Page 12 of Single Pucking Orc

Fen: since when do you know about babies

Brogan: since none of your business

Brogan went offline, and Rognar stared at the screen. He had just received more words from Brogan in thirty seconds than the goalie voluntarily produced during most road trips. He put that away for a night when his daughter wasn’t screaming.

“Okay,” he told Charlie. “Brogan says we stop.”

He carried her into the living room, turned off all but one lamp, and sat in the chair with her tucked against his chest. For nearly a minute, he managed not to move. Her crying went up half an octave, and every instinct he possessed screamed at him to do something. He lasted another thirty seconds before his body won and he was back on his feet.

“Brogan said not to do this,” he told her.

Charlie screamed.

He tried the bottle once more. She turned her face away and arched so hard he almost dropped her.

“What do you need?” he said desperately. “Tell me what you need.”

She couldn’t. That might have been the worst part.

He reached for his phone again and called the after-hours number Mildred had written on the back of her card. A recorded voice thanked him for calling county family services and informed him that office hours were eight-thirty to four-thirty. If this was an emergency, he should hang up and call 911.

He considered that. Was it an emergency? He went back to the list of warning signs. He checked Charlie again. No fever. Her breathing settled whenever the crying stopped briefly. She was alert. Furious, exhausted, miserable—but alert.

Not an emergency. At least he didn’t think it was. And he didn’t know enough to trust himself, and he hated that. For the first time all day, underneath the fear, he was angry.

Val had known.

She’d known his number. She’d known where he lived. She’d known how to find him. She had gone through doctors and pregnancy and childbirth and six months of Charlie’s life, and somewhere along the way she had decided he was a male you named in a will but didn’t call. He had missed everything.

Charlie hiccupped against his neck, and the anger vanished almost as quickly as it had come, leaving something heavier behind. Val was dead. She had trusted him enough to send Charlie to him. Those facts sat side by side in his chest and refused to fit together.

He could be angry later. Right now his daughter needed him. And he didn’t know what she needed.

Do you even know how to take care of a baby?

Nora’s words came back with viciously good timing. He closed his eyes. He could keep doing this. Keep walking. Keep trying the same things in different orders because asking Nora Bennett for help would mean admitting that, at this precise moment, she had been right about him.

Except she hadn’t been right, not really. He didn’t know how to take care of Charlie yet.

He had spent most of his adult life on the ice. He knew what happened when a play broke down and the plan disappeared. He could keep skating into a corner nobody was covering because that was where he’d intended to go. Or he could look up and find the open man. Pride was the corner nobody was covering.

He looked towards the wall. There was a woman eight feet away across the grass who alphabetized things.

He had watched Nora Bennett replace a section of her gutter last spring in the rain, wearing a yellow raincoat and using a level because apparently even gutters required precision. He had watched her carry a container of soup across the street to old Mr. Halloran at exactly six o’clock every evening for four days after his hip replacement. She had complained to the town when a broken streetlight went unrepaired for two weeks, then followed up until somebody fixed it.

Nora noticed things. Nora fixed things. And underneath all the dry remarks and disapproving looks, Nora was kind. He knew that too.

He looked down at Charlie. Her face was wet, her cheeks flushed darker around the edges, her tiny fists clenched against his chest. She drew a shuddering breath. That settled it.

“Come on,” he murmured, grabbing the nearest blanket. “We’re going to make me eat some crow.”

Charlie whimpered.

“Wait till you meet her properly. She thinks I’m an idiot. You’ll love her.”

He crossed the strip of grass between the houses in bare feet because he genuinely didn’t think about shoes. He was halfway up Nora’s front steps before he realized he hadn’t thought about a coat either. It didn’t matter. Charlie started crying again.

He raised one fist and knocked three times. Then he waited, and it was the longest four seconds of his life until he heard footsteps, and the deadbolt, and the door swung open.