Page 103 of Knocked Up

I wrote that in December because if there is a date on a thing then nobody has to be the one who leaves. I've never been able to explain that to anybody in a way that made it sound like what it is.

The due date was the 26th of June. It came and went and nobody mentioned it. Our daughter had been here four weeks by then and declined to consult the paperwork. It is void. It has been void since the 29th of May.

I stood there with my thumb on the cap for a long time.

And then I put the cap back on and put the marker down on the counter, because that one is not mine.

I've spent a year learning that I decide things at speed in rooms by myself and call it competence. I stood at a refrigerator fully intending to cross out a line and my hand did not do it. I stood there long enough to find out why. The why was that I want to watch him do it.

I put my hand flat on the photocopy of the deed, on the two names.

My mother rented that ground for twenty-four years and died still paying on it. Her daughter owns it. Her granddaughter is going to grow up on it and think a covered breezeway between a kitchen door and a surgical suite is a normal feature of a house.

And I did not do it by myself. I've run that sentence at myself about forty times since April, waiting for it to hurt in the old place. It does not. Both of those get to be true at once, and there is nobody left in my family to be smug at about it.

So I turned the light off and went to bed. At ten past twelve I heard him get up for the first feed. I lay in the dark and listened to a man tell a nine-week-old the entire ingredients panel of a bag of senior kibble. I did not get up to help.

Chapter 27: Beckett

Milo Renner called me on the 19th of June at twenty past four.

I was in the yard with a hose. I've had that number in my phone for two years and I've never once used it, on purpose. A man calling is a thing that has to be answered. I did not want to be a thing he had to answer.

"You sound like you're outside."

"I'm doing kennels."

"You're doing what?"

"Kennels," I said. "It's a long story."

"Yeah, I've read some of it." Neither of us said anything for a second. "Okay. I'm going to do this fast, because I've written it down and if I stop I'll lose my place. I'm playing. Bakersfield, for next year. I've been well over a year. I've got a person I see on Wednesdays and I'm going to keep seeing her." He took a breath. "And I know what April cost you. I've known the whole time, and I've sat on it for two years like a coward."

"You're not a…"

"Beckett, I'm going to write about it," Renner said. "That's the call. I'm not asking if I can, because I've spent two years working out that I don't have to. I'm telling you the reason, because you're going to try and take it off me."

I stood in a gravel yard with the hose running on my boot.

"It's not yours to spend," I said.

"That's what you've been saying to yourself for two years."

"It's true."

"It was never yours to spend," Renner said, "because it was always mine. You've been sitting on my night like it belonged to you. It doesn't. I want it back, and the first thing I'm going to do with it is put your name in it."

I did not have anything for that.

"Say okay," he said.

"Okay."

"Say it like you mean it or I'll call your wife."

"She's not my…"

"Everyone in the American Hockey League thinks she's your wife," Renner said. "There's a lady in Tucson with a spreadsheet."