Page 112 of Knocked Up

"Beckett. Come here," I said, and he came there. I kissed him over the top of a hundred and ninety nights a year for four years, with my hands on either side of his face. He put one hand flat on my back and the other in my hair. We knocked the coffee over and neither of us did anything about it for some time.

The celebration was a walk. Auggie offered to book a room and Violet offered to do something with a boat.

We went at eight, when it goes gold, the dusk route through the park we walked in October with a dog who had been cut open six days before.

Bear set the pace. He does about a mile an hour and he stops to read things. The entire party moves at his speed by unanimous consent, including a stroller and a professional athlete and my brother.

"He's stopped again."

"He's reading."

"He's been reading that post for a full minute, Beckett."

"It's a good post," Beckett said. "There's a lot on it."

Eli had Willa. He had taken her out of the stroller at the top of the park with no announcement. He walked the whole loop with her against his shoulder and one hand over her back. Nobody said anything about it. That stopped being a thing we say anything about in the second week of June.

Under the trees at the far end, where the path bends, Beckett stopped and pulled me in by the front of my shirt and kissed me. My brother stood a few feet away holding my daughter and looking at the sky with great interest.

"You two are disgusting," Eli said.

"Go and look at the ducks."

"There's no ducks, it's a quarter to nine."

"Go and look at where the ducks were," Beckett said.

Then we came back along Federal, which is not the pretty way, and went past the diner.

Walt's is on the corner of Federal and Ellsworth. It is a single-story brick unit with a flat roof, shut since before I moved back to this city. The lettering is still on the glass in a green that used to be a different green.

He always slows down there. He has done it since October. He does not stop. He does not look at it for long and he does not say anything. I have never once asked him about it.

He slowed. I watched him slow.

And then Eli stopped fully, in the middle of the pavement with my daughter asleep on his shoulder. He was looking in through the window with his head on one side.

"Eli?"

"How many covers is that?"

"How many what?"

"Covers. Seats." He moved along the glass. "That's a twelve-seat counter and, what, six booths?"

"Six," Beckett said.

"Six booths, twelve at the counter. Forty-eight if you're honest about it." Eli put his free hand up against the glass to cut the reflection. "That's a good number. That's the number where you don't need four in the kitchen."

Nobody said anything for a second.

"The Tennyson place sold," Eli said, to the window.

"Since when?"

"Since the ninth. New guy's in in September. He's fine, he's keeping everybody. He offered me the manager thing. I said I'd think about it."

"And?"