Page 105 of Knocked Up

"You had a line in January," he said. "Now you've got a door."

"Yeah."

He moved the jacket to his other arm and went down the steps, and at the bottom he stopped, and he did not turn around.

"Game six," Roy said.

I waited.

"That was the wrong result."

And then he got in the car and sat in it about twenty seconds before he started it. He went up Federal.

There is no version of that sentence, in the language my father actually speaks, that means anything except one thing. He has never in his life said the words you played well to a goaltender, on air or off it. It is not in the vocabulary he was given. What he has instead is the result being wrong.

It means I watched it. Taken all the way down, it means I saw you.

That is not the other sentence. It is not near it, and I've stopped waiting for it.

But I sat down on the step for a minute. Tessa came out and sat down right next to me, not one down and over. She put her hand on the back of my neck and did not ask me one single question. After a while she said, "Coffee's on anyway." I said, "I know," and we went in.

The bath happened on the Tuesday.

The dispute is procedural. Tessa's position is that the tub gets filled first and the baby comes second. My position, which is correct, is that everything goes into position first. Then the water is introduced, because water is the variable.

We were both in the bathroom. That is where it went wrong. There were two adults and a nine-week-old in one bathroom that already contains a dog bed I've never been able to get anybody to move.

"You're holding her too…"

"I'm holding her the way the folder says."

"Beckett, the folder is for a newborn. She's nine weeks, she's got a neck now."

"She has a partial neck."

"She has a full neck."

"Tessa, she does not have a full…"

And then Willa, who has never once agreed with either of us about anything, arched her whole back like a fish and went out of my hands. I got her. That is what I do for a living. I got her the way I get a puck I did not see until late, which is with everything.

The bath went over, all of it.

I went down on one knee in about four gallons of water, holding my daughter above my head in two hands like a trophy. She was fine. She was in fact delighted. It is the first time she has ever laughed and it was at me.

Tessa had to sit down on the closed lid of the toilet.

"You're soaked."

"I'm aware."

"Get up," she said, and she was not able to speak properly. "You're kneeling in it."

"If I get up she goes back down and this happens again."

"Beckett."

"This is a stable position," I said. "I could hold this for an hour."