Page 57 of Knocked Up

It was blank. I haven't written on it in nine years.

I did the math one more time, in case it came out different. One doctor. A hundred and six animals. Five bottle babies at ten, one, four, and seven. A cuff twice a day. No lifting. No overnights. Eleven hundred a week I do not have. A building that cannot move, a body that is not allowed to, and a due date in June.

There has been exactly one answer since two-fifteen on the nineteenth.

I put my hand flat on that board for a second.

Then I turned off the light and went to bed without writing a word on it.

Chapter 16: Beckett

She called me on a Tuesday morning.

"If you were going to say a sentence in my car, say it."

Then she hung up, because she was not a person who could be on a phone for a thing like that. I stood in my grandfather's kitchen with a dish towel in my hand.

I called back and said, "I'll come there. Your building can't move. I can."

A few seconds of nothing. "There are terms," she said.

"Good."

"I'm serious. There are going to be terms and they're going to be written down."

I boxed the house on the Wednesday.

It took four hours. I've moved plenty of times and never once had it take that long. There is nothing of mine in that house. Shirts, two duffels of gear, a bed.

It was the kitchen that got me. Four coffee cans I consolidated into one in October. I could not throw away the three empty ones, so they went in a box. A bottle opener from a beer company that stopped existing in 1981. A rubber band ball a man built over forty years, one at a time, off the newspaper.

And the mugs. Walt closed the diner in 2016 and brought nine of them home in a milk crate, the heavy kind that does not break. I wrapped them one at a time. I got to the seventh one and had to put my hands on the edge of the sink for a minute.

Then I opened the drawer and took out the cards.

The soup one is third from the top. Grease all the way through the paper, one corner gone. A brown ring from the bottom of a cup. At the bottom, in different ink in a hand that had gotten shakier, Beck: low and slow. If it's boiling you're mad about something.

The rest went in the box. That one went in the inside pocket of my jacket, flat against the chest. It went in with a folded exam form and a grey square of paper the size of a stamp. I zipped it and stood there a second with my hand over the outside of the pocket like a man at an airport.

Auggie came at two with his own truck and no questions, which lasted about ten minutes.

"Okay, I have to. Where are we taking it?"

"Storage on Sheridan."

"And where are you taking you?"

"Federal."

Auggie set down the box he was holding, entirely, on the porch. He looked at me.

"You're moving in with the hot vet."

"Don't call her that."

"I've called her that for four months and you have never once told me not to." He picked the box back up.

"It's a logistical arrangement."