Chapter 10 #2
She’d expected the closeness to taper off.
She had made a kind of peace with it in advance, the way she made peace with a client leaving—cleanly, professionally, wishing them well.
Deb was competence in a branded tote. Deb solved the actual problem, which was that a professional hockey player could not be in two places at once.
With Deb installed, there was nothing left that Rognar needed her for. She’d assumed he’d stop coming.
He did not.
He came over Wednesday evening, once Deb had gone, with Charlie freshly bathed and smelling of the lavender wash and half-asleep against him.
He sat on Nora’s floor and ate most of a sleeve of the crackers she kept for herself, and told her a long, aggrieved story about Fen’s continuing campaign to get the 4T jersey accepted as a legitimate garment.
He stayed two hours. He had no reason to be there.
He didn’t appear to have noticed that he had no reason to be there.
Thursday he came over with nothing to eat, which meant he ate her food again. He fell asleep on her couch for forty minutes with Charlie on his chest, while she finished a set of accounts at the desk with the lamp on.
She typed quietly. She didn’t wake him, and told herself the quiet was a professional courtesy.
Saturday, no game, he turned up at eight in the evening and stood in her doorway and said, “You busy?” His tone made it clear he didn’t much care about the answer. She’d said no before she’d decided to. He’d come in.
He kept coming over. There was no feed he needed help with, no crib to assemble, and no crisis in the aisle of a baby shop.
Deb had the days sewn up tight and laminated.
And still he arrived, in the evenings, with nothing in his hands and no problem to solve.
It took Nora four days to understand that this was information, and another day to decide to test it.
She didn’t trust information she hadn’t verified.
So she ran the audit in reverse.
She removed the excuse. All of it. Methodically, over a single afternoon, she gathered every foreign object in the house and packed it into the branded tote Deb had, with cheerful thoroughness, left behind.
The two bottles, washed and dry. The blanket, folded, off the arm of the couch where it had lived for nine days now.
The tin of lanolin off the windowsill. The burp cloth she’d rescued from her laundry, laundered again to be sure.
The pacifier from the fruit bowl. The duck bib.
The muslin, the rattle, the duck board book.
She got to the sock.
She stood at her desk with the tote in one hand and the duck sock in the other and conducted a short, silent, entirely humiliating negotiation with herself. The terms were plain and the outcome was never in doubt.
She put the sock back on the desk, exactly where it had been, and zipped the tote without it.
Then she carried the tote across the grass and knocked and handed it over. “Everything of Charlie’s,” she said, businesslike, when he answered. “I did a sweep. I kept finding her things in with mine. Simpler to have them all in one house.”
He took the bag. He looked into it. He looked at her, and a smile started, and then he seemed to decide against it. She’d never seen him do that before.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
And she went home, and she waited, because that was the point of the exercise.
She had removed every reason he had to come to her house.
There was now nothing of his in her possession.
If the pattern held after she’d stripped it of every excuse, then the pattern was not about the baby, or the bottles, or the blanket that had lived on her couch for nine days.
He came over at ten past seven.
She heard his knock, and she knew his knock now, which was another item she declined to add to any list, and she opened the door.
There he stood, enormous in her small doorway, and his hands were empty.
Both of them. He had brought nothing. No diaper bag, no baby—Deb’s evening cover, a fact she’d absorbed without noticing—no crackers, no bottle, no problem.
She looked at his empty hands and then at his face.
“Did you forget something?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
And he opened his mouth to answer, and she watched him not have the answer ready.
Watched him actually stop and think about it.
This male who never had to stop and think about anything social and had a smooth reply for everything.
His entire public persona was built on never being caught without a line.
He stood in her doorway and he genuinely did not know.
“Huh,” he said.
Just Huh, quiet and surprised. He wasn’t acting—she knew when he was acting and he wasn’t now. He was as surprised as she was. More, maybe. He’d walked across the grass on instinct and only now, standing empty-handed on her step, discovered he had no reason and needed none.
Something happened in her chest that she had no column for, warm and dropping, gratifying and alarming in equal and unhelpful measure. She stepped back to let him in. There was nothing else to be done with a male who arrived at your door for no reason and found himself glad of it.
He came in. He sat on the couch on the cushion that no longer had a blanket on it.
He talked, eventually, about nothing—Fen, the 4T, Korvash and his four kids.
She made two coffees, and his was correct without her having to ask him.
She sat across from him, and the evening went the way her evenings went now. She never once looked at the clock.
When he left, near eleven, he leaned down in the doorway and kissed her, and didn’t check first. She counted it, six, in a doorway, and didn’t say anything about the count this time.
She shut the door and stood in the hall.
Then she went to the desk and opened the notebook to a clean page and sat with the pen over the paper, in the little pool of lamplight, the duck sock exactly where she’d left it beside the blotter.
She didn’t write anything.