Page 16 of Knocked Up

"There's a contest," he said.

The light in that room was fluorescent and unkind to every living thing. He had a kitten asleep in the crook of his arm and one asleep against his thigh. His shoulders were down for the first time in nine days. Bear was flat out on the mat with his paws twitching.

I stood there with a clipboard and thought, in complete sentences: this is the thing I told myself I stopped wanting.

It was not only about him.

I was twenty-two when I inherited a brother. I did his laundry and signed his permission slips. I drove I-25 twice a week between a clinic and a veterinary school, with a twelve-year-old asleep in the back seat and a cooler of vaccines in the footwell. I got him to twenty-one alive and employed and standing up straight. There is no version of my life in which I regret it.

There is also no version in which anyone ever asked me whether I wanted a different one.

So I said it out loud. Because I've found that if I say a thing out loud in front of a witness it becomes load-bearing.

"Hey. Beckett. This is professional."

He didn't look up.

"I mean it. You're a client. Bear's a patient. That's the whole arrangement, I'm not…"

"I know."

"Because you cannot be in my building three times a week and have it be anything else. I have a business and a brother and forty animals and a lease. I do not have room for…"

"Tessa."

"I know," he said, and finally looked up. He had that flat unreadable television face on. I could not tell one single thing about what was happening behind it. "Understood."

"Good."

Luna yawned in the crook of his arm and went back to sleep. Neither of us said anything for a good long while. Both of us pretended that was a normal thing for two adults to do.

Out back, at some volume, my brother started running water.

Chapter 5: Beckett

Baranov skated us two hours on the Tuesday. Then he kept the goalies twenty minutes after, which was a message. He was about five foot eight and built like a fire hydrant. He never raised his voice, which was, in a specific way, worse.

"Douglas. You are fighting the puck."

"Yes."

"Do not agree with me so fast. It is annoying." He tapped the toe of my pad with his stick. "You are big. You take up the whole net. You do not need to be early. When you are early, you are guessing. And when you guess, you are a man with opinions instead of a goalie. Do not be early."

He skated off. That was the entire conversation. I thought about it for the rest of the day.

The room was polite. They were waiting to find out whether I was going to cost them. I'd been in rooms where they'd already decided, in both directions. Polite was the best one.

The press was less polite. There was a columnist here who wrote a piece in August titled The Peaks Bought a Used Car. Then he had to come stand in front of me on media day and ask how I felt about the fresh start.

"Good," I said.

"Anything you want to say to fans who are skeptical?"

"No."

He waited. Reporters left a hole to see whether I would fill it. I've never filled it. My father taught me that when I was seventeen.

Then he asked whether I'd be nervous with my dad on the national call for the home opener against Vegas. I said no. He wrote that down like it meant something.