Page 22 of Single Pucking Orc

Nora: She’s fine. Stop looking at your phone.

Rognar started to type how did you know, and deleted it, because obviously she knew.

Nora: Also she smiled at me again.

Nora: I’ve entered it in the log as a hostile act.

Fen went past and said something about the newsletter, but he was too busy grinning at the screen to care.

CHAPTER 6

By 7:15 Nora had discovered that a six-month-old was a project that refused to stay on the desk.

She’d had a plan. It was a good plan. She’d cleared a spot on the floor of her office with a play mat and a protective nest of cushions, along with a small arsenal of objects designed to be gummed. She’d sat down at her desk to reconcile Green Mountain Landscaping’s quarterly, with a baby contentedly occupied three feet to her left. For a full nine minutes it had worked.

Nine minutes.

“You,” she said, “are not being supportive of the local small business economy.”

Charlie, who had abandoned the play mat entirely and was now attempting to eat the corner of a blanket with the single-minded focus of a woman with a mission, disagreed.

Nora got her a teething ring. Charlie regarded it with contempt and returned to the blanket. She took the blanket corner away. Charlie’s face gathered itself into the expression Nora was already learning to fear, like a cloud coming in over the sea. And Nora, who did not negotiate and who had opinions about parents who negotiated, said, “Okay, okay, no, don’t, here, look, look at this, look how interesting this is,” and picked her up.

That was the end of Green Mountain Landscaping’s quarterly.

Because it turned out that a six-month-old on your hip was a full-time commitment of one arm, one shoulder, and most of your attention. The part she hadn’t anticipated was how much she liked it. Charlie settled against her like she belonged there. Then Charlie got a fistful of her hair and pulled it into her mouth. Nora extracted it and Charlie went for her glasses instead, and Nora extracted those and Charlie made a sound of pure outrage.

Then, two seconds later, having forgotten the entire injustice, Charlie tipped her head back and gave her a smile so enormous and so uncomplicated that her chest actually ached. It was the same feeling that had lost her the argument on the doorstep at six that morning.

“That,” Nora informed her, “is a cheap trick. It worked on your father but it’s not going to work on⁠—”

Charlie did it again, and she sighed.

“Apparently it is going to work on me. God, you’re your father’s daughter, aren’t you? You’re a menace.”

She got about forty minutes of work done, in fragments, one-handed. She typed with Charlie propped in the crook of her arm, narrating debit and credit entries out loud in the calm sing-song she’d discovered kept the cloud offshore. She fed her a bottle at 8:15 and got half of it down her sleeve. She changed a diaper on the office floor with a concentration she hadn’t used since a college anatomy exam.

And somewhere in there, between the ruined quarterly and the ruined sleeve, she stopped resenting the interruption. The dangerous part, the part she was going to have to lie to her therapist about, was that she started looking forward to it. To the little grabbing hands, and the weight against her arm, and the way Charlie watched her mouth when she talked, like Nora was saying something that mattered.

She was full-on rocking her, standing at the office window, humming something tuneless, when the truck pulled into the driveway next door.

9:26. He was four minutes early.

She watched him climb out of the truck, still in team warmups with his hair coming loose from its bun. He jogged across the strip of lawn with the haste of a male who’d broken several traffic laws getting there. She barely had time to arrange her face into its usual composed expression before he knocked.

“She alive?” he said, when she opened it.

“Barely. I nearly worked her to death. She’s a terrible employee. No focus, poor time management, and she ate part of a blanket.” She handed Charlie over. Charlie went to him with a happy shriek and both fists grabbing for his beard. Nora ignored, entirely, what that did to her. “How was your little skating?”

“Humiliating and instructive.” He already had Charlie tucked expertly against his shoulder, one enormous hand spread over her back. He did it without thinking about it now, which she noticed, because noticing things was a compulsion she couldn’t switch off. “I fell over during a drill I’ve run ten thousand times because I fell asleep standing up. Coach made me sit out the second half. He was actually fine about it, weirdly. He has kids. He gets it.”

“And the rest of it?” She leaned against her doorframe, arms crossed. “You said you’d figure the rest out yourself. I’d like to see the homework, because I did not sign up for Tuesday-forever, and I am watching for the exact moment you attempt to make this Tuesday-forever.”

“You want the report?”

“I want the report.”

“Fine.” He rearranged Charlie and delivered it over the top of her head. “The nanny agency called back. Two candidates cleared the background check. I’ve got interviews this afternoon at four and four-forty-five, back to back, at the coffee place on Main so it’s neutral ground. The daycare can start Thursday, which buys me some time, but I really want somebody in the house, because we travel and daycares don’t do 11 p.m. flights back from Montreal. Deb, of the personal brand, called me personally. We’re circling.”