Page 82 of Knocked Up

Tenant option to purchase the freehold, granted 1998, exercisable during any renewal window upon ninety days' written notice and proof of financing, at a price determined by the formula set out at Schedule C.

I went and got Schedule C.

In 1998 June Reeves could not afford to buy that ground. She never could, not in twenty-four years. So she sat in a room with a man who owned a block of Federal Boulevard that nobody wanted. She got him to give her the right to buy it later instead, with the price fixed to a formula. Then she paid rent on it for the rest of her life and died still paying it.

Apex bought the land in June and took it with every claim against it still attached. Somebody in their acquisitions department knew. That is why a chain that owns forty clinics has spent eight months sending a woman with six employees glossy mailers about how tired she must be.

They are not trying to renew me out. They are trying to get me out before August.

I stood in my office and did a thing I have not done since I was twenty-two, which is laugh out loud in an empty room.

The formula price, as best I could work it, was somewhere around $410,000. I had ninety days.

I did the numbers myself, at the kitchen table. I worked from nine at night on the Thursday until half past two on the Friday morning. Nobody asked me to do it alone. He was a few feet away asleep in a small room. Sofia has done this three times. Violet's cousin is a mortgage broker in Lakewood.

I did it alone because that is what I do. I did not think about it any harder than I think about which hand I open a door with.

A lender wants to see everything I owe money against, so I pulled the surgical loan file and started building the list out of the statements.

The arrears are the reason I know that file by heart. We went sixty days down in March, and then ninety. In the autumn it stopped being the first thing I thought about in the morning. I did not examine that.

The statements say the balance was cleared in three payments. They were the fourth of November, the second of December and the seventh of January.

I looked at those three dates for a while.

Then I went into the practice software. Every payment into this business gets applied against a client account, that is how the system works. I ran the payments report for the fourth of November.

It came back in under a second.

Account 20114. Douglas, B. Patient: Bear (canine, shepherd mix). Payment applied: on account.

I ran the second of December. I ran the seventh of January.

It was the same account three times. The amount had nothing to do with a fourteen-year-old dog on a maintenance dose of anything. It was sitting in a patient ledger under the name of a shepherd who lives in my house and sleeps at the foot of my bed.

I sat at that table a long time. The dryer went off at some point and the house got loud.

Then I went and stood at the freezer door, because that is where things go in this house. I read a board I wrote at that same table in December. I got to clause two.

Rent is paid in clinic labor, not money. Nobody in this house pays rent in money.

And down the right-hand side it was written seven times, in small neat block capitals, in a hand that did not slow down once.

B.D.

I woke him at twenty to three.

I did not do it kindly. I stood in the doorway of that room and said his name once at speaking volume. He was up before he was awake, the way he is.

"Kitchen," I said.

I had the statement and the payments report side by side on the table. I had turned on the overhead light, which nobody in that house ever turns on. He came through the door and looked at the table for a second, then stopped walking.

He did not ask what it was.

"When?" I said.

"November through January."