Page 65 of Knocked Up

Then the spreadsheet. The five fosters get weighed every morning before the seven o'clock feed. In a four-week-old kitten a bad twelve hours is a number before it is anything a person can see. Tessa has been writing them on the back of an envelope. I've watched her look for the envelope.

So it is a spreadsheet now, to the gram, on my laptop at the end of the kitchen table where the towels used to be. Down the left side are the names. The second-grade class names them and their teacher's husband is a hockey person. So every foster through that building is named after a goaltender who won the Stanley Cup. Hasek. Brodeur. Parent. Plante. And a fifth they insisted on calling Mister Tony.

There is a column at the right that calculates the gain over the previous day. I sort it descending every morning. This is a medically appropriate way to look at that data.

It is also a leaderboard. Brodeur has been winning since the ninth. He was two hundred grams behind Hasek on the 3rd of January. He has taken it back forty grams at a time like a man grinding out a road trip. I have no defense for how invested I am in this. There is no prize. Nobody else is looking at it. On the 16th Mister Tony gained four grams in a day. I sat at that table at one in the morning and thought, seriously, about what I could change for him.

And there is a sixth line on that spreadsheet that has nothing to do with the current litter. There is a grey cat in that house named Roy.

He came in with the October litter. The October litter went to homes in November and he did not. His card was never put out. I've never once said a word to anybody about that cat. I sat on an exam room floor in October. He climbed out of a tub and fell asleep against my leg. I haven't been able to explain the months since to myself, let alone out loud.

He is enormous now. He sleeps on the back of the couch behind my head.

Nobody in this house has ever said one word to me about the name.

Everybody in this house has noticed. Violet noticed in nine seconds and had the grace to only look at me. Eli has spoken to me four times since December, all of them logistics. He stood in that kitchen on a Tuesday. He looked at the grey cat asleep on the back of the couch. He looked at me and left the room.

And Tessa has never mentioned it. That is how I know how much she has thought about it, because that woman mentions everything.

The house fought the system. It did not fight fair. It was led from the top of the refrigerator.

Margaret's opening move was the scale. I came out on the fourth morning and every kitten in that litter weighed five thousand one hundred grams. All five were identical.

She was on the fridge. Paws together.

"That was you," I said.

She did not blink.

Her second move was the couch. I have a side. She had it inside a week. I got up for water on a Sunday and came back to nine pounds of cat asleep in it with her back to the room. Tessa said from the kitchen without looking, "Take the other end."

"It's my end."

The third move was the ambush.

So I left counter-notes.

Note: The scale has been zeroed. Please do not sit on the scale.

Note: A cat was found in the clean towel bin. This is the second occurrence.

Note: Occupant of the left couch cushion has been asked to relocate and has declined.

Tessa found the third one at seven in the morning and I heard her from the hallway. She laughed until she had to sit down on the arm of the couch. Then she read it again and did it a second time. I stood in a doorway with a bottle in my hand and did not go in, because I wanted to keep listening to it.

I text her from the road.

Plante 412g, up 9. Brodeur up 14. Mister Tony noncompliant. Dolly took hers in bread. Stevie refused cheese, took it in peanut butter, log updated. No further developments.

She has never once texted back anything except a thumbs up. On the 11th of January she texted back, No further developments is not a thing a person says. I read it in a hotel in Vancouver about nine times.

Baranov caught me in the hallway before the Winnipeg game. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the wall a while.

"November you were fine. December you were good. This month you are the best goalie in this building and it is not close. I have been coaching twenty-six years and I do not say that in a hallway."

"Okay."

"Do not say okay."