Page 87 of Knocked Up

"Yeah. They traded me in June for a fourth-round pick and a kid. My value went from a starter to a guy on a one-year contract in about eleven weeks."

Tessa did not say anything for a long time.

"Did he ever…"

"No," I said. "And he shouldn't. He was twenty. He doesn't owe me his worst night so I can have a better September."

"Beckett."

"It's not a noble thing," I said. "You'll make it one and it isn't. I paid for it because paying for it was easier than the other thing."

"Which is what?"

"Standing in a room and saying I need somebody to take my word."

She was quiet a while after that. Out behind the building a hose was running that did not need to be running.

"Tell me the rest of it," she said.

"There isn't a…"

"There's a rest of it," Tessa said. "In that exam room you told me what your father said to you at that table when you were twenty-one. You said it in about nine words and then you stopped talking. You have never gone near it since. I have thought about the way you stopped every week since then."

The sun had come up enough to see the whole lot.

"He drove me back from Denver," I said. "The call-up. We got in at about one in the morning and he made eggs, which he did about four times in my life. He sat down across the table from me and said it like a man doing me a favor. He said men like us ruin what we keep. He said love is a number and it gets withdrawn the night you let in a soft goal. He said if I wanted a life in this game I should not carry anything into it that could be taken off me."

"You told me that part."

"Yeah."

"What's the part you didn't tell me?"

I sat there and could not make my mouth work for a few seconds.

"He said, I know, because I did it to your mother."

Tessa did not move.

"That's the whole sentence. He said it flat, the way he says everything, and then he got up and put the pan in the sink and asked me what time my flight was.

"And I was twenty-one. I had spent my entire life being told what I was by the only man I'd been trained to believe. He had just told me it was hereditary and produced the evidence." I was looking at the gravel. "Two weeks later I stood in a hallway in Fort Collins with a phone in my hand. I did not ask you to come, because I already knew what I was going to do to you eventually. And I thought I was giving you something."

"You thought you were doing me a favor. For ten years."

"Beckett." Her voice had gone somewhere else. "And the money."

"That's the corollary. I worked it out when I was about twenty-three. I have run my whole life on it and I have never said it out loud."

"Say it out loud."

"If I never let myself have you, I can never make you pay for it," I said. "That's the whole system. And the only kind of love I can give anybody is the kind nobody can tell me I haven't earned. That's the kind I do where they can't see it."

There was a long silence on that step.

"So you paid nineteen thousand four hundred dollars into a dog's account," Tessa said. "In three instalments. A month apart."

"So it'd read like a payment plan."