Page 27 of Knocked Up

"It's fine."

"Now the hockey." My father turned a quarter to the left toward the analyst, who was already nodding. "The glove is at his hip. It's been at his hip two years. He dropped it when he got heavy and he never picked it back up. Every shooter in this league has that on video. They will go there tonight, and they will go there early."

The analyst said something about compete level.

"Here's the part nobody else will say, and I'm allowed to say it, because he's mine." He unfolded his hands. That was the tell. He did it when he was about to be honest at somebody. "Beckett doesn't get angry. Some guys get angry and angry is useful. He gets small. You won't see it on his face, that's the whole trick of him. But if this gets away from him early he will go very quiet and very polite. He will fold like a lawn chair. Eighteen thousand people are going to sit there thinking he looks calm."

Skoglund got up and turned it off. Nobody told him to. He stood there with his hand still on the wall like a kid who'd knocked a glass over.

"Sorry," he said, to the room.

"You're good," I said.

A few seconds of nothing.

"Well," Auggie said. "I feel loose. Does anybody else feel loose? I feel incredible."

Vegas came out the way Vegas comes out.

Four minutes in, a kid named Aubert took it down the right with no support and no angle. He threw a puck at the net like a coin into a fountain.

I had it the whole way. My glove came up and closed a half beat after the puck was already through it. It caught the inside of my wrist and went up over my shoulder and in.

Horn, song, eighteen thousand people making the sound of a bag being emptied.

I got my water bottle and put it back and scraped the crease, which was not maintenance. It was church.

And it was quiet in there. What came back was a man at a desk saying he will fold like a lawn chair.

The second one was worse, because it wasn't soft. It was slow. Screen at the top, tip on the way through. I was on my heels before the puck ever left the stick, because I was early. I was guessing. I was a man with opinions instead of a goalie.

Two nothing at 11:30 of the first.

Baranov did not look at me. That was a message too.

Auggie found me in the tunnel at first intermission.

"One thing, and then I'm going to go put my shins back on." He got in front of me so I had to stop. "My dad drove a bread truck for thirty-one years and he has never once told me the truth about anything. I've never needed him to. You're allowed to have a guy be wrong about you."

"He's not wrong."

"He's wrong about the lawn chair. I've watched you a hundred times. You don't fold. You get boring. It's the single most annoying quality a person can have and tonight it's going to be extremely useful."

Down the hall there was a TV on a bracket with my father's face on it and the sound off. My glove side was up in a freeze frame with a yellow circle drawn around it.

"Don't look at that," Auggie said.

"I'm looking past it."

"That's the same direction, Beckett."

It wasn't a speech. Nobody said a word to me.

I went out for the second and got down in my crease and did nothing. What came up was not a scouting report and it was not my father.

It was a piece of index card with grease all the way through it, propped against a toaster in a kitchen on the other side of town.

Low and slow. If it's boiling you're mad about something.