Page 56 of Single Pucking Orc

It didn’t cover this.

Charlie was asleep on the goalie. Charlie was thirty feet away, unbothered and safe, buried in Brogan’s beard. There was no version of a stick coming down on the boards over a married male in a mint hoodie that was about being a new father. None. He stood there sweating in the tunnel mouth with the horror of a male who has just found a bill he cannot account for.

“You want to put the stick down.”

Brogan. Of course Brogan. He’d come up the tunnel without a sound, the way someone that size had no right to, Charlie still dead asleep against him.

“It’s fine,” he said., even though he didn‘t remember picking up the stick again.

“It’s a folding table, Stonebreaker.” Brogan’s gaze moved to the raffle end of the rink and back. “It hasn’t done anything.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re looking at.”

“Neither do you.” Brogan gave him a look. “That’s the problem.”

New father, he tried to say, and heard the words go dead before he could even finish thinking them. They didn’t fit, and he knew they didn’t fit, and Brogan was standing there watching him find out.

He said nothing.

Brogan looked down at the baby on his chest. Charlie, as if summoned, surfaced—her eyes wide and unfocused, her two tiny tusks catching the light. She looked up at Brogan. Then, with the total unbothered certainty of the very young, rolled her head sideways and looked straight at him.

“She knows,” Brogan said. “Ask her.”

He didn’t.

They ran the clipboard around at the end, the way they did every year. The sign-up for the winter push. One of the Emerald Hearts people in a mint hoodie moved from player to player with a laminated sheet and a pen on a string. Rognar caught pieces of it as it came down the line. Toy drive collections in December. The hospital visit. Two evenings of gift-wrapping nobody wanted. Hands needed for a wheelchair-accessible ramp at the shelter, Santa at the mall on the twenty-third. A skate clinic for the kids. Fen was already arguing that gift-wrapping was a two-man job and he was not a two-man job.

Brogan handed Charlie back to him before the clipboard reached him. He transferred her warm heavy weight from the crook of his arm into Rognar’s with a last automatic stroke of his thumb against the back of her skull. Then he collected his bag off the bench and walked calmly down the tunnel, towards the lot, while the clipboard was still three players away.

Nobody looked after him. Rognar didn’t either. He had a sleeping baby back on his chest and a discovery he couldn’t categorize sitting in his gut like a stone. Across the rink Nora was signing something on the laminated sheet in her small precise hand, glasses down her nose, correcting the volunteer’s spelling before she did.

He watched her do it.

And it was still there, and he still couldn’t dismiss it. He stood in the mouth of the tunnel with his daughter’s breath warm against his neck and discovered he didn’t want to.

CHAPTER 20

Rosa’s shoebox arrived first, on a Monday, which set the tone for everything after.

It was an actual shoebox—the same shoebox it had been for four years, one corner soft with handling. Inside it lived Rosa’s entire quarter: receipts folded into eighths, a bank statement someone had used as a coaster, and one napkin with a supplier’s number written on it in eyeliner. Nora tipped it out onto the desk and felt the private, slightly disgraceful relief of a woman who has just been handed nine days of work that would keep her completely occupied.

She knew it was relief. She made herself admit that first. She was relieved, and she knew she was relieved, and there was no client on earth she’d let get away with not naming a discrepancy that plainly.

The Trombleys came Tuesday, both of them, disagreeing about mileage in her doorway. Ben from Green Mountain came Wednesday with a problem about a truck he’d bought through the business and then, it emerged, partly not through the business. A problem that was going to cost her the better part of an afternoon and him the better part of his good mood. Month end. It came the way it always came—all at once, because the small chaotic economy of the town remembered simultaneously that Nora existed and that numbers were due.

She let it close over her head like water.

Somewhere in the middle of it she caught herself keeping the record. She didn’t notice starting it. She simply looked down one evening at her working notebook, the one that lived open beside the keyboard. And in the margin where she logged her billable hours, she found a second little tally she hadn’t authorized. Half an hour there. Twenty minutes there. An hour last Thursday. The hours Rognar cost her. She’d been keeping the ledger the way she kept every ledger, out of the automatic habit of a woman who trusted numbers more than she trusted almost anything, tracking the debit before it came due.

She looked at it for a while.

She wasn’t proud of it, but she left it there, because tearing it out would have been a decision, and she wasn’t ready to have made one.

He must have seen it in her face at the fence, or in the set of her shoulders. Because on Wednesday night the demand she’d been braced for simply didn’t come. He knocked once. She opened the door already tired, already sorting the evening into what she’d give him and what she’d have to protect. He handed her a warm foil-covered dish.

“You’re buried,” he said. “Eat something that isn’t a granola bar.”

And then he left. He was off the step and gone before she’d found a reply, the porch dark behind him. She stood there holding a dish of something that smelled like garlic and butter and had cost her nothing. No conversation, no management, no charming half-hour she’d have to bill against her time.