Page 96 of Knocked Up

She sat up so fast the cuff line went tight. "Who took it?"

"Sofia cut at four. Eli scrubbed in. He's out and stable. Sofia's got him on fluids. She says the owner is a nightmare but the dog's a gentleman."

Tessa looked at me for a while.

"The service called you. They called you first."

"Yeah," I said. "You want to tell me when you did that?"

"No," Tessa said, and pulled the blanket up over her face. From underneath it she said, "January." Then she would not come out for about a minute.

We came home on the Wednesday at two in the afternoon.

Bear was standing in the hall.

He is fourteen. He has one hip that works and the other one is a suggestion. He does not get up for the mail or for Eli. I've seen him decline to get up for a plate of chicken.

He was on his feet at the door before the truck was off.

"Don't let him," Tessa said. "Beckett, he's going to…"

"He's fine. Tessa, look at him," I said.

He came the four steps to the car seat and stopped. Then he put his whole head down into it, right down. He did not lick her or push or make a sound. He breathed her in from one end to the other, twice. It was long and slow, the way he does with a bag of groceries when he is deciding what is in it.

Then he sat down beside the seat, in the way of everything, and looked up at me.

"Yeah," I said. "That's her."

He walked that seat down the hall about three inches behind my heel. I put it down by the bassinet. He lay against the leg of it with his spine along the wood and his chin on his paws.

He has held that post every night since. Nobody asked him to and nobody has ever moved him.

"He knows," Tessa said, from the door.

"He doesn't know anything, he's a dog."

"Beckett."

"He knows," I said.

I got on a plane on the Thursday morning and played that night on four hours of sleep. I stopped thirty-nine. It went on like that for a month. I've never played like that in my life and I do not think I will again. Every night I went out there with a photograph of a refrigerator door in my blocker. There was an exam form and a grey square with a crease in it. After the 3rd of June there was a strip of paper with a bar code on it and my daughter's weight printed in tiny letters.

The men who wrote in September that Denver had taken on a problem wrote in May that Denver had found something. I read one paragraph of that and put my phone face down. I've had the other kind and I did not die of it. I would rather not learn to need the good one.

Game six was at home on the 28th of June and we were down three games to two.

I played the best sixty minutes of my career and I've watched it since. Thirty-four shots and two went in. The second one came at eleven forty of the third. Their kid put it under the bar on the short side from about nine feet. It beat me clean.

For eleven years I've gone home and gone through the tape looking for the two inches that were mine. There were not two inches in it. He beat me. That is a legal thing a hockey player is allowed to do.

We lost two to one. Season over.

The room afterward was the way it always is. Baranov came in and said a few words about being proud. He could not do any more. Auggie sat down next to me with his shoulder against mine. He did not say anything for a long time, which for him is a hospital-grade injury.

"You know that was you," he said. "All of it."

"It went in."