Page 34 of Knocked Up

"Okay," I said.

"Don't say okay yet, I haven't said anything."

"You're going to, though."

She looked at the mug in her hand. "Yes. That was a beautiful mistake."

I put the coffee down on the floor beside me because I wanted my hands free. There was nothing to do with my hands.

"I'm going to say all of it at once, because if I say it in pieces, you'll get one in and I'll fold." She had her back against the doorframe. "It was a mistake and it was beautiful. It's a closed parenthesis. It happened. It's finished, and it isn't going to happen again."

"Okay."

"You’re playing for your career on a one-year deal that anybody can move at any time. In February somebody could call and you'd be in Ottawa by Thursday. There is nothing either of us could do about it."

"That's true."

"I'm running a clinic on $141 and a ground lease. I haven't slept a full night since spring. I have a brother and forty volunteers and a hundred animals, and I have exactly nothing left over. There's no room. Neither of us has room."

There it was. It did not feel like a knife. It felt like a schedule, like a man who has been told in advance what day the truck comes and then hears the truck.

Neither of us has room. Every man who gives it up for a woman spends the rest of his life making her pay the bill.

He said it in a kitchen in September when I was twenty-one. She said it in a doorway in October when I was thirty-one. They were the same sentence. The only difference was she was kind about it.

She was right. She had a building with her mother's name on it and a hundred animals and a brother. I had a duffel bag, a one-year contract, and a father who could describe my failures from a national desk. She deserved a man who was not perpetually a few days from being somebody else's problem.

Agreeing cost me nothing I hadn't already been told I'd lose.

"Understood," I said.

"That's it?"

"What else is there?"

"You could fight with me about it. You could do literally anything else."

"Would it work?"

She opened her mouth and closed it. "No."

"Then no."

She didn't sneak out. It was her building, so she couldn't. I don't think she'd have wanted to. She did the other thing.

She said, "I have to feed," and drank a third of her coffee standing up and went.

I heard the door to the runs go, and then I heard forty dogs find out it was morning.

I got dressed on a break room floor listening to that. Found one sock, found the other under the couch. Folded the fleece blankets and put them on the wrong shelf.

Bear was asleep in the hallway outside the door where he'd put himself at some point in the night.

"Come on," I said.

I went out past the oxygen cage. The light was on inside it with nobody in it, blue and humming. I stopped for a second, the way I would in front of a house I used to live in.

The paper was on the front counter. An exam form, turned over, written on the blank side in her handwriting. It slanted hard to the right and got faster as it went.