Page 59 of Knocked Up

"It doesn't care."

"Which cupboard do you want?"

"Whichever one nobody's using."

"Beckett, they're all being used."

"Then whichever one is being used least."

She opened one over the microwave that had four boxes of expired dewormer in it. She looked at it, and then at me. Then something happened in her face that she got away from fast.

"Take that one," she said. "Don't take anything else."

"Understood."

"And this bed." She pointed at a flat brown one by the radiator that looked like it had been run over. "That is Stevie's. Stevie is eighteen and blind. She has slept in that exact spot for six years and she navigates the entire house from it. If you move that bed she will not be able to find water. Do not move that bed."

"Which ones can move?"

"The three by the window and the one under the table."

"So the load-bearing ones are the radiator and the two in the doorways."

Tessa stopped.

"The what?"

"You've got eleven beds and four of them are structural," I said. "I'm asking which four."

She looked at me for a second.

"The radiator, the hall, the one at the foot of my bed. Noodle isn't in a bed, Noodle is a location."

"Copy."

"Don't say copy."

Then the bathroom, which is the only good one. It is at the end of a hallway thirty-one inches wide, with a dog asleep in the middle of it.

"How do I get down there at night?"

"Carefully. You go along the wall with your back to it," she said. "You take the corner wide because there's a crate on the left. Do not turn the hall light on. It wakes the whole house and then you'll be up until three. There's a lamp in the bathroom on a timer. It's not a timer, it's just always on."

"Then it's a lamp."

"It's a system," Tessa said, "and I would like some credit for it."

Margaret was on top of the refrigerator. Nobody had told me that Margaret comes to the house. She was up there with her paws together like a magistrate, watching me carry a duffel bag through her kitchen. She did not blink one time.

"Does she stay here?"

"She goes where she wants. She's nineteen. She's been here since 2011 and my mother's the only person she ever let touch her." Tessa did not look up from the crate she was latching. "She'll come around."

"She landed on my head four times."

"Then she's already come around," Tessa said. "She bites people she doesn't have plans for."

I had a game Thursday. Baranov stood next to me at the boards for a drill and a half on the Wednesday and said nothing, which is his method.