Page 51 of Knocked Up

So I did what I do with a feeling, which is turn it into a project. I read the eleventh week and then the twelfth and then the whole rest of it in order. At one in the morning I was reading about newborn reflexes with a dog asleep on my feet. I started a folder, green, from a drugstore. Then I put it in a drawer and could not look at it for two days.

I've never been able to say one true thing to her.

So I did the other thing.

The foundation called about the charity skate every year. They called the goalie, because goalies are cheap to put on a poster. There was a beneficiary. It had been a hospital wing, and before that a food bank. There was a woman named Denise on the phone asking what I cared about, in the voice people use when they expect me to say children.

"Animal rescue," I said.

"Oh, that's wonderful, we love that. There's a big one in Aurora that we've…"

"There's one on Federal," I said. "Reeves. It's a rescue and a clinic, one doctor. They take about eighty animals a year. It's been there since 1998."

"Reeves," Denise said, writing.

"They do the parvo cases nobody else takes because nobody else can eat it."

"And is there a connection there, or…"

"They fixed my dog," I said.

Everything I said to that woman was true. I've gotten very good at that.

It came back a week later with a yes. Then it became a thing with a hashtag. The franchise put out a graphic with June Reeves's name on it in the team's typeface. I looked at that graphic in a parking garage for longer than a man should look at a graphic.

I told her about it the way I would tell somebody about weather. I said the foundation had picked the clinic. She said, "Picked it how?" I said, "There's a committee." She looked at me for about four seconds and let it go.

The skate was Friday night. Six thousand people, players in half kit, a kid in a wheelchair who beat Auggie in a shootout to the loudest noise in that building all season.

The adopt-a-thon was Saturday morning at the beneficiary, which is contractual. The equipment truck came over with our gear in it because somebody in marketing had an idea.

Six chairs and a fish tank. By nine there was a table across the front with pucks on it and a line out the door into the cold. Kittens in a pen by the window. A Saint Bernard named Duchess who weighed a hundred and forty pounds sitting in the doorway like a piece of civil engineering. Skoglund on the floor with a beagle on his chest, being filmed. Wheeler's wife Kim running the team's social account off her phone like a war correspondent.

And along the window, on a folding table, our gear was laid out so kids could put it on for pictures. That was Kim's idea and it was a good one. There was nothing funnier than a six-year-old inside a goalie chest protector. They could not put their arms down. They stood there like a piece of furniture and everybody lost their minds.

Tessa was behind her own reception desk in a clean scrub top with her hair up, running an adoption queue with a clipboard. She did not look at me one time in two hours. I did not look at her, and both of us were extremely good at it.

Auggie found me by the kibble display with a puck in each hand and a small child holding the back of his jersey like a handrail.

"I've been in this building one hour and I've learned there is a cat on that cabinet who is watching me specifically."

"That's Margaret."

"Why do you know its name?"

"Everyone knows her name."

"Everyone," Auggie said, and looked at me a second too long. "You've had a face on for a week. It's a face like a man who won something and can't say what."

"Sign your pucks, Auggie."

There was a girl about seven in a purple coat. She had already done the chest protector and she wanted the blocker. The blocker was the one that got them, because it was a rectangle the size of a car door. It made a child look like a road sign.

She got it on her arm. Then she picked it up over her head with both hands, which is the shot her mother wanted. Kim was already filming. She turned in a circle with it so everybody could see.

The lining in my blocker has a gap up near the top where the wrist strap anchors. Everybody's gear has a place like that.

There are two things in mine. A folded exam form with a dog's medication schedule on it in a woman's handwriting, in there since October. And since Thursday, something else.