Page 94 of Knocked Up

"That's her."

He wrote it on the board on the end of the bassinet himself, in block capitals. He wrote it twice because the first one had a letter he did not like.

Then he sat back down on the edge of the bed in the dark.

And he did the thing. His right hand came up off his knee and went flat against the middle of his own chest, palm open. It was the way it does going out of the tunnel. It was the way it did in a dark room on Wadsworth in November, when a heart came into it at a hundred and sixty-two. He held it there.

Then he took it off his own chest and put it, very gently, flat over hers.

Her entire self was under one hand.

He did not say anything and neither did I. Nobody in that room needed anybody to.

Chapter 25: Beckett

There were two chairs in that room. One folded out and one did not. I sat in the one that did not for four nights, because the one that folded out was where her feet went.

Baranov called at nine in the morning on the 30th of May.

I had been somebody's father for a day. I took the phone into the hall in my socks with sentences ready.

"Douglas. Girl or boy?"

"Girl."

"Weight."

"Five pounds eleven."

"That is a good weight," Baranov said. "You are not here Tuesday. You are not here Wednesday. Thursday."

"Game one is Tuesday."

"Game one is Tuesday and Kovic will play it."

A door shut on his end. "I have three of them. With the first one I was in Sudbury and I've thought about that week for thirty-one years. This is not a favor. It is a line change. Thursday."

He hung up. I went back in. Tessa was awake and looking at the door.

"What did he say?"

"Thursday."

"Beckett."

"He said family first. Then he said it was a line change, so it wouldn't be a nice thing he said."

Tessa put her head back on the pillow. "I like him."

"Everybody likes him. He's said about forty words to me since October."

"That's why everybody likes him," she said.

They played game one on the Tuesday and I watched it on a television bolted to a wall at an angle that was wrong for the room.

Willa was on my chest inside my shirt with a hat on. Nobody explained the hat and I did not ask.

Kovic was twenty-four and had played thirty-one games in this league. He stopped forty-one shots that night. I've watched a lot of hockey in my life and I've never once been happy the way I was happy in that chair.