Page 48 of Single Pucking Orc

Nora set the phone down with the exaggerated care of a woman setting down something she’d rather throw. She looked at it. She looked at the ceiling. She said, in a level and terrible voice, “There is a thing called lead time.”

“Is there?”

“Yes, there is, Rognar. It is a documented concept, and it exists so that a person can prepare a guest room and buy food a guest will eat and mentally arrange their entire life around the presence of another human being. My mother has never once in twenty-nine years extended me so much as a day of it. She extends me the amount of lead time it takes her to remember I exist, which is currently supper time, and there is a cow statue involved.”

“There’s a couch. She mentioned a couch.”

“She is not sleeping on my couch. My couch cost—” She stopped. “That’s not the point.”

“So today,” he said, and he could not, absolutely could not, keep the smile off his face.

She looked at him with dawning suspicion. “Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re doing a face.”

“I’m doing a completely neutral face. This is my resting face. Ask the team.” He picked Charlie up off the floor and settled her against his chest, where she immediately located his collar and got to work. “So this is your mother. The reason for all of it. The lead time and the documents and the woman who prints a list of four rules and staples it⁠—”

“I didn’t staple it.”

“—this is the source. Coming today. For supper.” He was grinning now, openly and unforgivably. “Nora. I get to meet your mother.”

She looked at him the way she’d look at an oncoming bus.

He had never in his life been more delighted about anything.

CHAPTER 16

The voice in the garden came at one o’clock, four hours before supper and three hours before anyone with a functioning relationship to time would have arrived. Nora knew, with the deep bodily certainty of a woman who had been braced since breakfast, exactly who it was and exactly where they were.

They were next door. Her mother had not been early for anything in twenty-nine years. She was four hours early for this.

“—the smell of it, that’s what I always say. You can’t fake tape and liniment, it goes straight to the back of your throat and stays there. My second husband played rugby, briefly, badly⁠—”

Nora came around her hedge at speed and found her mother on Rognar’s porch. Summer had an enormous plush object clutched to her chest—a giraffe taller than the baby it was intended for, with a neck like a rolled-up rug and eyes the size of saucers. And she was already deep in conversation with the six-and-a-half-foot orc leaning in his doorway, a baby on his hip, both of them laughing at something Nora had missed and would never now recover.

“Mom.”

“There she is!” Her mother turned, her smile radiant, silver-streaked hair coming loose from a scarf that had given up entirely. “Darling, this is your neighbor, he’s marvelous. I went to the wrong house⁠—”

Of course she did.

“—and he’s got the baby. Look at the baby, look at her little face! Oh, I brought her a giraffe, is it too big? It’s too big. She’ll grow into it. Whom am I hugging first, that’s the question.”

She hugged Rognar first. He was closer, and he had a baby, and he went down into it with the easy warmth of a male who had never once in his life been suspicious of a hug. Over her mother’s shoulder he looked at Nora. He grinned at her, and she realized that the entire day was already lost.

By three they had agreed about a dozen things and had been wrong, in her opinion, about all of them.

They took to each other the way two of the same animal take to each other across a field. Her mother perched on the arm of Rognar’s couch with Charlie on her knee, and the giraffe looming behind them both like a benevolent hostage-taker. Rognar sat on the floor, because he sat on the floor now. They built between them, brick by cheerful brick, a shared and unshakeable theory of Nora.

“Your daughter alphabetizes her spices,” Rognar said.

“I know.”

“By cuisine.”

“Rognar.” Her mother bounced Charlie, who was gazing up at her with the frank astonishment she usually reserved for Brogan. “I have known that woman since she was born, and I’m telling you, she came out like that. The nurse handed her to me and she gave the room a look. Two hours old. Assessing us.”