on one of the letters she hadn’t opened and I walked down to the payphone on the corner and I called the power company and I got it turned back on.”