Page 49 of Knocked Up

"You've had ninety seconds."

"I've had ninety seconds and I'm not going to need more."

"Beckett, you don't get to decide something like that in ninety seconds."

"I decided it in four," he said.

And then he did not say anything else, which was his weapon. He sat there on a bench with an old dog across his feet and let it be in the room with us.

"You should be scared," I said.

"I am."

"You don't look it."

"No," he said. "That's the whole problem with me. Ask anybody."

I laughed. It came out wrong, like something with a hole in it. I put my hand over my mouth for a second and then took it away and got hold of myself.

I had armor for the other version. I had ten years of it. I did not have one single thing for a man who wanted in.

"There's a rule," I said. "Nobody knows. Not the room, not your agent, not one guy in that building. Violet knows and that's it. My brother doesn't know, and he is not going to know until I say so."

"Eli."

"He'll build his whole life around it inside a week. He'll drop shifts. He'll be here every night. He was twelve when our mother died. I've spent nine years keeping that boy from being a support beam under me. He gets to be twenty-one a while longer."

"And your side is worse," I said. "One person in a locker room knows and this city knows by Sunday. You're in a contract year with a national desk that has your name in its mouth twice a week. I've watched what happens to a woman who gets attached to a goaltender. I've watched it happen to women I've never met. They put your face next to his and they decide what you are inside of a day."

"Yeah," he said.

"So that's the rule."

"It's a good rule." He turned his hands over on his knees and looked at them. "Saying nothing is the one thing I've never once been bad at."

"I know," I said. "That's not the compliment you think it is."

There was one thing left and I could not get to it out loud.

It had been in my coat pocket for six days. I had gone to the dating scan on my own on a Wednesday morning and sat in a parking garage afterward. Then I had gone and done a splenectomy.

I could not make my mouth do it. So I did the other thing. I took it out and I put it face down on the exam table and slid it across the stainless steel. It made the noise a piece of cheap paper makes on steel, which is almost nothing.

He picked it up.

It was grey. It was the size of a stamp. There was a shape in the middle of it that was not shaped like anything yet. The clinic printer they used was worse than mine. There was a date in the corner and a number and my last name spelled right.

He did not say a word for a long time.

Then he turned it a little, toward the light.

"That's the head," I said, in a voice I did not recognize. "That's the, that's all spine. It's eleven weeks, it doesn't…"

"I see it," he said.

He did not give it back.

He did not ask if he could keep it. He did not perform not asking. He held it a while longer and then folded it once, along a line that was already there. He put it inside his jacket and looked up to see whether I was going to take it off him.