Page 40 of Knocked Up

"I said okay."

"You didn't say it like okay."

"I said it exactly like okay," Violet said. She looked at me a second too long, got her keys and went to Arvada to look at a rash.

I stood in that break room by myself for a minute. There was a couch in there my mother bought in 2003. There was also a shelf of fleece blankets, rewashed and refolded and put back on the wrong shelf. I could not make myself move them.

I closed up at ten-forty on the last Thursday in October. Runs, overnights, incubator. I bottled the three-week-olds at ten and set an alarm for one. I turned off the lobby lights.

The remote was still on the counter. It never went back in the drawer.

And I stood in the dark in my own building and did a thing I'd been describing inaccurately to myself for a while.

I got out my phone and opened the calendar and went backwards.

The parvo night was a Tuesday. The litter came the Sunday after. Apex was two Tuesdays after that. And the Thursday of the home opener, the Vegas game, was there in the middle with nothing written on it at all. I did not put anything in my calendar that I would have to look at later.

I counted backwards from there. Then I counted forward.

Then I put the phone face down on the counter next to a bowl that said World's Okayest Doctor. I told the empty lobby, "You're tired."

And I went out through the breezeway to my mother's house and got in bed with my clothes on.

Chapter 11: Beckett

November went like this. Vancouver, win. Nashville, loss, and the loss was mine. Calgary, win. Seattle, shutout. Chicago, win in a shootout, which was not a real thing.

Baranov started me eighteen of twenty-two. Everybody in the room knew it and nobody said it.

The prove-it clock ran anyway. There was a deadline in February and not one word in my contract to stop it. Every third day some site put up a list and I was on it. Auggie sent it to me with a picture of a garbage can.

The room warmed up around the middle of the month. Nobody announced it. It was that Skoglund started sitting in the stall next to mine instead of the one with the outlet. It was that a defenseman named Wheeler asked what I did on off days. When I said nothing, he asked me to breakfast with his wife and their kid. I went. The kid was two and threw a fork at me, and I liked it.

Baranov started watching me, not the way a coach watches a goalie. He came and stood next to me at the boards during a drill and said nothing for most of it.

"You are not early anymore. Since the Vegas game."

"Around then."

Baranov watched the drill. "Something is happening off the ice."

"Nothing's happening."

"You are a bad liar for a man with such a good face," he said. That was the second time somebody had told me that in two months. He skated off before I could decide whether to be insulted.

I touched the paper before every game.

It was a piece of an exam form with a dog's medication schedule on it. I could write it out from memory including the abbreviations.

Two hours before a game I'd put my hand inside the blocker glove. I'd press my thumb along the seam until I felt the place where the lining sat a half millimeter high. Then I'd take my hand out and go warm up. I did it in Nashville in a visiting room with nine guys in it.

The dog was the best thing about November.

He got better. I knew exactly how much of that was the fluids. I knew how much was a house instead of a kennel, and a person who was home more than Walt was at the end. By the third week he was doing the four stairs without stopping. He'd get to the top and turn around and look at me like a man who had finished a job.

We had a route. Out the door at six-forty, down to the corner and left past the house with the tomatoes that were done. Four blocks, then back. Then again at nine.

Walking an old dog slowly down the same four blocks twice a day for a month, I met everybody who lived on them. There was a woman named Anh who brought Bear a piece of chicken. When I said he had kidney values, she started asking about them.