Page 62 of Single Pucking Orc

He did it in order. He got the light on low so it wouldn’t hurt her eyes. He got the thermometer. The ear one made her scream, so he used the forehead one, drawn across in the arc the box had shown, and it read 102.0. He read it again. It still read 102.0.

He set it down and picked her up against his chest where she liked to be, and she did not settle the way she always settled. She kept pulling at the ear.

He got the folder Deb kept out one-handed and found the fever page with the dose by weight. His hands were not steady. He looked down at them like they belonged to somebody else. The paper shook. He held it flatter against the changing table so it would stop.

Order. You do it in order and then it’s done and then you know what to do next.

He got the infant Tylenol and the little syringe and drew the dose. He checked it against the page. He checked the page against her weight from the last appointment, the one he’d recited to Nora along with the ninety-first percentile. He got the medicine into her. She fought it and then took it. He picked the thermometer back up and ran it across her forehead again. It read 102.0, which he had known it would. Two minutes did not change a fever, and he knew that. He checked it anyway. His hands wanted a task, and the task he wanted was one that would tell him she was fine.

She pulled at the ear.

She cried the wrong cry.

He had his phone in his hand and Nora’s name up and his thumb over it before he’d decided anything at all—and stopped. He’d promised. This isn’t going to become your responsibility. He’d built their relationship on that. He’d taken her off Deb’s laminated schedule so she’d never once be a call somebody made at two in the morning out of nobody’s decision but geography.

He pressed it anyway, then hung up before it connected.

Charlie arched against him and screamed.

He dialed again. He got as far as the ring. She’s a person, he thought. She has clients. She has a life she arranged so nobody would do this to her. He hung up again with his heart in his mouth and set the phone face down on the changing table like it had burned him.

He walked Charlie. He walked the length of the hall and back, and then again. Low light, one big hand cupping the small furious head, saying nothing. There was nothing to say that a seven-month-old with a fever could use. He kept walking to have something to do with his legs.

The knock came at the back door forty seconds later.

She had a coat over her pajamas and her hair down and no glasses. She took one look at him standing in his hall with his daughter screaming against his shoulder. She didn’t ask what was wrong.

“I saw the lights,” she said. “Ear?”

“She keeps pulling at it. Her temperature’s a hundred and two. I gave her the⁠—”

“I know you did.” She was already in, already toeing the door shut behind her against the cold. “Show me the numbers.”

He showed her the folder. She read it the way she read a client’s books, one pass, no fuss, and handed it back.

“That’s the right dose,” she said. Not I’ll take her. Not let me. She looked at Charlie, red-faced and streaming and pulling at the ear, and something painful crossed her face. She put her hands in the pockets of her coat and left them there. “First slot at the clinic’s at eight. Do you want to wait for it or do you want the after-hours line now?”

Both of them. She’d handed him both of them.

“Clinic,” he said. “It’s not… She’s not limp, she’s furious. That’s better. That’s the good one.” He was telling himself as much as her, and she let him. She didn’t tell him he was right, which would have meant she’d been in charge.

“Then we’ve got six hours,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on. You’ve got her.”

He had her. He walked her. Nora sat in his kitchen in her coat with two mugs going cold and did not once ask for the baby.

Around half past four the Tylenol did its work. The screaming dropped to a whimper and then to a damp exhausted quiet. Charlie slept against his chest in a way that was still not right—too heavy and too warm—but at least she was sleeping. Nora put a blanket over the both of them when he sat and went back to her chair. She’d made it plain she was staying. She had not made it a favor. She’d made it not up for discussion.

The clinic smelled of strong soap and the cheap coffee. The doctor who came out for them at ten after eight was the half-orc pediatrician from the very first week, with a calm, unhurried manner. The absence of hurry did more for his chest than the Tylenol had done for Charlie’s.

“Mr. Stonebreaker. And who’s this cross young lady?” She crouched to Charlie’s level and didn’t reach for her. “Left ear, I’d guess, from the way you’re guarding it. What’s she been doing?”

You. Directed at him. He answered it.

“Pulling at the left one since about two. Off her food last night, now that I think about it—she left half a bottle and I thought she was just full. Temp topped out at a hundred and two, came down with the Tylenol around four thirty. Sleeping now but heavy and hot to hold. No rash, I checked, and she’s cross, not floppy.”

He felt Nora, beside him, not saying the part about the bottle. She’d been there last night when he told her about the half-bottle. She’d filed it the way she filed everything. She did not now supply she left half a bottle at the eight-fifteen feed as well, even though he watched it stay behind her teeth. She held the diaper bag. That was her entire job and she did it as though it were the only job in the room.

“May I have a look in the ears? She won’t enjoy it.”