Page 69 of Knocked Up

There is a thing my brother does with his jaw that he got from our mother and it means he is holding a sentence.

"I'm not saying anything nice," he said.

"I know."

"I want that on the record. Not one nice thing. He coiled the hose wrong," Eli said. He went out and did the runs anyway, which had already been done. I stood at the window and watched a twenty-two-year-old man hose clean concrete out of spite.

I went out to him at the third run and told him standing up, with the water still going. I said I was pregnant. I said it was Beckett’s. I said June.

Eli turned the tap off. He stood there about four seconds with his hand still on it.

Then he said, “Right,” and put the hose down and hugged me hard enough to hurt. Into my shoulder, in a completely flat voice, he said, “I’m still not saying one nice thing about him.”

He did not drop a shift. He did not move in. He came Wednesdays and he came Sundays and that was the whole of it, and I know exactly what that cost him, because I am the one who taught him how to do it.

Violet arrived at noon with an eight-foot inflatable snowman.

It came out of the back of her car with the seat folded flat. She stood over it on the gravel like a woman who had killed something.

"Where's the outlet?"

"Violet."

"Tessa, the lot is sad."

Auggie's truck came around the row at twenty past twelve. He opened the tailgate. There was an eight-foot inflatable snowman in it.

"No," Violet said.

"They had two." He came down the gravel with his arms out. "I stood in that aisle and I thought, is this too much. Then I thought, Augustin, when has that ever been the question?"

"I asked the guy if it was the last one."

"He told me it was the last one," Auggie said. Violet Ocampo put her hand out and Auggie shook it. The two of them looked at each other a second longer than two people need to look at each other. Then they put both snowmen up on either side of my clinic sign, facing each other, like a gate.

Beckett came out to see what the noise was.

"There's two."

"They're the same one," I said.

He looked at them a while. "They're going to fight," he said, and went back in.

Around two I asked where Violet was. Beckett said, "In the clinic with your friend," and I said, "He's your friend." Beckett said, "She has the mistletoe," in exactly the voice he uses to say Mister Tony is noncompliant. Neither of us did one thing with that information. They came out forty minutes later. Violet's lipstick was on the wrong part of her mouth and Auggie said the laminator was fascinating.

We did the gifts at nine at night, after everybody had gone, at the kitchen table with the good lamp on and five kittens in a crate by the radiator. It was my idea. I regret it the way I regret a thing that changed my life.

"I got you something," I said. "It's not a thing. It's small."

"You're setting expectations low," Beckett said. "Set them wherever you want. I got you something too."

"You did what? When?"

"November. It took a while," he said. "It was at a place."

So we sat at a table where the towels used to live and did it like two people defusing a device. He made me go first.

It was flat and heavy and wrapped in the paper the clinic uses for surgical packs. That man does not own wrapping paper and would not buy any. He had taped it in a way that suggested he had thought about the taping.