Chapter 19
Rognar kept waiting to resent it.
He waited for it in the truck, which was clean now.
Genuinely clean, with no fossilized coffee cups and no gear rotting in the footwell.
A car seat lived back there, and a car seat did not go next to rotting gear.
He waited for it at the late dinners, the ones that happened at nine because a bath and a bottle came first and a male learned to eat cold food.
He waited for it hardest at six in the morning, lying awake in a bed he could no longer sleep past dawn in, listening for a snuffle two rooms away.
The resentment didn’t come.
He turned it over sometimes, in idle moments, like a male patting his pockets for keys he was sure he’d lost. Everyone said this was the part you gave things up for.
Sleep. Nights out. Yourself, mostly—that was the one people leaned on, the you won’t recognize yourself, man.
He’d nodded along for years and never once believed it would happen to him.
But he recognized himself just fine. He was still on the ice.
Still fast. Still the one who made the room laugh.
Charlie was fat and cheerful and putting on length like it was a competition, and Nora hadn’t somehow tricked him into a life he woke up trapped inside.
He’d checked. He kept checking, and every time it came back the same way.
His life hadn’t gotten smaller. He couldn’t get his hands around that. It had gotten—
He got about two-thirds of the way into that thought and Fen skated into the boards next to him hard enough to rattle the glass.
“The hat has holes in it,” Fen announced, holding it up.
It was small. It was green. It was less a hat than a knit hood, the kind that came down over the cheeks and buttoned under the chin, and it had two neat slits worked into the jaw, spaced with obvious intent.
“For tusks,” Kowalski said, from the bench.
“Her tusks are about a quarter that far apart.”
“For future tusks.”
The community skate was already loud—families all over the ice, kids in helmets three sizes too big, the local rink’s ancient sound system pushing something festive and distorted out into the rafters.
Every year the Enforcers gave up an afternoon to it, and every year it ran the same.
Open ice, a raffle table, players in jerseys signing programs so badly the signatures were a running joke.
There was a banner across the far boards for the outfit that organized it.
Emerald Hearts Children’s Foundation. Rognar had signed a check to them every December for six seasons without once reading the name off the banner.
He read it now, idly, because his daughter was on somebody else’s chest and he had a minute.
“Who made the hat?” he asked.
Silence. Four large orcs suddenly became very interested in their skate laces.
“Somebody cut holes in a hat for a baby who won’t need them for ten years,” he said. “That’s a lot of forward planning for a person who won’t put their hand up.”
“It’s an anonymous charity,” Fen said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The jersey situation had not been resolved.
Fen’s next-day-shipped 4T still hung on Charlie like a christening gown, and Fen still refused to concede a single inch of it, on the grounds that fabric was fabric and she’d get there.
Kowalski’s mystery jersey fit her like it had been cut for her, snug across the little barrel of her stomach, and Kowalski still wouldn’t say where it came from.
He’d stopped asking. Some questions you retired.
Charlie herself was across the room, and Charlie was busy.
Charlie was working the crowd. She’d become someone nobody had voted on and everybody agreed to—the unofficial mascot, passed hand to enormous hand, a set of chubby green legs and a gummy grin that had put grown defensemen on their knees.
She had preferences. She had always had preferences.
And her preference, immovable and inexplicable, was for the largest and least willing member of the entire organization.
Rognar found him at the boards, and found her in his hands.
“You like her,” Rognar said, skating up.
Brogan didn’t look at him. “She’s a baby. There’s nothing to like. She’s a set of demands with a face on it.”
“You’re holding her.”
“You put her in my hands.”
“I put her in your hands ninety minutes ago, Brogan.”
Nothing. The big male stood with Charlie tucked against the slab of his chest and gazed out at the ice with the expression of a male reading a parking ticket.
“And you haven’t moved,” he went on, because pushing Brogan was one of the small free pleasures of his life. “You could’ve handed her off. There are forty people out there who’d take her. All of them are smaller than you.”
“You keep talking,” Brogan said, “and you’ll find out how far I can throw a stick.”
“You wouldn’t. She’s on you.”
“That’s the only reason.” He shifted her, a small correcting motion, his thumb settling against the back of her head.
It was so automatic that Rognar wondered, not for the first time, where a male learned a motion like that.
He’d learned by now not to ask. Asking got you the flat silence Brogan reserved for it.
He didn’t ask. He let it go. He’d take the competence and leave the why where Brogan kept it. He’d pushed once, years back, and gotten neither. He skated off to let the goalie hate him in peace.
Later he came back around the near boards with two programs to sign and stopped.
Brogan had turned his back to the room. He’d angled himself into the corner where the glass met the boards, facing out at the empty stands.
Charlie had fallen asleep on him, her cheek mashed sideways against his collarbone, and one small fist buried to the wrist in the heavy silver-threaded beard.
Sound asleep. Utterly boneless. And Brogan stood there facing the wall so the loud cheerful room couldn’t see whatever his face was doing.
Rognar looked at him for a second. Then he signed his two programs badly and said nothing at all.
He found Nora at the far end of the rink. He hadn’t set out to find her, but somehow he always knew where she was.
She was at the raffle table, and she was working.
He knew nobody had asked her to. But the Emerald Hearts volunteer running the raffle had the hunted look of a person whose numbers had stopped adding up.
Nora had the calm of a person for whom numbers had never once, in her entire life, failed to add up.
She had the raffle ledger turned around to face her and a stub of a pencil in her hand.
She fixed a total with two strokes, said something dry, and the volunteer laughed—the relieved laugh of someone handing a fire to a fireman.
Then, inside five minutes, the volunteer handed Nora the cash box outright and walked off to get a coffee.
He leaned on the boards and watched her count someone else’s money faster and more accurately than they’d ever managed it themselves.
Glasses down her nose, dark hair coming loose from where she’d pinned it.
He knew that once again her competence meant she’d been given the job, but there was a small smile on her face and he knew that she’d done it deliberately.
This is what I want.
Nora at a table doing what needed to be done. Charlie asleep on Brogan, who hadn’t put her down in ninety minutes. Him leaning on a rail watching both of them. On a Tuesday.
Tuesday-forever.
He'd said it on her step, as a promise of something that would never happen, and now he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more. Next Tuesday and the one after and for as long as she'd let him have it.
He was grinning at the cash box like an idiot when the male walked up to her.
Rognar clocked him and cleared him in the same instant.
Just a pleasant, ordinary father in a mint-green rink hoodie, his kid somewhere out on the ice, standing at the far side of the raffle table making conversation while Nora counted.
Harmless. Completely, provably harmless.
He said something. Nora said something back without looking up, dryly, and the dad laughed.
And then Nora glanced up over the top of her glasses and smiled.
The small private smile, the one he had spent months earning.
Nothing was happening.
He could see, with total clarity, from thirty feet away, that nothing was happening. The male was married. He was wearing a ring and making rink small talk with a woman fixing a raffle ledger. It was the most nothing thing in the entire building.
Rognar’s stick came down against the boards.
The crack of it went off flat and hard across the ice and several people turned to look at him.
He hadn’t decided to do it. His hand had just done it, the same way his head had just turned to the stands at the game he’d lost the puck in.
The way his eyes went hunting for her before he asked them to.
His body was running a program he hadn’t installed and couldn’t turn off.
Right.
He knew this trick. He’d watched Tarmek burn a whole season on this trick and reroute the fuel into practice, skating the roster into the ice until nobody could feel their legs.
He wasn’t the captain. He didn’t have drills to give.
So he took the fuel and put it where he could—he went and hauled the equipment.
The gear had to go out to the truck at the end of the day anyway.
He did it now. He did it alone, in two trips, his arms loaded way past anything reasonable, so the tower of equipment blocked his view down the tunnel.
Once out. Once back. Once out again. He came in from the lot sweating through his shirt in November, and stood there breathing.
None of it had burned off what was underneath.
It scared him, and it scared him badly, because he couldn’t excuse it. He’d built an army of excuses—orc instincts. New father. The excuse had covered the head that turned at a crying baby. It had covered the window facing southwest.
It didn’t cover this.
Charlie was asleep on the goalie. Charlie was thirty feet away, unbothered and safe, buried in Brogan’s beard.
There was no version of a stick coming down on the boards over a married male in a mint hoodie that was about being a new father.
None. He stood there sweating in the tunnel mouth with the horror of a male who has just found a bill he cannot account for.
“You want to put the stick down.”
Brogan. Of course Brogan. He’d come up the tunnel without a sound, the way someone that size had no right to, Charlie still dead asleep against him.
“It’s fine,” he said., even though he didn‘t remember picking up the stick again.
“It’s a folding table, Stonebreaker.” Brogan’s gaze moved to the raffle end of the rink and back. “It hasn’t done anything.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re looking at.”
“Neither do you.” Brogan gave him a look. “That’s the problem.”
New father, he tried to say, and heard the words go dead before he could even finish thinking them. They didn’t fit, and he knew they didn’t fit, and Brogan was standing there watching him find out.
He said nothing.
Brogan looked down at the baby on his chest. Charlie, as if summoned, surfaced—her eyes wide and unfocused, her two tiny tusks catching the light. She looked up at Brogan. Then, with the total unbothered certainty of the very young, rolled her head sideways and looked straight at him.
“She knows,” Brogan said. “Ask her.”
He didn’t.
They ran the clipboard around at the end, the way they did every year.
The sign-up for the winter push. One of the Emerald Hearts people in a mint hoodie moved from player to player with a laminated sheet and a pen on a string.
Rognar caught pieces of it as it came down the line.
Toy drive collections in December. The hospital visit.
Two evenings of gift-wrapping nobody wanted.
Hands needed for a wheelchair-accessible ramp at the shelter, Santa at the mall on the twenty-third.
A skate clinic for the kids. Fen was already arguing that gift-wrapping was a two-man job and he was not a two-man job.
Brogan handed Charlie back to him before the clipboard reached him.
He transferred her warm heavy weight from the crook of his arm into Rognar’s with a last automatic stroke of his thumb against the back of her skull.
Then he collected his bag off the bench and walked calmly down the tunnel, towards the lot, while the clipboard was still three players away.
Nobody looked after him. Rognar didn’t either.
He had a sleeping baby back on his chest and a discovery he couldn’t categorize sitting in his gut like a stone.
Across the rink Nora was signing something on the laminated sheet in her small precise hand, glasses down her nose, correcting the volunteer’s spelling before she did.
He watched her do it.
And it was still there, and he still couldn’t dismiss it. He stood in the mouth of the tunnel with his daughter’s breath warm against his neck and discovered he didn’t want to.