Page 72 of Knocked Up

He was quiet a second. "I don't know."

"You have to know. You were there. That's not a finding."

"Tessa." His thumb moved once on my cheekbone. He sounded so tired and so awake at the same time. "I've got no jurisdiction over any of it. I never have."

I went to bed at ten past one and did the thing I do.

I built the case. I was very good at it and I'd had a decade of practice. He is on a one-year deal with a deadline in it. There is a red clause on a refrigerator with his initials next to it. I have a lease renewing in August and a chain that wants my mother's ground. I have $1,100 a week I do not have. I have a hundred and six animals and a blood pressure that is a number in a red circle in a man's chart notes. And a person coming in June who will need me to be standing up.

I laid it out on the ceiling in the dark in order. It held all the way to the end the way it always does. Then I got to the end and there was nothing there. No conclusion, just a woman on her back at one in the morning with her hand flat on her own stomach and her mouth still feeling like somebody else's.

Through the wall the tap ran. Then the bottle warmer with its lid that does not sit right.

Then a low sound that went on for a second and stopped, and went on again. It took me a minute to understand what I was hearing. I've known that man since I was twenty-one and I've heard him laugh maybe forty times in total.

He was laughing quietly, on his own, at something a cat was doing.

I lay there and listened to it through lath and plaster. I did not build one more thing.

Chapter 20: Beckett

There is a form for everything in this life. There is a form to change your address and a form to bring a dog on a plane. There is a form for a man to be told he is worth less this year than last. I've signed all three. I've never once wanted a form the way I wanted one on the 1st of January.

A thing had happened in that kitchen at midnight. By nine in the morning she had her hands inside her sleeves and was talking to me about the drug log.

So I wrote it down at eleven at night on the 2nd, at the freezer door, under clause seven. I drew a line across the board to separate it.

Amendment one. For the purposes of clause seven, kissing does not constitute falling in love. Per management.

Then I initialed it, B.D., and went to bed.

She found it at six-forty. I know the time because I was standing in the hall with a bottle in each hand.

"Beckett. Come here."

I came there. She had a coffee she was not drinking. She was looking at that board with her head tipped over.

"Per management," she said.

"Yeah."

"Who's management?"

"It's a house with a charter in it. There's management."

"Is management you?"

"Management's whoever's holding the marker," I said.

She put her cup down. "This is a workaround."

"It's an amendment."

"It's a workaround. It's a man doing a workaround on my mother's freezer."

"Clause seven prohibits falling in love," I said. "It doesn't define it. You wrote a term with no definition in it. You gave me a hard time about that on clause three. I'm clarifying it."

"You are clarifying my boundaries again."