Page 118 of Knocked Up

And I got it out and I did not do a speech. There was not one left in me and she would have hated it.

"Marry me," I said.

She did not answer.

She stood there at twenty past four in the morning with her hand over her mouth and tears coming down. She did not say one single word. I stood there and let her have it. My heart was going like the end of a period.

Then Tessa Reeves walked past me.

She went to the counter. She picked up the marker. She took the cap off with her teeth. She went to the refrigerator and got down under everything, under the seven clauses and the two amendments and the finding. She went all the way to the bottom of the board, where there was about two inches of white left.

And she wrote, in that slanted hand, Approved. T.R.

And she put the cap back on.

"That's it?" I said.

"That's how it's done in this house," Tessa said.

"You could say a word."

"I've said all of them," she said. "And I'm not going to be able to do another one for about a minute. Give me your hand."

I gave her my hand. She was shaking too much to do it and I had to do it myself in the end. She watched me do it. Then she held her own hand out flat in front of her at arm's length in the light over the stove. She looked at it like a woman reading a chart and said, "Huh." That is what she said in a dark room on Wadsworth when a heart came in at a hundred and sixty-two.

Then she came at me hard enough that I had to put a hand back on the counter.

We ended up on the couch, because it is nearer than the bedroom. At some point Willa woke up all the way and had to be carried and fed and put in the middle of it. Neither of us was willing to leave the room.

That is where the light found us. It was twenty past five, going grey in the front window and then going yellow.

The board was full. There is not two inches left on it anywhere.

The blocker was on the kitchen table with the lining open and nothing in it. Everything that has been in it since October was out on that table in a line, where anybody in the house could see it.

Willa was asleep between us with one hand out flat on the side of my neck.

Tessa had her head on my shoulder and her left hand up on my chest, flat on the scar. She had not taken it off. I do not think she had noticed she was looking at it.

"Beckett. You're not asleep."

"No."

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing," I said.

"You're doing the arithmetic."

I did not say anything for a second.

"I've stopped," I said.

Down on the floor at the end of the couch, in his spot, Bear's tail came up about four inches. It came down once on the boards, hard, the way a man brings a hammer down when a thing is settled. Then he went back to sleep and did not do it again.

Chapter 30: Tessa

The bell over the door of Walt's is the original.