Page 71 of Knocked Up

"It was a defenseman named Kyle."

"It was a puck, Tessa," he said. Something in his face came apart about a quarter of an inch and he pulled it back. He still had not looked up.

And then he said it to the table.

"You had this the whole time."

I could have said something. Nine feet away, on the door of my mother's freezer, is a sentence about what nobody in this house is going to do. It is in red marker and capitals with his initials next to it. I had a decade of practice and four good sentences ready. Every one of them would have worked.

"It was in a box," I said. "With a lot of other things. I never went and looked at it. I moved four times. It was in the box, and you take the box."

And that was all either of us said about it. I got up and put the kettle on that I did not want. Behind me I heard him move the frame another inch. Neither of us went near the refrigerator. At eleven he said good night and went down a thirty-one-inch hallway with his back to the wall the way I taught him. I stood in my kitchen with my mother squinting into the sun on the table in front of me and did not go to bed for a long time.

New Year's Eve, the bottle babies ate at midnight.

That is not a decision anybody made. Plante eats at ten and one and four and seven. Mister Tony eats when Mister Tony feels he has been wronged, which that night was eleven-fifty. By five to twelve there were two of us on the kitchen floor with our backs against the cabinets. We had a towel across our knees and three kittens between us. Once I do one I have to do them all or the ones I did not do scream about it.

"Hasek's at four hundred and eighty wins," Beckett said. "Up eighteen since Sunday."

"Are we doing the leaderboard?"

"I'm reporting."

"It's eleven fifty-eight, Beckett."

"Brodeur's still got him by sixty," he said. He adjusted the towel over his knee with the care of a man who has a cat on it. "It's not close."

Fireworks started up somewhere north, the neighborhood kind, flat and far away. Bear lifted his head off the floor and put it down again. Out in the runs one dog said something about it and forty dogs agreed.

"Here it goes," I said.

Somebody two streets over got hold of something bigger and it rattled the window over the sink. Plante came off my knee at the noise. I got a hand on him and Beckett got a hand on him at the same time. My thumb ended up across the back of his knuckles.

Neither of us moved it.

"He's fine," Beckett said.

"He does that every time," I said.

I looked up to say something ordinary. I know what it was going to be. It was going to be about the dryer. Instead I looked at the side of his face in the light off the stove hood. He turned his head.

He kissed me, or I kissed him. It was not the way it was when we were twenty-one.

It was slow. There was nothing hurried anywhere in it. His hand came up along my jaw and stopped and just stayed there, holding the side of my face like it was the whole point. He made a sound in his chest at the back of it that I've not heard in ten years and knew instantly. I heard myself make one back. The taste of him was coffee and the same soap as always and my entire twenty-first year.

It went on long enough for the fireworks to stop and start again.

Mister Tony screamed through every second of it, not once but continuously. Four hundred grams of cat on his back in a towel between us with his feet in the air, screaming at the volume of a much larger animal. Neither of us stopped. At some point Beckett got a hand down and put the bottle back in. The screaming went off like a switch. He did not take his mouth off mine to do it.

When we came apart my forehead was against his and his hand was still on my face.

"Okay," he said.

"Don't say okay."

"I don't have another word."

"Beckett. Which one of us did that?"