Page 85 of Knocked Up

Four o'clock bottles. Six o'clock seniors, with their pills hidden in food. Stevie in butter, Noodle in cheese, Dolly in bread. All four logged on the laminated sheet. Runs hosed at five-forty. Feeding tube flushed at six. Dryer on at six-fifteen with nothing in it.

At six I put the soup on, because my head was loud. The card says low and slow and I have never had trouble with that instruction.

Then I took a coffee out onto the porch steps and let it go cold and watched the light come up grey over the runs.

Eli's truck came in at ten to seven.

He got out with his coffee and stopped in the gravel about fifteen feet away. I watched him understand that I was there. He had come in braced. He had come around that fence expecting an empty spot where a truck goes.

He stood there a while. Then he came over and sat down on the step below mine, which put his back to me, and drank his coffee.

"Runs are done," I said. "Hose is coiled wrong."

"I know how the hose is coiled," Eli said.

We sat there about two minutes. A magpie did something to a bin down the block.

"She was up," he said. "Light was on at three. I could see it from Tennyson." He turned his cup around. "You two had it out. Was it about money?"

"It was about money," I said.

Eli nodded slowly at the gravel.

"I was eleven," he said.

I did not say anything.

"When you left. I didn't know your name, I didn't know anything about it. I knew there was a guy in Fort Collins because she was different that summer. She used to sing in the car and she does not sing." He drank some coffee. "And then in August I came into the kitchen at six in the morning to get cereal, and my sister was on the floor.

"She wasn't crying loud. She was sitting between the counter and the dishwasher with her arms around her knees. Mom had been dead nine months. She looked up at me and put her face straight back down." He stopped a second. "And I said what's wrong, and she said nothing. And I said what's wrong. And she said nothing, Eli, get your cereal.

"And I got my cereal," Eli said. "I sat at that table and ate it four feet from her, because I was eleven and I did not know what else to do."

The furnace came on inside the house.

"She never told me one thing about it. Ten years. I found out your name off a search in 2019 when I was drunk, from a photo credit."

"Eli."

"I'm not finished." He still had his back to me. "So that's what I've been doing since I was eleven. Every guy she's brought within forty feet of this place I have been a nightmare to, and I don't care. I made a decision on a kitchen floor with a bowl of cereal in my lap. It was that nobody was ever going to put her there again."

He turned around then and looked up at me. My God, he has his sister's face.

"I'm not asking you for anything," he said. "I'm not asking you to promise me. I don't want a promise, I've had promises. I'm telling you the price. You do that to her again, for any reason that sounds good to you at the time, and it will not be a punch in a lobby. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

"Say it back."

"I know," I said. "And if it happens I'd hand you the bat myself."

Eli sat there.

"Don't say things like that. That's a psycho thing to say."

"You asked me to say it back."

"I asked you to say it back, not to." He rubbed his face with his hand. "God. You two are the same person. That's the actual problem here."

The screen door went.