Page 84 of Knocked Up

"You'd have said no in about a second and a half. You'd have said it kindly and then you'd have gone on doing it on your own. I watched you do it in October and I watched you do it in November." He was very quiet. "And I would rather you hated me than watched you drown in that building."

"There it is." I put my hand flat on the table, on the statement. "You decided. On your own. In a room I wasn't in. About my life."

He did not say anything.

"That's what you did in the hallway in Fort Collins," I said. "You stood somewhere by yourself with a phone in your hand. You did the math for both of us and you came back and told me the answer. And you have never once in ten years understood that the thing you did to me was not leaving."

"Say it, then."

"You never asked me," I said. "Not one time. Not then. You didn't ask me if I'd come. You decided what I'd say and then you gave me the door like it was a kindness. I have spent ten years being angry at a man for leaving. What I was actually angry about is that he never once let me be in the room."

The refrigerator hummed. Something moved on top of it and settled.

"This," I said, "is why the end date exists."

I watched that land. He did not move at all.

"That's fair," he said.

"Don't do that. Don't you stand there and be reasonable at me," I said. My hands were shaking and I put them behind me. "You should go."

And Beckett Douglas looked at me across my mother's kitchen linoleum at ten past three in the morning and said, "No."

I did not have anything ready for that.

"What?"

"No," he said again. "I'm not going."

"It's my house."

"It's your house and you can throw me out of it in the morning and I'll go. I'll do the runs first. I'll leave the schedule laminated on the wall so somebody can read it." He had not raised his voice one single time. "But you said it at three in the morning at a table with a light on. You are twenty-eight weeks pregnant with a blood pressure I have on a piece of paper in a drawer. I am not getting in a truck tonight so that you can be right about me."

"Beckett."

"I'm not going to Walt's. It's boxed and it's cold and there's no bed in it. I'm not going to a hotel. If I go anywhere you will spend the rest of the night listening for a truck, because that is what you do. I have watched you do it every time I've come home late since December." He put his hand on the back of a chair from 1991. "Be as angry as you want. Be angry for a week. I'm on the couch."

"You are not sleeping on my couch."

"I'm on the couch," he said. He went and sat down on it in the dark, with his elbows on his knees, and did not turn the television on.

Then I turned the overhead light off, because I could not stand it. I went down the narrow hallway with my back to the wall and shut my door.

I lay on my side in the dark with my hand where it goes and my heart going in my ears. I was so angry I could feel it in my teeth. Every single thing I had said to him was true and I would say all of it again.

And underneath it, running the whole time like a tap in another room, was a thing I could not get to stop.

I opened the door. I pointed at it. I said the words out loud.

Every man in my life has taken that offer. My father took it in 2001 with a duffel bag. Beckett took it in a hallway in Fort Collins when he was twenty-one. I have built an entire life on the certainty that this is what happens when I open it. And I have been so careful. And I have been so right.

At half past four I heard him get up and do the four o'clock bottle feed. He put the bottle in the sink and went back and sat down.

The house was completely dark and nobody was gone.

Chapter 23: Beckett

I did not sleep, so I did the things.