Page 24 of Knocked Up

The bloodwork was okay. Not great, but okay. His kidney numbers were holding. His phosphorus was up a little, so I told him to add a powder to the food that would soak it up. He typed it into his phone while I was still talking, which I decided was not charming.

"His hips are the thing now. See the leg kicked out? That's the arthritis. He needs to move more, not less. Short and often. Flat ground."

"There's a loop by the house that's flat."

"We could do it now," I said. He looked up. "To see his gait. Because if he's dropping a hip I want to see it before I put him on anything. I cannot see it in a room this size."

"Okay," he said.

"It's clinical."

From the break room, through a wall, Violet said, "Mm."

The park was fourteen blocks up. It had a gravel loop around a pond and a standing population of geese with a bad attitude. Everything had gone the color it goes for twenty minutes in October, when the whole city looks like the inside of a peach.

Bear walked like a very old man on a very good day.

Nothing happened. We walked a dog around a pond.

He had brought a water bottle and a collapsible bowl for a ten-minute walk. When Bear stopped at the second bench, Beckett crouched and poured and held the bowl and waited. Bear drank about a tablespoon and looked away. Beckett folded the bowl and put it back in his jacket without a word. It was simply the procedure, and he expected to run it again in four minutes.

He ran it again in four minutes.

He matched the dog's pace the whole way, not roughly but exactly. Bear would shorten up on the left going into the turn and Beckett would come off the gas without ever looking down.

And we talked about nothing. The geese, and why they don't leave. He said that seemed like an enormous number of golf courses. I said, "It's Denver," and he said, "Fair." There was a food truck on Tennyson that Eli, unknowingly, also loves, which I did not mention.

He said, "Is the bottle heavy? I can take the leash."

I said, "I'm holding a leash."

He said, "I know. That's why I offered."

On the far side of the pond the wind came across the water. I did not cross my arms, because crossing my arms would have meant I was cold. About a minute later a jacket landed on my shoulders.

"I'm not cold."

"Keep it on anyway."

That jacket weighed nine pounds and smelled like a truck and like him. I wore it the rest of the loop like a woman with no self-respect whatsoever.

Underneath all of it, I was running the equation.

I've run it since I was twenty-two and it has never given me a different answer. More than a hundred living creatures depend on me. That counts the fosters, and Margaret, and the tortoise nobody has ever explained. There is a brother who was twelve when our mother died and did not have a parent after that. There is a building with my mother's name over the door. There is a lease on the land under it with a renewal coming, and a chain that keeps mailing me a golden retriever.

And there is a finite amount of me.

So anything I take for myself, I'm taking from somewhere, from something with a name.

That was the entire architecture of my personality. And there I was on a gravel path with a man's jacket on my shoulders, doing arithmetic like a woman checking a receipt she already knew was right.

"You went somewhere," Beckett said.

"I'm tired."

"Tessa."

"Don't," I said. "Please."