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Robby had that Tuesday off. In practice, that meant just a few hours of breathing room before he had to pick up Leo and Hazel from daycare and kindergarten at noon. Enough time to catch up on errands, if the universe felt like cooperating for once.
At 7:10 in the morning, the kitchen already looked like it had survived a full day's work. Scrambled eggs, waffles fresh out of the toaster, and cut fruit covered the table, a spread that only happened on Robby's days off. The rest of the week, breakfast was cereal poured half asleep, with a lot less ceremony. Next to all of it sat a cup of coffee Robby was hoping to finish before it went cold.
Hazel was wrestling with a piece of banana, pushing it around with the dull edge of her fork, while Leo cracked up every time Pickles circled his chair again, like a shark doing laps and waiting for something to hit the floor.
It didn't take long. The ferret yanked a piece of waffle right out of Oliver's hand and vanished under the table with it before the boy even had time to react.
"Dad!"
"Nobody feeds Pickles waffles," Robby said, not even looking up from his coffee, though his hand was already reaching blindly under the table. "It messes up his stomach, then he's throwing up all night, and guess who's the idiot who has to clean it."
"I didn't do it, he just took it!" Oliver protested.
"Be smarter than him, Ollie. Eat it up high where he can't reach."
He managed to fish the ferret out from under the table, holding him with one hand while carefully prying his jaw open with the other, rescuing the now pretty mangled piece of waffle. Pickles squirmed, outraged, before Robby set him down far from the table and went back to his coffee like nothing had happened.
"But he still ate some!" Hazel let out a little shriek of protest anyway, both hands flying to her mouth.
"It's fine, Haze. A little bit won't hurt him." Or so he hoped. The last thing he needed was the ferret giving him another problem.
Florence walked into the kitchen just then, hair still wet and a towel around her shoulders, and opened the fridge to pour herself a glass of juice with the total calm of someone who had zero intention of getting involved in the chaos.
"Dad, I need more pads."
"The usual kind?" Robby asked, already reaching for the marker on top of the fridge to add it to the shopping list, not thinking twice about it.
"Yeah."
Oliver, still keeping an eye out for where Pickles had gone, suddenly perked up. "Ah. That explains why you've been so cranky." The punch to his arm landed before he even finished the sentence. "Dad, she hit me!" he whined, clutching his arm with a look of betrayal.
Robby took another sip of his coffee, unhurried, before answering. "You had it coming."
"But she actually hit me!"
"What did you expect? A comment that crappy deserved way worse, sweetie."
Hazel, who had completely abandoned her half eaten banana to watch the whole thing unfold, just nodded solemnly, backing her sister up without a word. Not because she understood what Florence was going through, but because any hit landed on Oliver made her genuinely happy. Florence, satisfied with the silent support, ruffled her little sister's hair before sitting down to eat.
That was when Leo, completely oblivious to the drama, decided it was the perfect moment to hold out a piece of waffle, already soaked in drool, straight down toward the floor, where Pickles had already circled back with obvious interest.
"Dad!" Oliver and Hazel shouted almost at the same time, both pointing.
Robby didn't make it in time. He reached out, but the ferret was faster, jumping with perfect aim to snatch the piece right out of Leo's hand before disappearing under the table again.
Leo stared at his empty hand for one whole second before his face completely crumpled. "Pickles, no!"
Robby set his coffee down on the table with a long sigh and bent down again, resigned, to go hunting for the ferret under the table for the second time that morning.
"You're going in the cage."
Half an hour later, everyone dressed and backpacks on, he dropped them off one by one on the way to school. Leo included, though dressed in his case meant the full Spiderman costume, mask on since breakfast and everything, a battle Robby simply didn't have the energy to fight that morning. He dropped Florence off last, in front of the high school, and before she could open the car door, he handed her a small thermos along with two pills wrapped in a tissue.
"Hot tea. And this is in case the pain comes back like yesterday."
Florence took both without much fuss, tucking the pills into her jacket pocket with the ease of someone who'd been through this exact scene more than a few times.
"Thanks," she said, one hand already on the handle, but she stopped before getting all the way out, turning to him with an expression much softer than anything she'd shown all morning. "Dad. Can you get me a cupcake later?"
"We'll see."
"That means yes."
"It means we'll see," Robby repeated, though he already knew for a fact he'd end up buying it anyway.
Florence smiled, satisfied, and got out without saying anything else, disappearing into the crowd of students heading into the building.
And then, for the first time in weeks, Robby found himself completely alone, with the car all to himself, and a handful of hours he was already mapping out in his head like a battle plan.
The grocery store came first. He went in meaning to buy only the essentials and came out twenty minutes later with two bags of groceries and a box of chocolate cupcakes he ended up buying anyway.
From the grocery store he went straight to the bank, where he lost nearly forty minutes between a line that wasn't moving and a teller who insisted on explaining, in way too much detail, why his account was still showing up in the New Orleans system. He left with half a solution and the certainty that he'd have to come back.
Next was the nanny agency, where he repeated, once again, the same conversation he already knew by heart: four kids, unpredictable hospital hours, a ferret. The woman at the desk wrote it all down with a professional smile that no longer fooled Robby, and promised to call if someone with the right profile turned up. She didn't sound too hopeful.
The pet store was, surprisingly, the fastest stop of all. Food, litter, and a new toy that Pickles would probably ignore within a day, just like the five before it.
By the time he got back to the apartment, he had less time left than he would have liked. First thing was taking out the trash, which had been piling up since the night before and was already making itself known from the doorway. He stepped into the hallway with the bag hanging from one hand and the keys between his teeth, mentally calculating how much time he had left before he needed to get the laundry going.
That was when he heard the voice, a little louder than usual, coming from the door across the hall. Well, looked like Dennis had the day off too.
"I'm asking you to call her at a decent hour, Dean. What do you mean you're calling her at one in the morning?"
The door to 4C was open just a crack, and through it drifted Dennis's voice, tense in a way Robby had never heard before, not even during their worst run ins at the hospital.
"How hard is it to buy a damn plane ticket and come see Amelia?"
Robby stood there a second too long, trash bag still in hand, caught in that middle ground between walking on toward the chute and staying put to listen to something that clearly wasn't his business. He knew he should keep walking. He knew it perfectly well. And still, his feet decided, for a fraction of a second longer than he'd ever admit, not to move.
"I don't care that you're busy." Dennis's voice dropped, but not in intensity, something much sharper and more controlled than before. "She asks about you, Dean, she still asks. And I'm the one who has to come up with a new excuse every time."
That was enough to finally get Robby moving again toward the trash chute, with that uncomfortable feeling of someone who'd just stumbled onto something they weren't supposed to see. He didn't really know who Dean was, other than that he clearly had something to do with Amelia, and that the absence of that name weighed heavy in his neighbor's voice.
He dropped the bag, closed the chute more carefully than usual, as if the noise might give him away, and went back to his apartment without running into anyone else.
He got the first load of laundry going, then into the dryer, and used the dead time to tackle the kids' rooms: picking up toys off Hazel's floor, sorting through the comics scattered across Oliver's room, unplugging the straightener Florence had left on again and clearing the mountain of clothes taking over her desk chair, and rescuing no fewer than three stray socks from Leo's room that had no match anywhere in sight.
If he was lucky, he thought, he'd get to sit down for five minutes while the dryer finished.
He got lucky. Five whole minutes, sitting on the couch with his eyes closed, before the dryer's beep yanked him back to reality. He got up, folded the still warm laundry without much care, and happened to glance at the microwave clock.
11:55.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck."
He made it just in time, barely, to pick up his kids. Leo first, still wearing his Spiderman mask and a smear of finger paint on his cheek that nobody could quite explain, then Hazel, who showed up with a drawing folded into fourths that she insisted on showing him right there at the kindergarten door, before she'd even gotten in the car.
Back at the apartment, Hazel didn't leave his side for a single second, following him from room to room while recounting, in exhaustive detail and without pausing to breathe, absolutely everything that had happened that day. Who got in trouble, who shared their snack, and a very long story about a butterfly that had flown into the classroom and, according to her, almost landed on the teacher's head.
Leo, meanwhile, had shut himself in his room, the same one Robby had left more or less spotless that morning, to fight an imaginary battle against some invisible villain, judging by the muffled shouts of take that! that kept slipping out from under the door.
The doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon. It was Dennis, wearing an expression that made it pretty clear his day hadn't been easy either.
"I've got the night shift later," he said, without much preamble, the second Robby opened the door. "I promised Mellie we'd get Chipotle before I go in, and I figured, since I'll be driving right past the school anyway, I could grab Oliver too, if that works for you."
Robby took a second too long processing the offer. Dennis offering, on his own, to spend time with Oliver, without Amelia asking first, without it being part of some plan worked out in advance, wasn't exactly what he'd expect from him.
"You, wanting to bring Oliver along?" Robby couldn't help raising an eyebrow. "Who are you and what did you do with Dennis Whitaker?"
"Don't start."
Behind Robby, another muffled shout came from Leo's room, followed by a dull thud against something that, hopefully, wasn't the lamp. Dennis didn't even flinch, already used enough to the background noise coming out of that apartment for it to register as normal.
"I really appreciate it," Robby said, still wearing that smile caught somewhere between amused and genuinely grateful. Then he lowered his voice, more carefully than usual. "Are you okay?"
Dennis rolled his eyes, though without his usual lightness. "Yeah. I guess that's what you get for deciding to start a family with an asshole, right?"
Well, look at that. So his neighbor was actually going there. Something Robby wasn't supposed to know, but would never admit he'd overheard.
Robby shrugged. "I don't know. My wife's dead. I don't think we ever got to the point of hating each other."
Dennis went quiet for a full second, his face completely thrown, like he'd stepped on a wire he didn't know was there. "Shit. I'm sorry. I had no idea."
"It's fine." Robby was already back to his usual smile, brushing off the moment as easily as he did pretty much everything. "It's not something I go around announcing."
He noticed, almost right away, that Dennis had no intention of going any further down that road, his eyes already fixed on some random spot in the hallway that wasn't Robby's face.
"It's a long story," he added, without pushing. "If you want, we can talk about it over a beer sometime. You know, like the friends we are."
Dennis smiled with a condescension he didn't even bother hiding. "We're not friends, Robby."
"Of course we are."
"No. We're neighbors. And coworkers, technically, though I'd rather we weren't. That's not the same thing as being friends."
"Sounds like you're describing exactly what a friend is."
"I'm describing an unfortunate coincidence." Dennis was already backing away down the hall. "No beer. No story. We're not friends. I'll bring Oliver back around four," he said finally, walking off quickly without giving Robby a chance to respond to any of it. "Bye."
Robby stood in the doorway, watching him disappear down the hall. In fifty years of life, with all the people he'd known, nobody had ever turned down his friendship in so many different ways, in such a short amount of time, as Dennis Whitaker just had.
Six months later, Dennis would have agreed to use the word friendship for whatever it was they had. By then, Robby would already be doubting that was the right word for it. But what else could Dennis Whitaker possibly stir up in Michael Robinavitch? Because men could only ever be friends, right?