Page 52 of Knocked Up

It came out when she turned it over, flat and slow, the way paper does. It went four feet down onto the concrete, face up, in a room with people standing in it.

I did not think. My hand was already going.

I got down and my glove closed over it before the second bounce. I put it in my jacket and stood back up.

And the room did the arithmetic.

Nobody said anything. The room went quiet in a very particular way for about a second and a half. Then Skoglund said "whoa" from the floor with a beagle on him. Wheeler turned to look at his wife. His wife had her phone up and had had it up the whole time.

Tens of thousands have now seen a small white rectangle on grey concrete, then a glove closing over it, then a goaltender standing up with a face on him.

Nobody can see what it is. That is the worst part. If they could see it, it would be a fact. What it is instead is a hole, and a hole gets filled in by whoever is standing nearest.

Auggie made a noise like a man being shot and went over backward into the kibble.

He had time to choose. There was a pyramid of forty-pound bags and he went into it from six feet with his arms out. A bag split, and chicken and rice went across that floor. Duchess got up out of the doorway for the first time in two hours.

"I'm fine!" Auggie said, from underneath. "Everybody's fine! Nothing happened!"

That bought me a few seconds and I did not use them well.

Because I looked up, and Tessa was behind her own desk with a clipboard in her hand and a woman in front of her holding a cat carrier.

She had her face completely under control. She was better at it than I was and she was doing it in front of a queue in her mother's building. But she was looking at my jacket where my hand was. The color had gone out of her from the neck up. I've never in my life wanted so badly to be somewhere else with somebody.

I took one step toward her.

That is when my head went sideways.

I did not see it. Eleven years and I've never once been hit by something I did not see. A twenty-one-year-old bartender got a clean right hand on me in a room with two hundred people in it. I never saw his arm.

I went down on one knee into the kibble.

There was noise then, a lot of it. Somebody screamed, and about four people got there at once. By the time I had my eyes working there were three volunteers on Eli. Duchess had put herself sideways across his shins, which is a hundred and forty pounds of dog deciding a thing is over.

"Get off me!"

"Eli."

"You get him out of here!"

"Eli, honey, no."

He was not shouting at me. He was shouting at the room. "She's had you in this building four months and you couldn't…"

Then Tessa said his name, one time, from behind the desk, and he stopped like somebody had cut a wire.

I got up. My mouth was full of blood and my jaw felt like a bell.

Everybody in that lobby was looking at me, waiting for the thing that happens next. They had all seen a hundred fights and they knew the shape.

"I'm all right," I said, to the room.

"You're bleeding," Kim said.

"It's a lip."

Two of my teammates were coming across the floor with their chins down. That was the moment. If I had said one word in a certain tone, that kid would get hurt in his sister's lobby in front of a camera.