Page 67 of Knocked Up

"I played hockey."

"Beckett."

She did not say anything.

There is a red clause on a refrigerator eleven feet from that couch. At that moment I could have recited it and it did not mean anything. Her thumb was still under my jaw. She was looking at my mouth. I was going to do it and I was not going to be sorry.

The door from the hall does not latch. It is a strike plate and an $8 part and I haven't fixed it. In this house I've learned not to fix things I haven't been given.

Bear put his whole shoulder into it from the other side. Eighty pounds of shepherd came through at the speed he does everything, which is slowly. He got his head under her hand and put his entire weight against my back at the same time. I went forward into the arm of the couch. The plate went and there was soup on the floor.

"Bear."

"He wanted in," Tessa said. Her voice was not right. "He always wants in."

She went and got a towel and did not come back for a while. I cleaned up soup off the floor with a fourteen-year-old dog standing directly in it. Margaret came off the refrigerator to supervise from four feet.

At midnight I sat at the end of the kitchen table and put the day's weights in.

Brodeur, up eleven. Hasek, up six, which is not enough. I will be watching that. Plante, up nine. Parent, up nine. Mister Tony, up two. He has been last since the 28th of December and does not appear to have any opinion about it at all.

I sorted it descending.

Margaret was asleep on my end of the couch in the next room, on her side with her feet out. It is not a thing she does in front of people.

And on my chest, inside my shirt, was a grey cat named after my father. That is where he goes now. He weighs four pounds and has never earned one single thing in his life.

Down the hall the bathroom lamp that is not a timer was on. The dryer was running with nothing in it. If the dryer is running the whole house sleeps. I stopped feeling anything about that on day three.

I put my hand flat on the cat so he would not fall when I stood up.

Then I sat there a while longer and did not stand up.

Chapter 19: Tessa

The rescue does not close for Christmas.

People find this upsetting. They say but surely. I say the bottle babies eat at ten and one and four and seven on the 25th exactly the way they eat on a Tuesday in March. Then they look at me like I've told them something sad about myself.

Beckett did not do that. On the 23rd he came in from the runs with the laminated sheet and said, "What's the holiday version?"

"There isn't one."

"There's a schedule and then there's the holiday version of the schedule."

"Beckett. It's the same schedule."

He looked at the sheet a second, the way he looks at a thing that has come back with a number he did not expect.

"Then I'll take the mornings," he said.

"Which mornings?"

"The mornings," he said. He went back out.

I woke on Christmas Eve at twenty past six because the dryer stopped. That is the only thing that wakes me now.

There was a decaf on the counter with a saucer on top of it to keep the heat in. On the laminated sheet, in the column that says Seniors, four small check marks in pencil. Next to Stevie's, a note in that handwriting like an engineering drawing.