Page 89 of Knocked Up

"I'm not offering you money. I'm not paying anything off and I'm not doing anything through a dog. I want to sell my grandfather's house and put it into your mother's ground. I want both our names on the deed. I want a lawyer to write it and you to read every page and change whatever you want. If you want a written debt against my share so it's a loan and not a gift, we'll do it that way."

"Beckett."

"It's not a rescue. It's a partnership and there's paper." I looked at her. "Let me do it where you can see me."

Tessa Reeves stood in her mother's kitchen with her hand over her mouth for about ten seconds.

"Beckett, that house is the only thing you own."

"I know exactly what it is," I said. "He fed a kid for free in a back booth for eleven years because his father wasn't there. He'd think putting it under a rescue was the funniest thing that ever happened to him, and then he'd do it."

She took the marker out of my hand and initialed amendment two, T.R. She looked at the board a second longer. Then she capped it and put it on the counter instead of the top of the fridge.

Then she turned around and got both hands in my collar.

I have kissed that woman in a hallway and in a truck and on a kitchen floor at midnight. It was not like any of them. Neither of us was in a hurry and neither of us was proving anything. She had her hands on the sides of my neck. I had one arm all the way around her and my other hand up in her hair.

It went on a long time. About two thirds of the way through it she made a small sound against my mouth that was not a good sound. I stopped. She said, "Keep going," so I kept going.

Behind us on the stove, the soup was still on low.

At two o'clock I was at the rink, in the room forty minutes early, which is normal for me.

I had a photograph on my phone that I took at seven that morning. It was of a refrigerator door with a charter on it and two amendments under it and four sets of initials. There is a place on Colfax that will print a small photograph in nine minutes.

I unlaced the top of my blocker, the padded glove on my stick hand, where the wrist strap anchors.

There is an exam form in there with a dog's medication schedule on it in a woman's slanted handwriting, dated the fourth of October. She wrote it at dawn so a night would look like medicine. There is a grey square of paper the size of a stamp with a crease across it from a concrete floor.

I put the photograph in with them and laced it back up and sat there with the thing on my knee.

I have been paying for eleven years. I paid a room in Minnesota and I paid a market for two seasons. I paid a woman $19,400 in a currency she never agreed to accept. I have understood myself the entire time as a man with an outstanding balance.

And that morning she stood on a step and heard all of it. She heard the sentence about my mother and the corollary and the dog's account. She did not send me an invoice.

I could not make it add up. After a while I stopped trying, and went out and skated.

Chapter 24: Tessa

Auggie had been lying to me about that bar for three weeks.

I knew something was happening. Violet had asked me twice what I was doing on a Saturday afternoon, in the tone of a woman conducting a survey. My brother has never texted me a question mark in his life, and he had asked me what I thought about balloons.

So on the twenty-eighth of May Beckett drove me to Tennyson, because Eli had allegedly done something to a walk-in cooler. I went in through the front. There were about seventy people in that bar and they all yelled at once.

I stood in the doorway at thirty-six weeks pregnant with my hand on the frame and cried immediately, which is not like me and has been happening constantly since March.

Eli had closed the bar for the afternoon, which for him is a Saturday. That means it cost him money. I got to him at the taps and said, "Eli," and he said, "It's a room, Tessa, it's not a personality transplant." Then he hugged me with his chin on the top of my head.

Violet and Auggie had done the rest of it. I could see the seam where two people had planned separately and then stopped planning separately somewhere around week two. There was a table of extremely tasteful little sandwiches. There was a six-foot banner that said Welcome Baby Douglas-Reeves, with a photograph of Bear on it.

"The banner's mine," Auggie said. "The sandwiches are Violet's. She's been insufferable about the sandwiches."

"You have been at my apartment four times this week," Violet said.

"For the sandwiches," Auggie said. Violet looked at him for a second. I put my drink down and looked at the two of them and said, "Oh," out loud. Violet said, "Not today, today is about you," and took my arm in a grip like a bailiff.

The team came in civilian clothes, which is a strange thing to see. Skoglund brought his mother. Wheeler and Kim came with a car seat still in the box.