Page 63 of Single Pucking Orc

“She won’t,” he agreed. “Do you want her on the bed or on me?”

“On you’s fine. She’ll fight it either way, but she’ll fight it happier on you.”

He turned Charlie against his chest and got her head still with one hand the way Brogan had shown him. The doctor went in with the little light and Charlie shrieked and twisted. He held her exactly as steady as she needed to be and no steadier. It was over in four seconds.

“There we are.” The doctor straightened. “Left ear’s got a nice little infection brewing. Right’s clear. Nothing on the chest, throat’s fine. This is the ordinary one, Mr. Stonebreaker—it’s viral more often than not at her age. Hers has gone bacterial, with that temperature and the length of it. I’m going to give you a course of amoxicillin. I’ll tell you now she’ll hate the taste, and you’ll wear more of it than she swallows for the first two days.”

“How long till it⁠—”

“Better in two to three days. Worse tonight before it’s better, most likely, because that’s how ears go. Keep the Tylenol going for the pain, every four hours, no closer. If the temperature won’t come down at all, if she goes floppy, if she stops taking fluids, or if you see her guarding her neck—then the after-hours line, and don’t sit on it. But…” She looked at him, and there was something almost gentle on the flat professional face. “You did exactly the right thing. Most first-timers don’t.”

“He’s not a first-timer,” Nora said.

To Charlie. Not to either of them. She said it down to the baby, tucking the loose duck-sock foot back into the sling with one finger, like a secret told to someone too small to keep it. He’s not a first-timer. Then she straightened up and went back to holding the bag.

He had to look at the poster about handwashing for a moment. His eyes had gone hot and this was not the place.

Nine in the morning, and the amoxicillin sat on his kitchen counter in its little white box. The adrenaline of the crisis had finally faded away, and left them sitting silently in a cold kitchen.

Charlie was asleep in her crib at last. Properly asleep this time, with her mouth open and her fists uncurled. She was deep in the boneless sleep of a baby who’d been awake and in pain for seven hours and had finally been told, chemically, that she could stop.

Nora had made toast. Neither of them had eaten it.

“You didn’t answer for me,” he said. “In there.”

She looked up from the toast she wasn’t eating.

“You knew about the bottle. The eight-fifteen one. She left half of that too and you were there. You had it. You let me tell the doctor she was too heavy and work out for myself it was the fever. You let me say it.” He turned the little white box on the counter. “You had every answer in that room and you sat on your hands.”

“You got it right.”

“I got it right second.” He looked at the counter, at the box, at the printed sticker with Charlie’s name on it, Stonebreaker, C., spelled out by a machine as though it were an ordinary fact about the world. “I love you. There’s a refill. I have to call the clinic on Thursday for it, they said Thursday because she’ll need the second week.”

The kitchen went very quiet. The kettle he’d boiled and not used clicked once as it cooled.

“Rognar.”

“I know what I said.” He didn’t take it back. He didn’t build a joke on top of it even though he’d spent his life doing that, because if you’re the one who laughs nobody checks on you.

He just left it out there on the counter next to the box of antibiotics, the biggest thing he’d ever said sitting flatly beside the smallest domestic fact he owned. And he made himself look up from the counter and at her face while he waited for whatever came next.

CHAPTER 24

Nora remained in the kitchen. She had spent almost thirty years knowing where the door was in any given room. There was a door here, only a few feet away, and then out across the cold grass to the safety of her house. She didn’t go to it. She put her hand on the counter beside the toast neither of them had eaten and she stayed.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Rognar said. “I want that on the record. I didn’t say it to make you⁠—”

“Stop talking.”

He stopped. Charlie was in her room, deep in the boneless amoxicillin sleep. The kettle clicked once more as it cooled. She looked at the little white box with her daughter’s—with his daughter’s—name spelled out by a machine. She made herself start talking before she’d finished arranging what she wanted to say, even though she hated doing it in that order.

“When I was nine, the power went off,” she said. “In the apartment on Corliss Street. Third one that year. My mother had… There was a reason. There was always a reason. And the reason was never that she didn’t love me. I want to be clear. She loved me the entire time, spectacularly, at the top of her lungs. The power just went off. And I knew where she kept the letters, because I always knew where things were. That was already my job by then. So I found the account number, and I took a quarter to the payphone on the corner, and I called the company and read them the number and told them we’d pay. And I got the electricity turned back on.” She moved the box on the counter, the way she’d watched him do it a few minutes ago. Then she noticed she was doing it, and left her hand there. “I was nine. I’ve never told anyone that. I told it to you at The Broken Stick like it was a funny story about a resourceful child.”

“You did.”

“It isn’t a funny story.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”