Page 1 of Knocked Up

Chapter 1: Beckett

The moving truck ahead of me had a bison painted on the back doors and one busted brake light. I tracked that light most of the way into Denver the way I'd track a puck through traffic. That was a habit. I picked a thing and I watched it. It kept my hands quiet.

My phone had been face down in the cup holder since Kearney. It buzzed a few times before the state line. I knew who most of them were. Auggie texted in bursts. My agent texted in paragraphs. My father did not text. My father left voicemail. He talked into a phone the way he talked into a broadcast mic, like there was a camera on him and a producer counting him down.

I let it ride until the truck took my exit. Then I hit play.

"Beck. It's your dad."

Thirty-one years old and the man still identified himself.

"So. Denver. I'll be honest with you, because nobody else in your life will be. One year, league minimum plus change, and not one line of trade protection in it. That’s not a contract, that’s a tryout with a hotel room. I said as much on the segment Tuesday. People are going to ask me about you and I'm not going to lie for you. I've never lied for you. It's the one thing I've given you."

The light at the bottom of the ramp went yellow. I braked. The truck kept going and I lost it.

"Anyway. Your grandfather's house. Sell it. He never fixed a thing in it after your grandmother died. Call me back."

Then I heard him breathing while he decided whether to say one more thing. He decided against it.

Auggie: welcome to the mile high city. you will be short of breath for three weeks and every person here will lie and say you get used to it. are you in the state or did you defect?

I didn't answer him either. The light went green.

The whole drive from Buffalo I'd been telling myself I felt fine.

Walt's house sat on a street where every third yard had a chain-link fence and somebody's tomatoes still going in October. It was brick, one story, with a porch chair that had been rained on since 1994.

The movers finished fast because I didn't own anything. I had identical practice shirts, two duffels of gear and a bed. Everything else in that house was Walt's.

I stood in the front room after they left and the smell got me in a way I hadn't planned for. The smell was cigarettes from a man who quit in 2009, still living in the drapes. It was old coffee and a kitchen that ran hot for fifty years. He'd been dead eight months and the house still smelled like the middle of his life.

Bear came out of the hallway then, taking his time, his back end doing the swing-and-catch thing it did now. He was eighty pounds of shepherd mix with a gray face and hips that had been going since he was nine. Walt got him from a parking lot in Aurora.

He walked into my leg and stopped there. He leaned.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

He leaned harder.

I got down on the floor with him, which took a while, because my knees were a joke. He put his chin on my thigh and sighed like a man sitting down after a double shift.

"We're going to fix this place up," I told him. "Gutters are shot. There's a soft spot by the back door."

He didn't care.

I unpacked until nine. I hung my shirts at the same width. I found coffee cans, all half full and all different brands. In the drawer by the sink there was a stack of index cards with recipes in his handwriting. I shut the drawer.

Around ten I made eggs and gave him a piece of one. He took it out of my fingers so carefully it was like he was worried about the fingers.

"You're a soft touch. Walt made you soft."

Then I did the dishes and turned off the kitchen light. Behind me I heard a sound I had heard maybe a few times in my life. It was a scrape and then a thud, and it was small. Bear was on the tile.

"Bear."

He was breathing fast and shallow like he'd sprinted. He hadn't sprinted. He'd walked across a kitchen. His eyes were open and looking at me. For a second there was nothing behind them. Then there was, and that was worse.

I got my hand under his jaw and pulled his lip up, because I saw a trainer do that once. His gums were the color of the inside of an envelope.