Page 26 of Knocked Up

"It was a gait assessment."

"It was a gait assessment," Violet repeated. "At sunset."

"Go home, Violet."

"I'm taking the drunken noodle," she said, "because you didn't eat it and I have needs." And she hugged me too hard and left.

I locked up at 9:30 and checked the incubator twice. I walked through the breezeway to my mother's house and stood in her kitchen with the refrigerator open.

I'd claimed ten years of getting over Beckett Douglas. That was not true, and I was too tired that night to keep it standing up.

The problem was never that I stopped loving him. The problem was that I never did. Not for one day, and not in Fort Collins. Not in the nine months I watched my mother die, or on the night I signed the papers on a building I could not afford. Not at any point in a decade of being extremely convincing about it.

I never stopped. I just got very good at running a clinic on top of it.

And now I knew why he left. Knowing was worse. The story I'd been using was load-bearing, and somebody had just taken it out from under the room.

I shut the fridge. Out the back window I could see the whole loud, hungry, endless thing that had my name on it. I said it out loud, to nobody, "Absolutely not."

Then I went and stood in the lobby in the dark.

The waiting room television was nineteen years old and had not been turned on since the remote died. I knew exactly where the remote was. Second drawer, with the tongue depressors.

I stood there with a dead remote in my hand and told myself I was checking whether the batteries had leaked.

The Vegas game was a week Thursday. National window.

I put two double-As in it, and the little red light came on. The television woke up with the sound off, showing a used car commercial to six chairs and nobody.

"Absolutely not," I said again.

I did not put the remote back in the drawer. I left it on the counter, next to the bowl.

Chapter 7: Beckett

The home opener was a Thursday. My father had the whole national window. Pregame, both intermissions, postgame, desk to desk.

"Three hours of him," Auggie said. "I can get the room TVs off. I know a guy."

"You don't know a guy."

"I know a guy who knows where the remote is. In this building that's the same guy."

"Leave it," I said. He left it.

The pregame show came on at five-forty while I was taping my stick. A nineteen-year-old defenseman named Skoglund had it up loud, because nobody had told him not to.

They put a graphic up. My face from Minnesota, two years old, with a number next to it I haven't had since 2019.

Then my father. Roy Douglas at a desk was a product. Gray at the temples on purpose. Jacket a half size too good. Hands folded. He did not lean in.

"People want me to be nice about this one," he said. "I'm not going to be nice about it. That's not the job and it never was."

Somebody in the room said shut up.

"Denver did not acquire a starter tonight. Denver acquired a bridge. One year, league minimum plus change, out at the deadline. I've read a lot of those. One year at the minimum with no protection. I’ve read a lot of those. That is a team saying we’d like to be wrong about you, and we’ve kept the receipt in case we’re not."

"Beckett," Auggie said, two stalls down. "You want me to what? I can go and…"