Page 12 of Knocked Up

"Six. After my last appointment."

"Tessa. Is he in pain?"

"No. Not from this."

"Okay," he said, and hung up. I stood there holding a phone, thinking about how one man could make a two-syllable word carry a suitcase up a flight of stairs.

He came at six with the dog and a canvas bag of supplies. He had apparently already bought them somewhere, unprompted, down to the exact right gauge of needle.

"How did you know what to get?"

"I called and asked what you'd want."

"You called my clinic and asked my staff…"

"I called the supply place and described you."

I elected not to touch that.

We set up in exam three. Beckett stood there in a gray T-shirt regarding a length of plastic tubing like it was a live wire in standing water.

"Watch first."

I ran the line and popped the cap. I showed him the bevel, the slanted cut at the tip of the needle. Then I did it myself once, quick, and Bear did not lift his head.

"See? Nobody in this room cares about this except you."

"He cares. He's being polite."

"He wants a snack. He's a dog, Beckett. He's not at a dinner party." I dropped the needle in the sharps. "Your turn."

That was where the trouble started, and I did not go looking for it. Teaching fluids under the skin cannot be done from across the room. I had to put my hands on his hands.

"Tent it. Grab the skin behind his shoulder blades and lift. He's got a mile of loose skin back there. It's the entire point of a dog."

He put his hand on the dog and did approximately nothing.

"You're petting him."

"I'm not petting him."

"You are absolutely petting him. Lift."

"I'm going to hurt him."

"You are not. Here."

So I stepped in and put my hand over his. I closed his fingers around a fold of Bear's skin and lifted.

Beckett Douglas's hands were enormous. That was not an opinion, it was a job requirement. There is an entire industry that measures those hands and publishes the numbers. They were also warm and dry and rough across the knuckles. I knew the exact shape of the tendon that ran up the back of the second one. I used to trace it in a truck, on a couch, at twenty-one years old, for hours, like an idiot with time.

I had my hands on animals and on people all day long. It had never once been a thought in my head.

It was a thought in my head.

"Like that," I said, and my voice came out completely normal. I considered it one of the great performances of my career. "The needle goes in at the base of the tent, parallel to his spine, and you're going to feel a pop. Two, sometimes. It's supposed to feel horrible."

"That's a bad sentence."