Page 101 of Knocked Up

"Which night is this?" I said.

"It's every night," Beckett said. "Since the fourth."

I stood in the doorway of my mother's kitchen at seven in the morning and did the arithmetic on my fingers like a child. It came to nineteen nights. Then I sat down on the floor, not in a chair. I sat against the cupboard with my knees up.

"Hey," he said.

"I'm fine. I'm not crying, this is…"

"I know," he said.

He put Willa in the bouncer and came and sat down beside me with his back against the cupboards. For a man that size in that kitchen that involves a certain amount of planning. After about four seconds he put his arm round me and I put my face in his shirt.

"Nineteen nights."

"It's the off-season. I've got nothing to do until September."

"Don't do that. Don't make it small so I don't have to have a feeling about it," I said, into his shirt. "You're not allowed. That's mine, I said it to you in a truck in February."

"You did."

"So say it properly."

"I take the nights," Beckett said. "All of them. Since the 4th of June. I didn't tell you because you'd have made a rota. You'd have made one in forty minutes and laminated it out of spite."

"I don't own a laminator."

"I own a laminator."

"I know you do," I said. I sat on the floor of my mother's kitchen and cried about eight hours of sleep for four minutes. It is not a thing I have ever done. He did not tell me it was all right and he did not tell me to stop.

In October a man tried to carry a twenty-two-pound bag of food from a van to a door and I took it off him in the parking lot. In December I could not accept a decaf without making it a negotiation. In April I sat at that table from nine at night until half past two doing $400,000 of arithmetic alone. There were three people within reach who have done it before. It did not once occur to me to ask.

And on a Thursday at the end of June I was unconscious for nine hours in a house full of animals, with my daughter four rooms away. Nothing bad happened, because somebody was awake.

I've thought about which moment of this year was the biggest one. There is a good case for a heartbeat on a screen on Wadsworth. There is another for a man sitting down on my couch at ten past three in the morning after I told him to get out.

It was the floor of the kitchen. It was nine hours of nothing.

The other thing about that week is my brother.

I came in from a two o'clock on the Friday and the house was silent, which in that house means something is wrong.

Eli was on the couch on his back at two in the afternoon, asleep, with his boots still on. Willa was face down on his chest with her knees up under her. He had one hand flat over the whole of her back. He must have learned it by watching, because nobody taught him.

My brother was eleven when our mother died. He was eleven when he came into a kitchen and found me on the floor and could not get me to say why. He has not taken a day off since 2019.

He woke up at twenty past and did not move, because of the baby.

"Don't," he said in a whisper, without opening his eyes properly. "You're doing a face."

"I didn't say anything. I'm not doing a face."

"Tessa, I can hear the face. Go away."

"How long have you been here?"

"Since eleven. I did the runs. Then she started up and Douglas was on the phone to the lawyer. I said give her here, and then it was two o'clock."