Page 21 of Knocked Up

"Who told you that?"

"Every coach I've ever had."

"That is a horrible way to live," I said. I took the dog.

The bloodwork took nine minutes to run. I put Bear on the mat in exam three and sat on the rolling stool. Beckett sat on the bench. We had nine minutes with nothing in our hands, which was a mistake.

He looked at the ceiling tile with the hole in it.

"You never fixed that."

"I put a new hook in."

"The tile still has a hole."

"Different hole. That one's from the swamp cooler. I have a building my mother bought in 1998. Half of it is held together by hope and one very committed roll of duct tape." I spun a quarter turn on the stool and back. "How's the season?"

"Fine. We're four and three."

"Are you good?"

"I'm fine."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know," he said.

The centrifuge stopped in the other room, and neither of us got up.

"Do you remember," he said, "that Walt used to call us the ten o'clock crowd?"

Memory was not warm. It was more like banging the same knuckle I banged last week.

"He'd flip the sign at nine-thirty," I said, "and leave the door unlocked anyway."

"And put the fryer back on."

"For nine weeks straight. For a vet student and a goalie who could not afford to eat there and who he never once charged."

"He charged me. $2. He said it was for the labor. And at the end of that summer, when I moved out of his house, he gave me a coffee can with all of it in it. $142. In ones."

I had not known that. It was so precisely, molecularly Walt that I had to look at the floor and be a person about it.

"He asked me what I was studying and then he remembered. Every time. He'd say, how are the horses, because he thought vet school was horses."

"He thought that until the day he died. He asked me last Christmas whether you'd ever gotten into the horses."

The room went completely quiet.

"He asked about me," I said.

Beckett looked at the mat.

"Once a year, maybe. Sometimes twice."

"And what did you say?"

"I said I didn't know."