Page 35 of Knocked Up

Bear / Douglas. Recheck 4 weeks. Hips: add gabapentin AM on bad days, 300mg, do not stack with the evening dose inside 8h. Continue fluids under the skin, 250ml every other day. Recheck creatinine and phosphorus at that visit. Weight check. Bring the med list.

Then a date, four weeks out, a Wednesday.

Then, at the bottom, her name. Not printed but signed, the way she signed a chart.

I stood at that counter with my truck keys in my hand and understood what it was. It was a receipt. A woman had made a night look like medicine in ink and in her own hand, in case anybody ever asked, including her.

I could have left it. It was for the file. I took it.

I folded it in half and in half again and put it in my jacket. I sat in the lot with the engine off for a minute. Through the front glass I could see the lobby and six chairs and a fish tank and nobody.

The equipment guys got in at eight-thirty and I was already there, which they've stopped remarking on.

My blocker had a gap in the lining on the inside, up near the top where the wrist strap anchors. It had been there since last season.

I put the paper in it.

I had a rule about superstition, and the rule was that I didn't have any. Superstition is a system I don't control, and I only keep systems I control. I've said that out loud to teammates and to a reporter.

I pushed a folded piece of exam paper down into the lining of my blocker with two fingers. I pressed the edge flat so it wouldn't ride up. Then I sat there in an empty room with my hands on my knees for a while.

Then I went home and cleaned out the hall closet.

There was a closet in that house with forty years of things in it. I took every one of them out and sorted them into three piles on the front room floor. One of the piles was a shoebox of photographs I did not open.

Then I made soup. Chicken, whole, don't be cheap.

Seven-forty when I started, noon when it was done. I stood in Walt's kitchen with a wooden spoon and six quarts of soup. One thirteen-year-old dog was not permitted to have any of it and sat under the table with his chin on my foot anyway.

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

It was boiling. I turned it down.

I sat at that table with my phone and looked up a leasing company. Then Apex Veterinary Partners, which had a website with a photograph of a woman in a white coat laughing with a beagle. Then I looked up who owned the buildings on that block. It was public. It took eleven minutes and a county website.

Then I turned the phone over and did nothing about any of it. She had told me in a doorway that there was no room. I was not going to answer that by moving her furniture.

Auggie caught me at practice.

I was fine at practice. I did the drills and I took the reps. My numbers were my numbers. But between drills I always talked, at about the level of a man buying gas. I did not do it, and Auggie noticed inside of forty minutes.

He waited until we were in the room. He sat down next to me while I was cutting tape off.

"So, we're not doing the thing where I make jokes today," he said.

"You can make jokes."

"I can. I'm not going to." He sat with his elbows on his knees looking at the floor, same as me. "Something happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Beckett, last night you won a game after your father called you a lawn chair on national television and you looked exactly like this. This morning you look worse. It is not about the hockey, because you were unbelievable and you know it."

I peeled tape off my shin. "Yeah."

He waited about eight seconds. "Okay."

And then he didn't say anything else. He sat on that bench and untaped his own shins next to a man who wasn't talking for about six minutes, until Skoglund came in and asked about a restaurant.