Chapter 2 #2
Nora sat back in her chair. Her mother had always believed things would sort themselves out, and most of the time they did.
Appointments were rescheduled. Lost things eventually turned up somewhere unexpected.
But Nora had learned early that they sorted themselves out considerably more reliably when somebody remembered them.
She started checking the mail at seven. By eight she knew when the electric bill was due, and by nine she was the one who called about it.
She had loved her mother enormously the entire time.
She’d tried to explain that to people before and it never came out right.
She had never once doubted that she was loved.
Her mother’s love had been the one constant in a childhood built largely around improvisation.
But she had also learned that loving someone and being able to rely on them were not necessarily the same thing.
“I have to go, Mom. I’ve got Hendricks and it’s almost quarter end.”
“Okay. Come for dinner Sunday.”
“What time?”
“Dinner time.”
“Mom.”
“Six?” her mother asked tentatively, which meant dinner could be served anywhere between four and midnight.
“I’ll text you Sunday morning to confirm.”
Her mother laughed. “Love you, baby.”
“Love you too.”
Nora ended the call and stared at the Hendricks account again.
It’ll all sort itself out.
That was Rognar too. Or at least it was how he appeared from across a fence.
Smile first, figure out the details later.
If something went wrong, laugh and improvise.
If the recycling bin stayed at the curb an extra day, the world kept turning.
If he started cooking and discovered he was short an egg, knock on Nora’s door and borrow one.
Three.
She’d given him three.
Nora sighed and opened a new document. She typed a heading. Six months. Underneath it she added pediatricians accepting new patients. Then infant CPR. Then feeding guidelines. She hesitated and added childcare agencies.
Her fingers stopped over the keyboard as she stared at the list. She hadn’t decided to make a list. She certainly hadn’t decided to help Rognar.
Yet somewhere between her mother’s casserole dish and the Hendricks account, her brain had identified a problem and started solving it.
Somebody nearby was about to be underwater, and before she had consciously decided anything at all, her hands were already building the raft.
“No.”
She selected the entire list, deleted it, and closed the document without saving it.
This was precisely what she was not going to do.
Rognar Stonebreaker was thirty-four years old.
He had a career, a house, teammates, friends, money, and presumably the ability to operate a telephone.
He did not need the woman next door to organize his life simply because it had abruptly become more complicated.
And she did not need another person’s complications spilling into hers.
She returned to the Hendricks account. She made it twelve minutes before something moved outside and she looked up. Then she told herself it was entirely reasonable to get up and go to the window because it was her window, and she was entitled to look out of it.
Rognar was unloading the truck. He had taken Charlie inside first. Good. He’d listened to her, which shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did.
He started hauling boxes. He did it quietly, she’d give him that, moving with a delicacy that looked absurd on a male that size, easing the truck’s tailgate down inch by inch so it wouldn’t slam, catching a bag before it toppled.
Every couple of trips he’d stop and look back at the lit front window of his house—checking, she understood after the third time.
Checking on the baby as though she might have gone somewhere in the time it took him to walk to the truck and back.
And the equipment.
She had never seen so much of anything. Box after box tramped up his front walk in his arms, and even in the growing darkness, she could read the pictures on the sides.
A crib. A high chair. Something shaped like a saucer with a hundred dangling toys.
She caught the flash of a package of diapers the size of a hay bale, a stack of tiny folded things, and a play mat rolled under his arm like a yoga mat he had no business owning.
And almost all of it was pink. Pink boxes and pink bags and pink clothes.
A tidal wave of pink, foaming up his front walk,.
It was as though he had learned he had a daughter and concluded that the correct response was to buy every pink object in the building.
Somewhere under the ridiculousness of it was something that made her chest ache in a way she categorically refused to name.
On his next trip he picked up an enormous stuffed unicorn that he carried by the horn with an expression of such total bafflement that a laugh escaped before she could stop it, and his head turned.
She froze, but the houses weren’t that far apart, and he had clearly spotted her at the window.
He lifted the unicorn solemnly in her direction.
She shook her head. His grin flashed before he carried the unicorn inside.
She went back to her desk. She fixed the four numbers she had entered in the wrong column and worked determinedly for another twenty minutes. The Hendricks account balanced, every cent accounted for, the world in its correct and comforting order.
Outside, Rognar was still unloading his newly acquired pink kingdom.
She was not going to get involved. She would be pleasant.
She would be sympathetic about Charlie’s mother.
She would tolerate whatever disruption came with living next door to an infant because only a monster complained about a crying baby.
She would stay firmly on her side of the fence. It was a good plan.
A thin wail pierced the quiet, and her fingers stopped on the keyboard.
The cry rose sharply, gathering force with impressive speed.
It was the specific, escalating, absolutely-not-messing-around scream of a six-month-old who had apparently discovered that life contained disappointment.
Outside, Rognar stopped dead. He was halfway up the walk with a box tucked beneath one arm.
Charlie screamed again, and he dropped the box on the grass and ran for the house.
She stayed in the chair, staring through the window at the empty driveway and listening to the baby cry. Then she looked down at her perfectly balanced spreadsheet.
I am not getting involved.