Page 50 of Single Pucking Orc

She picked up a plate. She dried it. She kept drying it. The water had long since gone cold in the basin. The house was quiet in the way it only was when someone else was asleep in it. She stood there turning the cloth over the same plate, around and around, for some time.

CHAPTER 17

The list was in block capitals because Rognar didn’t trust his handwriting under pressure, and packing for three days away from a seven-month-old qualified, in his current estimation, as pressure.

MOUTHGUARD. He crossed it off. SKATES—already in the bag the team packed, but he wrote it anyway, because writing it was the point. TAPE. PHONE CHARGER. SECOND PHONE CHARGER, because he had learned, in thirty-four years, that there was always a second one needed somewhere.

He got to the bottom of the list and read it again. Nothing on it belonged to Charlie. It had taken him a startling amount of effort to get it that way, and he’d been pleased with himself right up until he read it back. Everything Charlie needed was staying here, because Charlie was staying here, because Charlie’s father was going to Montreal and Charlie was not. He’d never once had to think that sentence before. He did not enjoy the experience.

He zipped the bag. Then he unzipped it, checked for the mouthguard he had already crossed off, found it, and zipped it again.

“You’re stalling,” he told the empty bedroom.

The empty bedroom, being a coward, said nothing.

Nora was at the fence when he came out, which she was not usually at seven thirty in the morning. He decided not to notice that she’d timed it. He was busy not noticing several things this week, and one more wouldn’t hurt.

“Montreal,” he said, over the pickets. “Three days. Two games.”

“I know. It’s on the fridge.” She had done that. She had put his schedule on his fridge, in her handwriting, one evening in October, and neither of them had ever discussed it. “Nine o’clock flight back on the third night. The late one.”

“The late one.” Everybody took the late flight out of Montreal. It got you home at a stupid hour to a dark house and it was the only flight worth taking. “Deb’s got Charlie the whole trip. Days and nights. It’s covered. The insurance is sorted, the pediatric thing’s the fifteenth, that’s after I’m back, and there’s a card for the fridge with my number, Deb’s number, the team doctor, and Barrington, in case—” He stopped. “In case of Barrington.”

She waited.

“I’m not asking you,” he said plainly. He needed it clear between them, the way he’d needed it that first night, when it was a screaming baby and no idea what he was doing. “You know that. This isn’t yours. I’ve got it handled and none of it’s landing on you. That was the deal from the first night and it’s still the deal.”

She looked at him over the fence for a moment. She had her mug in both hands and her glasses pushed up into her hair, and her mouth did something he couldn’t identify, and then she nodded.

“I know,” she said. The deal worked precisely because neither of them ever said out loud that it was working.

He went to Montreal.

The scheduling problem arrived on the morning of the second day, by text, from Deb. It was the sort of problem that was barely a problem—a daughter’s parent-teacher evening she’d forgotten, on the middle night, and a gap of about four hours she needed covered. Apologetic in three paragraphs, with a laminated feel to them even on a screen.

He called Nora to lay out the options. He had options. He had a backup sitter, a name from the agency, and a plan, and he was two sentences into explaining the plan when Nora said:

“I’ll take her.”

“I wasn’t⁠—”

“I know you weren’t.” A pause on the line, and he could hear the ordinary sounds of her house behind her. “I’m not doing you a favor. I want her. I’ll get her from Deb this afternoon and keep her until you get back.”

He stood in a hotel corridor two hundred miles from home with his phone against his ear and found he had nothing prepared for that. It was the second time something had gone by between them unremarked, and both of them, he was fairly sure, had noticed both times.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay.”

“The travel crib’s in the hall closet. The one with the⁠—”

“Rognar.”

“Right.”

“Go to your meeting.”

He went to his meeting.