Page 23 of Knocked Up

The centrifuge clicked and began to cool.

"What did he say to you?" I said.

"He wasn't angry." He turned his hands over on his knees and looked at them. "He sat at Walt's kitchen table and he was kind about it. He said: every man who gives it up for a woman spends the rest of his life making her pay the bill. He said, you'll be thirty-four and you'll be selling something. You'll look across a kitchen at her and you will know to the dollar exactly what she cost you. You'll be too well-raised to say it out loud, and she'll know anyway. Every day. For forty years."

"Beckett."

"And then he said, I know because I did it to your mother."

I put my hand over my mouth. I don't remember deciding to.

"She left when I was seven. I've told you that. What I didn't tell you is what it was like in that house for the four years before she did. I was small and I didn't have a word for it. By the time I had a word for it I was already the kind of person who doesn't use words." He looked up. "He was describing my childhood to me and telling me it was a forecast. And I was twenty-one. And he has never once lied to me. He is unkind and he is accurate. I had never in my life caught him being wrong about anything."

"So you believed him."

"I believed him. And in the parking lot I was doing the arithmetic on what I was going to do to you over the next forty years. I couldn't think of a single sentence that wasn't a lie, so I didn't say one."

I sat on a rolling stool in a room that smelled like disinfectant. I could not get any air into the top of my lungs.

Ten years of a story I had written and rewritten and finally laminated: he was always going to choose the ice. It was a clean story. It was a story I could run a business on.

And the true one was so much worse. A boy I loved was handed a prophecy by the one person he'd been trained to believe. He took it. He protected me from himself with the only tool he had, which was disappearing.

"He was wrong," I said.

Beckett didn't answer.

"Beckett. He was wrong."

"He was wrong about the first part," he said.

I heard the size of what he left out. The second part was still sitting there in the room with us like a third body.

I just didn't ask. I was twenty-one again and I could not have survived the answer. And he put his hand flat on the exam table right then, not near mine, but near enough.

"I thought about it for ten years," he said. "I never came up with anything better."

I looked at his hand, four inches from mine. I thought with total clarity that if either of us moved two inches, the last decade was going to become extremely difficult to explain to myself.

And then the front bell went off like a fire alarm.

"It's me!" Violet shouted from the lobby. "I have Thai food and I have opinions!"

She came around the corner and stopped so hard her bag kept going.

Violet Ocampo was five foot one. She ran the foster program and managed forty-one volunteers by text message. She had the temperament of a woman who had been fighting a war with a phone for six years and was winning it.

She looked at Beckett. She looked at me. She looked at the four inches between our hands. I had not moved mine, because moving it then would have been infinitely worse.

"Well," she said. "No, it's fine. I'm putting the food down," she said, putting the food down very slowly and without looking at it even once, "in the break room. Where I will be. Alone. Contemplating."

She left. Two seconds later her head came back around the doorframe.

"I'm Violet."

"Beckett."

"I know who you are," Violet said, with enormous warmth and total menace. Then she went.