Page 22 of Knocked Up

"That's it?"

"That's what I had."

"Can I ask you something, and can you not do the face?"

"What face?"

"The television face."

He put his hands flat on his knees, which was what that man did instead of bracing.

"Ask."

"Why didn't you ask me to stay?"

I'd been carrying that sentence since I was twenty-one. I'd never said it out loud to another human being. Not to Violet, not to my mother in the last months I had her, not to a dark ceiling at three in the morning. And it came out over the noise of a centrifuge like I was asking about a parking spot.

He didn't move.

"You'd have said no," he said.

"That is not an answer."

"You were going back up to Fort Collins in three weeks. You had four years of school left and a mother running a clinic that was already…"

"Beckett."

"You'd have said no."

"You don't know that."

"You'd have said yes," he said. "And then you'd have hated me by thirty. I'd have had to watch it happen."

"So you did me a favor."

"I didn't say that."

"You're saying it right now. You told me in June that you'd choose me. You said those words. In the truck, at the reservoir, with the windows down. And then in September a man with a clipboard called you. You got very quiet. You sat on that tailgate and let me stand in a gravel lot and ask you a question three separate times. You never answered it. I walked, and you let me."

"Yes."

"That's your whole defense. Yes."

"It's what happened."

"You don't get to agree with me," I said. "You are supposed to fight with me about this. You have had ten years to come up with something."

He did what he always did, which was nothing. It went on long enough that I nearly stood up and left my own exam room.

Then he said, "My father drove out."

I stopped.

"That September. The clipboard call was Wednesday. He was in the driveway Friday." Beckett was looking at a spot on the floor four feet in front of his boots. "I'd already turned it down. That's the part nobody knows. I told them no on the Thursday morning. I was going to stay. I was going to play beer league in Broomfield if that's what it took. Walt knew. Walt was the one who told him."

"Walt told him?"

"Walt thought he'd be proud of me." Something happened at the corner of his mouth that was not a smile. "That's the only thing my grandfather ever got wrong."