Page 63 of Knocked Up

"It's sixty-eight."

"Tessa, I'm looking at it."

"That thermostat has been wrong since 2013. You have to add four."

"Then it isn't a thermostat, it's a riddle."

"It's sixty-eight and the fosters are fine. If you're cold there are nine blankets in this house."

"I'm not cold," he said. "You're cold. You've had your hands inside your sleeves for two hours."

He got a blanket off the back of the couch and put it on the arm of my chair. He did not hand it to me or say anything about it. Then he went back to the sink.

I sat there with my hands inside my sleeves and looked at that blanket like it was a summons.

The hallway is thirty-one inches wide, because in 1961 somebody built a bathroom into what had been a porch. Every person who has lived in that house has learned it the way a person learns a piece of music.

He has not learned it. He is six foot four and he takes up the whole thing.

On the ninth night I came out of the bathroom at ten past ten with wet hands. He came around the corner from the kitchen with a bottle in each hand. We did not so much collide as arrive.

I got a hand up. It landed flat on his chest. I know exactly where, because my palm went straight onto the scar in the middle of it like it had a map.

Neither of us moved.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's a narrow hall."

He had come out of the shower an hour before and his hair was still doing the thing it does. There is a smell that is soap and clinic and him. I've known it since I was twenty-one. My whole body sat up and put its ears forward like an animal at a gate.

"You should…" I said.

Neither of us said what the end of that sentence was. His hand had come up somewhere around my elbow, not holding, just there.

And nine feet away on the door of a refrigerator, in red marker, there is a sentence about what nobody in this house is going to do. A man's initials are next to it.

"Beckett. I'm not."

"I know," he said. He did not move either. We stood in a thirty-one-inch hallway for what was probably two seconds and was not two seconds.

Then the crate at the end of the hall went off like a smoke alarm.

It was Plante. It is always Plante. He is four weeks old and he weighs three hundred and ninety grams. He has the lungs of a much larger animal. He had gotten himself under the towel and could not solve it.

Beckett was there before I was. He got the crate open one-handed with a bottle still in the other and got the towel off him. "All right. All right. You're all right." His voice was about an octave below the one he uses on people. The kitten stopped mid-scream.

I stood in my hallway with my hand still up in the air where his chest had been.

"He was under the towel," Beckett said.

"He does that."

"Every night?"

"Every single night."

"Then the towel's wrong," he said. I said, "Do not reorganize the towel." He went past me into the kitchen. I went and stood in my room with the door shut and my hands over my face for a minute.