Page 57 of Single Pucking Orc

He did it again Thursday with a different dish. One sentence—there’s more if you want it. Gone.

By Friday she stood at the closed door with the warm dish in both hands and felt something she declined, on principle, to name.

Charlie stayed next door.

That was the second thing, and it took her two days to register it as a decision rather than an absence. No baby in the travel crib in her office. No bottle prep migrating onto her counter. No small green person appearing at ten past one to be put down for a nap in the corner of Nora’s working day, where she could now admit she had liked having her. He kept Charlie at his house. He kept the warm noisy weight of her at his house, on Deb’s schedule, in Deb’s laminated care. And he did not once, across four days of Nora’s worst week of the quarter, appear at her door needing her to hold anything.

The porch light came on Thursday.

She noticed it Friday, which told her how busy she’d been. She came out at dusk to bring in a package and the light over her door burned steady and yellow. The light that had been dead since the week he moved in. There was a new bulb in it. There was, she found when she looked, a new fixture. The old one had corroded, and he’d simply replaced it, on a ladder against her wall, at some point she’d been too buried in work to hear. And he’d said nothing about it. He hadn’t knocked to tell her. He hadn’t collected the small currency of gratitude a person was owed for a ladder and a Thursday.

She stood under her working porch light and didn’t know what to do with her face.

And he asked her to organize nothing.

That was the fourth thing. No pediatrician appointment she needed to note for him. No form. No do you want me to, the sentence she’d built a personality around finishing before other people could. Mildred Prescott had come and gone on the Tuesday, and Nora found out on the Wednesday, in passing, because it hadn’t been anything that needed her. Four days, and not one thread of his life had reached across the eight feet of grass to become hers to hold.

By Saturday she was frightened, the cold familiar fear churning in her stomach.

She did with it what she did with everything. She went looking for the error. She sat down with the notebook and she went back through the previous two weeks the way she’d go back through a set of books that wouldn’t reconcile, line by line, hunting the transaction where the balance broke. The community skate. The male in the mint hoodie she’d barely noticed. The way Rognar had gone quiet on the drive home, quiet in a manner she didn’t have a category for. Somewhere in there she’d shown him the version of herself that kept a column of his hours in the margin.

And he’d seen it. He was pulling back, kindly, the way kind males pulled back. He was feeding her and fixing her light and taking his daughter home so the exit would be clean when he took it. She couldn’t find the error. The books reconciled.

Then on Sunday, she went to return the empty dishes. She let herself in because she always let herself in now.

Deb’s schedule still lived on the fridge—still laminated and color-coded, the daily rhythm of a seven-month-old rendered in a professional’s hand. With Deb’s correction of the bottle time to eight-fifteen, made her first morning, that Rognar had never let anyone move back. She had read it a dozen times. She read it now out of habit, out of the reflexive need to check that a system was holding.

The bottom of it had been rewritten.

EMERGENCY CONTACTS, it said, in Deb’s neat type. Rognar’s number. The pediatrician. The team’s medical line. Deb’s own number.

Her name wasn’t there.

It had been there. She knew the exact spot—second line, under his, in his blunt capitals, N. BENNETT, NEXT DOOR, the way he’d added it the day Deb arrived. When she was the nearest competent adult and the person who’d answered the door and known which end of a screaming baby to point at the ceiling. He’d written her in when she was the safety net. And now, sometime in this last quiet week, he’d had it retyped, and he’d taken her off it.

Not to shut her out. She understood that in the same breath she understood that the fear had been wrong. He hadn’t pulled back. He’d un-obliged her. He’d gone through the one document in the house that made Charlie her responsibility—the piece of paper that said if it all goes wrong, Nora Bennett is who you wake up. And he’d quietly taken it away, so that nothing bound her to them but choice.

She stood in his kitchen holding four clean dishes and couldn’t move.

She’d have known what to do with flowers. Flowers had a procedure—the vase, the thank-you, the private eye-roll. She’d have known what to do with a speech, or a grand gesture, or a male on a knee. She’d have had subheadings ready before he finished. She had nothing at all for a name deleted off an emergency list. There was no line item for it. He hadn’t given her anything she could refuse.

Her mother called that evening, because her mother had a gift for the exact wrong moment that occasionally, once a decade, curved back around into being the exact right one.

“You didn’t come to dinner,” Summer said, in place of hello.

“That was weeks ago, Mom.”

“I know when it was.” A clatter in the background. Summer never called from a quiet room. “I’m not calling about the dinner. I’m calling because I can hear it in your voice already and you’ve said four words.”

“There’s nothing in my voice.”

“Mm.” The mm Nora had grown up under. “It’s the neighbor.”

She sat down at her kitchen table, in the house she’d spent four years and a good deal of money arranging into the peace she wanted. “He took my name off a list,” she heard herself say, which wasn’t something she’d planned to tell anyone.

“What list?”

“It doesn’t… An emergency contact list. For Charlie.”