Page 6 of Knocked Up

Rinse. Suction. Count the sponges. Count them again. Close and staple the skin, because it was one in the morning and my hands were finished being fancy.

Somewhere in the middle of that my phone went off in my scrub pocket. Marisol fished it out. It said Violet.

"Speaker," Marisol said.

"Tessa Anne. I've been awake for six minutes because a foster parent named Kimberly has sent me nine photographs of a rash…"

"Beckett's here."

There was a silence on that phone like the inside of a bank vault.

"Beckett Douglas," Violet said. "Is in your building."

"His grandfather's dog is on my table with his spleen in a bag."

"Tessa."

"I can't. I have a bleeder."

"Okay. I'm not going to say anything." Two full seconds. "I'm going to say one thing. I've been telling you for ten years that this city is a small town wearing a very large hat."

"Marisol, hang up on her."

"I love you and I'll be there at seven with a coffee and questions…"

Marisol hung up on her.

A foster kitten started screaming. He was the four-week-old orange one who screams because the world is unbearable. He screamed the entire rest of the surgery, and honestly, same.

He came off the table. His pressure was ninety-four over sixty soon, which I announced out loud to nobody. He was in the oxygen cage half an hour later on a pain drip with a warm-water blanket and Marisol's hand flat on his chest. His gums came up from envelope to something nearly pink.

I stood in front of that cage and did absolutely nothing for a quarter of an hour. For me that was a religious experience.

Then I went and printed the invoice.

I stood at that printer at three in the morning and thought about eating it. Then I thought about the leasing company and the $141. I thought about the fact that Marisol had a kid and a car payment. And I thought about the word arrears, which means money already owed and sounds like a body part.

I could not afford to be a good person on a Tuesday.

So I printed a bill for four thousand and change. It went in a folder for the man who broke my heart, for the privilege of me saving the last living thing his grandfather touched.

He was still there.

I looked out through the glass at four in the morning. He was in a plastic waiting room chair with his arms folded and his head back against the wall. He was six foot four, and that chair was a joke.

Marisol came and stood next to me.

"Should I tell him he can go home? Should I offer him a blanket?"

"He's not going to go home. No," I said, and then, "yes. Fine. Yes."

She got the maroon fleece and laid it over him. He didn't move. She came back in and said, "He's enormous." I said, "Go check the bulldog."

She checked the bulldog for a very long time, from a position that let her see the lobby.

At 6:00 the sky over the back fence went the color of a bruise going away. I took the chart out to him.

He came awake all at once, with no stages, the way people do who have been trained to.