Page 78 of Knocked Up

"Tessa."

"It's fine," she said, with her hands flat on the edge of the counter. She has said that word to me maybe four hundred times in five months. That is the only one I've not believed.

I got my bag. At the door she said my name. When I turned around she was right there. She came up on her toes and got a fistful of the back of my jacket. She kissed me hard enough that my teeth got involved. Then she stepped back and said, "Take the blue one," and went into the clinic.

In the truck at five past seven my phone went. It was a number I had in my phone and had never once had a message from.

Eli: if you get traded I’m keeping the dog

I sat in that lot and read it four times.

I typed he'd rather be with you anyway and deleted it. That is a joke. A joke would have been a way of not answering a man who had just told me something.

Understood, I sent.

Three dots came up and went away and came up and went away, twice, over about a minute.

ok

That is the entire conversation and I would not trade it for a first-round pick.

A deadline day from the inside is worse than it looks.

We skated at nine and it was a bad skate because everybody was doing arithmetic. Wheeler told a story about a guy in Ottawa who found out from a taxi driver. Somebody said do not look at your phone, and everybody looked at their phone.

Auggie set up in the corner of the lounge with three of them fanned out on a towel like a man laying out instruments.

"This one's the aggregator, which is an account that collects every rumor. This one's the guy in Toronto who's right about sixty percent of the time. This one's my cousin Dez, who is right zero percent of the time but is very fast."

"Put them away."

"Beckett, I'm load-bearing right now."

I had known for eleven days. I knew because my agent started calling more and saying less. The reason it was happening is the thing that makes it stupid. I had been playing the best hockey of my life since January, on a one-year deal. A contender two time zones away had a goalie with a groin injury. In September the columnists wrote that I was finished. In February the same men wrote that Denver would be foolish not to sell high.

I had no say in where I went. I signed that deal in July because it was the only one on the table.

At ten-forty I walked down the hall to the general manager's office and knocked on the frame of an open door. Marc Delisle has had that job six years. He looked up at me like a man whose morning had just gotten stranger.

"You got two minutes."

I had thought about how to say it in the truck and every version was a speech, so I did not use any of them.

"I know how today works. I know what a goalie playing like this on an expiring deal is worth to a team that thinks it can win. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it isn't good business, because it is."

"Okay."

"I've never asked anybody in this game for anything. Eleven years, four organizations. I got told."

Delisle put the pen down.

"My daughter's going to be born in this city in June," I said. "Nine minutes from this building. Her mother's business is on Federal and it doesn't move. It can't. It's a shelter and a clinic and a house on one lot. I'm not asking you to make a bad hockey decision. I'm asking, if it's close, for the chance to earn the rest of my career here."

He did not say anything for a while. "You know I can't tell you anything."

"I know."

"Beckett." He picked the pen back up and turned it over once. "How long have you been standing in that hallway?"