Page 39 of Knocked Up

"Sure."

He stepped back first and I hated it. I had no right to hate it.

"Four weeks," I said, to the chart.

"Four weeks. Marisol will book it."

He stood there another second. I turned around and opened a cabinet I did not need anything out of. By the time I closed it the door was shutting.

Two days later a supply van pulled into the lot with eleven boxes.

"I don't have an order," I said.

"It's paid," the driver said, and turned the tablet around. It said Paid.

Four cases of the recovery diet. Two cases of IV fluids. Three hundred needles. Kitten milk replacer, $9 a can, forty cans a season. And a pallet of the mid-grade puppy food that was the difference between a good month and a bad one.

Marisol came out and said, "Oh my God," in three syllables, then looked at my face and stopped.

"It's a mistake," I said. "It's for somebody else."

"It's got our name on it eleven times."

"Then somebody made a very thorough mistake."

I called Violet.

"Don't do this," Violet said.

"Foothills has forty animals and two paid staff. Adams County took eighty-one dogs off a hoarding case in September. They can use it."

"Tessa Anne."

"It goes out today."

"You think it's from him," she said, "and you'd rather give away $900 of food than owe a man a thank you. And I want you to hear how that sounds coming from a woman with $141 in her operating account."

Eleven boxes went out of my lot that afternoon in a borrowed van. I kept the kitten milk replacer, because there were five three-week-olds in the building and I was not insane.

The milk replacer was the exact size of the compromise I could live with. I kept it because it wasn't for me.

Violet cornered me in the break room on a Thursday.

"You've looked green for a week."

"I've looked tired."

"Green," Violet said. "Tessa, I've watched you drink four cups of coffee a day since we were nineteen. You made a cup on Monday and put it down. It was still there on Tuesday. I know because I threw it away and it had a skin on it."

"I've been off coffee."

"Since when?"

"Since it stopped tasting right. It's the parvo ward and the litter and the man from Apex. I've been up every third night since September."

"Okay."

"Violet."