Page 99 of Knocked Up

"By a lot."

"How is it going so far?" Tessa said. I sat in a kitchen on Federal Boulevard at one in the morning with everything I have on my chest. I could not make one single thing add up in either direction. I gave up on it and finished the soup.

Chapter 26: Tessa

The log is laminated.

Three weeks after we brought her home there was a document on the side of my mother's refrigerator, under the charter, in a plastic sleeve. It had a dry-erase pen on a string taped to the corner. It tracked feeds, output, sleep intervals and weight. It was color-coded and it had a legend.

"Beckett, there are four colors and a legend," I said.

"Green's a feed. Blue's a change. Red's a weight. Black's anything else." He did not look up. "Yellow's if something's off but not off enough to call anybody."

"That's five."

"Yellow's not a color on the legend, yellow's a flag."

I stood in my kitchen at nine in the morning and looked at a laminated sheet of paper. Then I had to go and do something else in another room for a minute.

It works. That is the joke and it has been the joke since May. This house has beaten every system that man has ever brought into it. It ate his feeding chart. It ate his medication schedule twice. Margaret personally destroyed a spreadsheet of kitten weights by sitting on the scale for four months.

And then a five-pound person arrived. None of his systems had worked here because none of them had ever been pointed at something that could actually be run.

Willa Douglas is the only thing on this property operating on schedule, including me.

I had my whole speech ready about it and never got to give it. On the second Tuesday I came in from the clinic. He was standing at the counter with the baby scale and a look on his face.

"Problem?"

"There's no problem."

"You've got the face."

"There's an anomaly," Beckett said.

The scale said eleven pounds. Willa weighed seven pounds four ounces.

Margaret was sitting on the corner of the scale with her tail down over the edge and her front feet tucked under, looking at the middle distance like a woman on a bus.

"That's eleven pounds," I said. "That's what every kitten in this house weighed from January to April."

"Every single one," he said. "Brodeur and Mister Tony both weighed eleven pounds. Mister Tony is the size of a shoe."

"Have you tried moving her?"

"I've tried twice and I'm not going to talk about the second time."

He wrote it in the log in red. Weight: 11 lb 0 oz. Then he wrote in black underneath, in block capitals, because he is who he is, contested.

He has done it three separate Tuesdays now. That log is going to outlive all of us. It is going to say our daughter weighed exactly eleven pounds three times, with a footnote on each one. I'm not going to correct it, ever. When she is twenty I'm going to hand her the whole thing in the sleeve.

Margaret's actual position on the baby took nine days to arrive and was delivered without comment, the way she delivers everything.

She had been on top of the refrigerator since the 29th of May, which is where she goes when the building has been altered without her consent. She did not come down for the hospital bag or for my brother or for Sofia, who she loves.

On the ninth day I came out at six in the morning and she was in the bassinet.

She was not near it. She was in it. She was sitting up on the mattress about four inches from my daughter's head. It was the posture she uses on the reception desk when she is deciding whether a person may enter the building.