Turning around, he saw Derek and Gaby in the doorway, Derek with his arm around his mate's shoulders.
"Yeah," Gaby said after a moment. "I think this is going to work out just fine."
Gaby had to head off to work, and Derek went back to bed. Lulu cried every time Dan put her down, so he carried her with him while he moved around in the Rugers' kitchen, starting coffee and familiarizing himself with the kitchen's contents.
It was strange to be in someone else's kitchen like this. He reminded himself that this was his job now. At least until the security agency got off the ground and they had to work out some other arrangement. Not exactly how he would have seen his life going, but right now, with Lulu's soft little baby head nestled under his chin, smelling of powder and baby shampoo, he would take this in a heartbeat over being a bouncer at some hole-in-the-wall nightclub run by a douchebag.
He had to put Lulu down in order to actually do anything, in his one-armed state. He took her back to the guest bedroom with him, turned on the light, and laid her on the bed. Lulu lay there, kicking her legs, and stared at him with her wide-eyed milky baby stare while he put on his prosthesis.
It was a fairly quick process now that he'd done it so often: a little baby powder on the stump to stop it from chafing, a soft stump sock to cushion it, and then the stump fit into a plastic socket above the prosthetic arm's elbow joint, and the control straps went around his upper body.
Those straps could ache and dig in after a long day of picking things up. When he had mentioned this to his physical therapist at the VA, she had said wryly, "I know it's not quite the same thing, but let me tell you how good it feels to take an underwire off after a sixteen-hour workday. It never gets fun, but you can get used to it." And then she showed him some little adjustments to take the pressure off the straps when he needed to rest the skin underneath. And she was right, he had gotten used to it and hardly noticed the pressure of the straps anymore, except at the end of the day when he was tired anyway.
Lulu watched the whole thing with her fist jammed into her mouth.
"What do you think, kiddo?" he asked her, and scooped her up again.
She snuggled against his shoulder and looked around, kicking her legs a little.
"Right. Let's go make some breakfast."
In the living room, he found a playpen and slid it into the edge of the kitchen, where he laid her on a blanket. She was perfectly calm, he found, as long as she could see him. It was only when he got out of her sight that she started to fuss and cry.
He had coffee ready and breakfast cooking by the time Derek and the other kids came downstairs.
"Wow," Sandy said. The kid was nine, big-eyed and adorable and just starting to get gawky. "You're like a male nanny."
"Alejandro Diaz Ruger," Derek began sternly.
Dan found himself grinning. "It's all right, I don't mind. That is what I am."
"Can I look?" Sandy asked, and when Dan nodded, he came over to examine Dan's prosthesis. Dan showed him how the clamps—technically a pair of curved metal hooks—opened and closed. "Whoa. Cool."
"Don't bother the man if he tells you to stop, Sandy," Derek said. He was carrying a sleepy Mina against his shoulder, her legs in little unicorn-covered tights dangling on either side of his thick forearm. He went over and fetched a piece of toast from a plate where Dan had been buttering them.
"I really don't mind," Dan said. And it wasn't just talk. He had found that he preferred kids' honest curiosity to the way that adults edged around the topic of the prosthesis and didn't really want to bring it up. "So what kind of things are you into, Sandy? You like sports?"
Sandy lit up. "I'm on the softball team."
They chatted about sports while Dan finished making breakfast and set the table. Derek settled Mina in her highchair and kept casting glances at Dan bustling around the kitchen.
In the playpen, Lulu began to fuss.
"She might be hungry," Derek said. "Sandy, go get one of your sister's bottles, okay?"
Sandy dashed off. While he was gone, Derek remarked, "You know, I gotta