Page 68 of Knocked Up

Refused PB. Took in butter. Will keep watching.

He was in the doorway of the back hall with a kitten in one hand.

"You're up," I said.

"It's six-twenty."

"It's Christmas Eve."

"Yeah," Beckett said. "The dog still has a thyroid."

"Did you sleep?"

"Enough to do the runs," he said. That is not a number. That man gives me a number for everything, so I knew.

Sofia came at nine and took her coat off like a woman arriving at a scene.

"Go and lie down."

"It's the 24th. We've got two drop-offs and a suture check."

"I've done forty Christmases in this business and I've never seen a suture check that could not be done by me. One hour. Horizontal."

"It's my clinic."

"It's your one hour," Sofia said.

So I lay down at ten past nine in the morning like an invalid. I got about a minute of feeling foolish about it before Margaret came off the back of the couch and stood on my chest. She has never sat on me in nineteen years. She put her paws together and faced the door with her back to me. That is how that cat says a thing is under her management now.

I slept. When I woke up Beckett was going past the doorway with a laundry basket on his hip and did not say anything. I lay there with a cat on my sternum and my hand where it goes now, low and flat. I felt absolutely nothing except a building I've held up alone for nine years making noise without me in it.

Eli came at seven the next morning for the runs. He never once said Merry Christmas and I did not expect him to. He stopped dead in the kitchen.

"Who did the runs?"

"Beckett."

"Why?"

"Because he gets up at five."

"That's not a reason," Eli said. "That's a symptom."

He went out and looked at them. He came back with a face on him.

"He coiled the hose wrong. And the food bins are in the wrong order."

"They're alphabetical."

"They were in the order of who eats first," Eli said, "which is a system." Then he stopped, because he heard it.

He put his coffee down. "Did he do the pills?"

"He did. Stevie's on butter now."

Eli turned around. "Since when?"

"Since she started refusing peanut butter and he wrote it down."