Page 90 of Knocked Up

At about half past two a group of them got very serious and Wheeler made everybody be quiet. Skoglund came through the room carrying something on a towel with two hands, like a man delivering a document.

It was a pair of goalie pads, eleven inches tall. They were made properly by the equipment staff, out of the real materials and in the team's colors. There was a number on them. Something was stitched into the leather at the top of the right one, small, in white thread, Douglas

Beckett picked one up and turned it over in his hands and did not say anything for a while. The room let him not say anything, which is a thing that room does for him now.

"They're not regulation," Skoglund said. "If she's going to play, they're a violation."

"She's going to play out," Auggie said. "She's got a hockey mom and a goalie dad, she's going to be a winger out of spite." Beckett said, "Yeah," in a voice with something in it, and put the pad down very carefully.

Sofia gave a toast. She stood on a chair, which nobody asked her to do and two people tried to stop, and held a glass of soda water.

"I have known this woman four months. When I met her she had a blood pressure of one forty-eight over ninety-four and a stand-in vet she could not afford. She had a face like a person who has decided to die at work. I recognized it, because I did it for forty years and sold my building to a chain to make it stop."

Somebody laughed and then understood and stopped.

"I have watched her, since January, learn to lie down. It has been like watching a horse learn to use a telephone." She raised the glass. "Tessa. Your mother was a stubborn woman who built a good thing badly. You have built the same good thing and you have finally got somebody else standing in it. You will not lose it, because I have seen the accounts and I know what I am talking about."

Two grown defensemen were openly crying. Wheeler had to leave the room.

Then the second-grade class's contribution arrived, which Miss Ansah drove over herself. It was a piece of poster board with a bar chart on it in crayon, because they had held a vote.

The ballot was baby names. Every option was a goaltender who has won a Cup.

"They were told it had to be a girl's name," Miss Ansah said.

"And?"

"They did not accept the premise."

Brodeur got four. Plante got six, mostly on the strength of Plante the kitten. Somebody had written Hasek over and over in the same box.

And with thirty-one votes, in a landslide, in green crayon, Roy.

The room came apart. Auggie went down on one knee. Beckett stood there holding a piece of poster board with both hands. He looked at it a long moment and said, "Absolutely not," in a completely flat voice. It was the funniest thing that has ever happened in that building.

"It's democracy," Auggie said.

"It's a cat."

"It's a mandate."

Violet went last, because Violet always goes last.

She gave me a frame. Inside it was the rescue's own letterhead, on the form we use. She had filled it out properly in her handwriting with all the boxes ticked:

Certificate of permanent placement. Animal: Baby Douglas-Reeves. Intake date: pending. Foster period: none. This placement is final. Foster fail. No returns.

Signed and dated, and in the corner where the adoption fee goes, she had written paid in full.

I said it to her in November on a supply room floor. I said that if I could just register the baby as a long-term foster, the paperwork would feel survivable. She told me human children do not come with foster contracts. Then she went and made one.

That is when it happened, and it only lasted a second.

Somebody had put me in a chair by the window. Sofia had my drink and Kim had my coat. Eli had brought me a plate I did not ask for. Violet had her hand on my shoulder. Beckett was across the room with his back to me, talking to Miss Ansah about crayons. I had not done one single thing for anybody in two hours.

I sat in that chair and let seventy people hold me up, and I did not put a stop to it.

I had a headache when I woke up.