Page 29 of Knocked Up

The last appointment on a Thursday was a four-thirty ear infection that actually started at four-thirty, which never happens. It was out the door by five-ten.

Two inpatients, both boring. A dachshund on fluids, and a cat named Chip who had a dental cleaning that morning and was now furious in a way that indicated total recovery. Fosters fed and down. Marisol went home at six because she has a kid. Rosalie, who does Thursday overnights, called to say her sister's car had died. I said don't come.

So it was me and forty animals who were, that one night, all fine. Door locked at six-fifteen. After-hours line forwarded at six-sixteen.

And then I turned on a television. I had put batteries in a remote eight days earlier and left it on the counter next to a soup bowl. I had walked past it since and looked at it, conservatively, hundreds of times.

At six-forty I got a folding chair from the break room and put it in the middle of my own lobby. I sat down in front of six empty waiting room chairs and watched a hockey game. Margaret watched it with me from the desk.

His father did the pregame. He was very good at it, which is what nobody says. He sat with his hands folded, calm and warm and specific. He took his son apart in front of a country like a car he was thinking about buying. And then the thing at the end. I've heard it over and over since in my own head, in his exact cadence:

He gets small. He will fold like a lawn chair.

I sat in a folding chair in an empty lobby and said, "You absolute monster."

Margaret looked at me.

"Not you."

Then Aubert scored on a shot my brother could have stopped. Then they scored again. I put both hands over my face.

Violet: I can see that you’re watching, you have never once left me on read at 7pm on a Thursday. His own father said lawn chair! I want to fight a 62-year-old man in a blazer.

I typed: I'm doing paperwork.

Violet: you left the remote on the counter last Thursday and I saw it and I have been waiting!

I put the phone face down.

Then, in the second period, nothing happened. In the first he had been going somewhere all the time, early, leaning. In the second he stopped going anywhere and let it come to him. It went nowhere.

There was a five on three where the camera was behind the net and I could see him breathing. After the third save he did not celebrate and did not look up. He scraped his crease and got back down. Eighteen thousand people were screaming, and the man in the middle of it had a face like a bank building.

I said, "There you are" out loud, to a television in my mother's lobby.

They won. Then his father came back on after the horn and said, "Well, he answered the bell tonight, and I'm the first one to say it." I threw a pen at my own television. Margaret left the room in disgust.

I told myself I stayed for the dachshund, who had been fine for nine hours. I checked him at ten and again at ten-forty. I sat down at the front desk at eleven with the lobby lights on. Turning off the lobby lights would have been a decision about whether I was waiting for something.

At 11:30 I heard the pothole.

I put Bear on the mat in exam three and ran him through it properly. If I was going to lie, I was at least going to do the medicine. He grumbled at the left hip and leaned his whole weight on me the entire time, because Bear's position on being examined is that it's a hug with steps.

"It's arthritis," I said. "The same arthritis he had Tuesday and will have Friday. Add a gabapentin in the morning on the bad days. That's a phone call, Beckett. You know it's a phone call."

He was in the middle of the room in a gray hoodie with his hair still wet and his hands doing nothing at his sides.

"You won," I said. He looked up. "I watched it. So."

"Okay."

"Stop saying okay."

"I don't know what you want me to say about it."

"I want you to say anything. I watched a man on national television tell a country his son would fold like a lawn chair. Then I watched his son be the best player on the ice for forty minutes. Then I watched the same man say he answered the bell. I've never wanted to hit somebody I've never met."

Beckett almost smiled. It got a third of the way and stopped.