Page 9 of Single Pucking Orc

She had never seen so much of anything. Box after box tramped up his front walk in his arms, and even in the growing darkness, she could read the pictures on the sides. A crib. A high chair. Something shaped like a saucer with a hundred dangling toys. She caught the flash of a package of diapers the size of a hay bale, a stack of tiny folded things, and a play mat rolled under his arm like a yoga mat he had no business owning.

And almost all of it was pink. Pink boxes and pink bags and pink clothes. A tidal wave of pink, foaming up his front walk,. It was as though he had learned he had a daughter and concluded that the correct response was to buy every pink object in the building. Somewhere under the ridiculousness of it was something that made her chest ache in a way she categorically refused to name.

On his next trip he picked up an enormous stuffed unicorn that he carried by the horn with an expression of such total bafflement that a laugh escaped before she could stop it, and his head turned. She froze, but the houses weren’t that far apart, and he had clearly spotted her at the window. He lifted the unicorn solemnly in her direction. She shook her head. His grin flashed before he carried the unicorn inside.

She went back to her desk. She fixed the four numbers she had entered in the wrong column and worked determinedly for another twenty minutes. The Hendricks account balanced, every cent accounted for, the world in its correct and comforting order.

Outside, Rognar was still unloading his newly acquired pink kingdom.

She was not going to get involved. She would be pleasant. She would be sympathetic about Charlie’s mother. She would tolerate whatever disruption came with living next door to an infant because only a monster complained about a crying baby. She would stay firmly on her side of the fence. It was a good plan.

A thin wail pierced the quiet, and her fingers stopped on the keyboard.

The cry rose sharply, gathering force with impressive speed. It was the specific, escalating, absolutely-not-messing-around scream of a six-month-old who had apparently discovered that life contained disappointment. Outside, Rognar stopped dead. He was halfway up the walk with a box tucked beneath one arm. Charlie screamed again, and he dropped the box on the grass and ran for the house.

She stayed in the chair, staring through the window at the empty driveway and listening to the baby cry. Then she looked down at her perfectly balanced spreadsheet.

I am not getting involved.

CHAPTER 3

The instructions were in Swedish. They were accompanied by pictures, but the pictures were lying. Rognar sat on the floor of his spare bedroom with a crib in thirty-one pieces around him and an Allen wrench the size of a toothpick between two fingers that could crush a hockey puck. The diagram showed a cheerful stick figure assembling the crib in four easy steps. The stick figure had no baby. The stick figure had all the time in the world.

He hated the stick figure.

“Okay,” he told the room. “We can do this.”

Charlie, propped in her carrier where he could see her, made a small sound that suggested she was reserving judgment.

“I hear you. But I’d like it noted that I’m working with inadequate coaching materials.”

She chewed on her fist, and he went back to the diagram. He’d made a plan. People didn’t necessarily expect that from him, and he’d always found that funny. He liked having a good time. He liked doing things on impulse. He had once driven six hours after practice because Korvash mentioned a barbecue place that supposedly served the best ribs in the state. None of that meant he went through life waiting for other people to clean up after him.

He hadn’t played professional hockey for most of his adult life without learning how to follow a system. Tonight’s system was simple. Build the crib. Get Charlie settled. Then tackle the rest of the mountain one piece at a time.

He had already cleared the guest room, which had taken longer than he expected. He had played eleven professional seasons and apparently kept a souvenir of all of them, and the spare bedroom was where the souvenirs went. Three bags of gear. A box of skates in four sizes, none of them current. Two sticks he had been meaning to have re-taped since the spring, a folded exercise bike, and a signed jersey from a player he had idolized at nineteen, still in the tube it came in.

He carried it all out to the garage in six trips with Charlie strapped to his chest in a sling thing the helpful girl at the baby store had recommended. In the end the room held a dresser, a rocking chair, and nothing else. It looked bare, but it also looked like a room somebody could live in. One afternoon, and his house had a nursery in it.

Eventually there would be other things in here. Pictures, maybe. Toys. Whatever babies needed in their rooms besides a place to sleep and an apparently infinite supply of diapers.

He returned to the crib. Slat A slid into groove B. He nearly wept.

“See?” he said. “Your dad’s a natural.”

Charlie’s face went through a thoughtful sequence of expressions. Then she smiled, and he grinned back.

“Exactly. Never doubted me.”

It took him another thirty-five minutes, two consultations with the internet, and a deeply personal disagreement with screw C. But eventually the crib stood in the corner of the room, level, sturdy, and containing exactly the number of bolts specified by the manufacturer.

He put both hands on the top rail and shook it. Nothing moved. He shook harder. Still nothing.

“Good enough for the National Hockey League,” he announced, and Charlie kicked her feet.

He picked up the stuffed dragon he’d bought at the store and set it on top of the dresser, safely out of the crib. Then he surveyed the room. Crib. Dresser. Chair. Dragon. It wasn’t much yet, but it was hers. The protective instinct that had flared at the lawyer’s office hummed with satisfaction.

“All right,” he said. “One thing down.”