Page 62 of Knocked Up

"I don't know when they start."

"When people are asleep, Beckett."

"Nobody in this house is ever asleep," he said. He was not being funny. That man has never been funny on purpose in his life. "There's a bottle feed at one and one at four. There's a dog who barks at the dryer. Last night you were in the runs at eleven-forty with a hose. If quiet hours are when people are asleep then there are no quiet hours, and I'd rather have a number."

"Ten," I said.

"Ten at night to when?"

"Six."

"Six," he said. He wrote 10 to 6 on the board next to clause three in handwriting like an engineering drawing.

"You're annotating my charter."

"I'm clarifying clause three."

"Don't say charter."

"You said charter."

"I did not say charter," I said. I had, twice.

On the Thursday I came into the kitchen with a cat carrier and stopped dead.

The board had been color-coded, not rewritten. Every word was still in my own slanted handwriting exactly where I put it. But there was a green box around the three clauses that are logistics. There was a blue box around the two that are money and labor. Clause five had its date boxed in the corner. The whole thing looked like something from a room where men decide about a defenseman's ankle.

"Beckett."

"Yeah."

"What is this."

He came and looked at it with me, like a man checking his own work for errors.

"Green's what we do," he said. "Blue's what it costs. The red one's yours. I didn't touch it."

"You put a box around my boundaries."

"I put a box around the categories."

"Do you understand," I said, "that I wrote that board so there would be one thing in this house you could not get inside of?"

He did not say anything for a second.

"Yeah," he said. "I know. I did it anyway."

And then he took the carrier out of my hand, because it weighs eleven pounds and I'm allowed five. He carried it out to the truck.

The first days were like this. He gets up at five, not five-fifteen. Five every day, including the day after a game in Anaheim when he got in at two-forty. I know that because I heard the door.

By the time I come out at six-thirty the bottle babies have been done twice. Stevie has had her thyroid pill in cheese and Noodle has had both of his. The cat with the feeding tube has been flushed and logged. There is a decaf on the counter I did not ask for and have never once thanked him for.

I've said more than once that I do not want a decaf. I drink it every morning.

The thermostat took eight days.

"It's sixty-four in here."