Page 28 of Knocked Up

I breathed out. I stopped trying to get anywhere first.

Then other things came, in no order I chose. A dog's ear moving in an oxygen cage. A woman at her own front counter at a quarter to midnight eating soup out of a bowl that said World's Okayest Doctor. She stopped a few spoonfuls in, like somebody had put a hand on her back.

And I thought, that's out there right now, a few minutes east, whatever this is.

I've played eleven years and never had a useful thought in a crease. I've had that one.

Aubert came down the same side at 3:30 of the second and went glove again, because they'd been told to. I took it out of the air and held it up like a man checking a lightbulb. The building came up off the seats for the first time all night.

Then a five on three for the better part of two minutes. Three shots in a handful of seconds, and I do not remember any of them, which is how I know they were good.

Skoglund tipped one in at 14:02. Auggie got the second. He got the third with 6:41 left off his own hip. He skated by my net on the way to the bench and said, "Lawn chair!" directly into my mask.

Twenty-nine shots, twenty-seven saves, three to two.

Winning was worse. Losing let me be sad, and sad had a floor to it. A win like that had nowhere to go. I sat in a room with music on and I was supposed to be a person who was pleased.

The columnist who wrote The Peaks Bought a Used Car came and stood in front of me with a recorder. He asked if I had anything to say to my father. He left the hole and waited to see whether I would fill it. I never have.

"No," I said, and he wrote that down.

Baranov caught me in the hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets. "Second period. You were not early. Why?"

I stood there with a towel around my neck. "I don't know."

"Find out," Baranov said, and went to talk to somebody about a defenseman's ankle.

I sat in the truck in the players' lot with the engine running for a while.

Bear had been favoring the back end since Tuesday. He was short-striding on the left going up the stairs. Twice he'd sat down on the way to the door, which he did not do. I was allowed to be concerned about an arthritic dog.

It was eleven forty at night.

I drove to the house first. I went home and put him in the truck. Then I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal. The whole way I was building a sentence about his gait.

The clinic lights were on. They should not have been, not the lobby ones. The lot was empty except for her car and the security light over the runs. Through the glass I could see her behind the front desk, sitting perfectly still with her chin in her hand. Above her, up in the corner where nobody could possibly have wanted it, a nineteen-year-old television was on.

Bear stood up in the passenger seat.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

She got to the door before I did. She had it open before I had my hand off the truck.

"He's fine," I said. "Nobody's dying."

"Then what?"

"His back end. Since Tuesday."

She looked at me for about three seconds. "Bring him in."

She was in the same scrubs she'd been in that morning. There was a dark patch on the left knee where somebody had gone through the fabric with a hose or a paw. It was dry now. Her hair was down. She'd taken it out at some point in the last hour and forgotten about it.

Bear went in ahead of us and put his nose on her hand.

She got the door with her hip and locked the deadbolt behind me. Then she stood there with her hand still on it, longer than the job required.

Chapter 8: Tessa