Page 3 of Knocked Up

Nobody had ever designed a waiting room for a person who was standing up.

I sat eventually. Somewhere behind the wall a cat was making a sound like a door hinge, with the patience of something that intended to do it all night. There was a bulletin board by the door. It had dogs in cones on it and, for reasons nobody had explained, a llama.

The tortoiseshell got down off the file cabinet, crossed the room, and sat a few feet in front of me, facing me.

"Hi," I said.

She stared at me the way an actuary stares at a man who has just described his hobbies. Then she got up and left.

Auggie: Beckett its almost midnight and you’re typing and not sending which is genuinely the most you behavior possible!

I put the phone in my jacket.

That's not a contract, that's a tryout with a hotel room.

I hadn't wanted the house. When the lawyer called about the will I sat in my car in Buffalo and thought, what am I supposed to do with a house in Denver? Then eight months later the trade came through.

Walt fed me. There was a booth and there was a plate. Nobody ever asked me first how the game went.

The swinging door opened.

Tessa came through it pulling a glove off. She got halfway across the room and stopped. I noticed that. She stood there with her arms crossed.

"I'm going to say this fast, because I don't have time to say it slow. He's bleeding into his abdomen. I tapped it. It's blood and it isn't clotting. He's got a mass on his spleen and it's ruptured. That's what happened in your kitchen. His red cell volume was twenty-four when he came in and it's nineteen now. He is losing it while the two of us stand here talking. He needs surgery. Not tomorrow. Now. I take the spleen, I stop the bleed, I transfuse him. Then we find out."

"Find out what?"

"Whether he survives the anesthesia. Whether the mass is the kind that's already everywhere else." She stopped. Something moved across her face and she put it away. "I need you to hear the whole sentence. He's thirteen and he's in shock. If I take him back there right now he might not come off the table."

"And if you don't?"

"Then he dies in the next hour or two."

The fish tank hummed.

"Do it," I said.

"There's paperwork. I'm sorry. I have to…"

"Where?"

She hit a couple of keys. The printer woke up and started grinding like it resented her personally. She set the pages on the counter and put a pen on top. She slid the stack toward me and did not look up.

"Consent for anesthesia. Consent for surgery. Blood product consent. And an estimate. You have to initial that one, because I'm legally required to make you look at the number."

I picked up the pen and signed the first line.

"Beckett. You have to read them."

"No, I don't."

I signed the second. I signed the third. I initialed the estimate without reading the box.

She took the pages. Her hand was steady. Mine wasn't. I found that out when I set the pen down and it rolled.

"I'll come out when I can," she said.

"Tessa."