Page 55 of Knocked Up

Somebody in that room made a sound. It was not me and it was not Mateo.

"Right," Mateo said. "So we're not in the common column anymore. We're in the other one."

He gave it to me straight after that, because there is no way to soften it for a person who reads the same journals.

Chronic high blood pressure plus a low-lying placenta that has already bled. High risk as of today, not as of some later date when I feel like agreeing with him. Baby aspirin every night. A cuff at home, twice a day, written down on paper and brought in. Pelvic rest. No lifting. When I asked him to put a number on it, he said ten pounds, then looked at me and said five. No overnights. A rescan at twenty-eight weeks to see whether the placenta has picked up and moved.

And then the last one, which he said slowly.

"If your numbers go severe or you get a headache that won't go or you see spots or your face swells, you call the service and you go in. Not in the morning. That night. And if it gets bad enough between now and June, the treatment is delivery. That's the only treatment there is. The baby comes out early whether anybody is ready or not."

"I know what the treatment is."

"Say it back to me anyway."

I said it back to him.

We were in the hallway before I laughed, and it was not a good one.

"He just ordered a woman who runs a twenty-four-hour emergency clinic to stop lifting things and get eight hours."

"Yeah."

"I have a hundred animals. Five bottle babies on a three-hour schedule. A cat with a feeding tube. I do the overnights because I'm the person who does the overnights. That is not a preference, that is the org chart." I stopped in the middle of the hallway. "And the building is my house, Beckett. Forty feet of covered concrete between the surgical suite and my kitchen. My mother poured it in 1998 so she would never have to go home. Now a man in a cardigan wants me to pretend it is a commute."

"What do you need?" Beckett said.

"Don't."

"It's a question."

"I know it's a question. That's why."

The clinic part I fixed in a day and a half, and it half killed me.

Sofia Rodriguez did forty years of small-animal surgery on Sheridan. She sold to Apex in June and lasted eleven weeks in her own building before she quit. She is sixty-eight and she has hands like a bricklayer and no interest at all in anybody's feelings. I called on a Friday to ask if she knew anybody.

"You're asking me if I know a fill-in vet."

"I'm asking if you know anybody who might."

"Tessa. I have been retired five months. Do you know what I did Tuesday? I organized a drawer."

"Sofia."

"I'll do three days and Saturday mornings if you leave me alone about it," she said. "Is your ultrasound still the one with the crack in the screen?"

“It is.”

"God," Sofia said, with enormous happiness, "that thing was old when I bought mine." She started Monday and reorganized my controlled drug log inside four hours.

Every hour of her is money. That is the sentence under the good news. Eleven hundred a week that does not exist, in a building where nothing has existed since spring. There is a lease renewing in August, and a man named Grant Fessler waiting patiently for me to be a risk profile.

So I bought back my daylight hours. What I could not buy was the night, and the night is where the actual job is.

Violet's first, because Violet insisted. I said no twice.

It was a studio above a dry cleaner with a roommate named Deshaun who sleeps behind a curtain. In the corner, on a stand, there was an African grey parrot named Cornelius who belongs to Deshaun's mother.