Page 8 of Knocked Up

By Friday she was saving me a chair.

And Margaret ran the building. Day three I was at the front counter and I heard nothing at all. Then nine pounds of tortoiseshell landed on my shoulder from the top of the supply cabinet.

I had taken a slapshot off the collarbone and made no sound. I made a sound this time.

She got one back foot into my ear and pushed off. She hit the counter and walked away with her tail up.

Marisol was crying. Not politely.

"Is that normal?" I said.

"That's Margaret."

"That's an answer to a different question."

They moved Bear into a room with a mat on the floor and let me sit with him as long as I stayed out of the way. He'd lift his head when I came in and put it back down. His belly was shaved and purple, with a line of staples running down him like a zipper. He smelled like a hospital.

"Walt had a diner. You were there. That place on Thirty-Eighth for forty-one years, eight booths and a counter with nine stools. One of the stools was crooked and he never fixed it. He said the crooked one kept people honest. There was a booth at the back, by the pie case. Nobody sat in it because you couldn't see the television from it."

Bear's tail moved twice on the mat.

I sat on that floor and told an unconscious dog things I had never said to a human being.

That my father was gone from October to April, and that being gone was never the problem. The problem was what happened when he came back. I would get in the car after a game at nine years old and there would be a long drive home. He would go through it goal by goal, calmly, no yelling. By the time we pulled into the driveway I would know precisely what I had been worth that week.

And that Walt would be at the diner at seven the next morning with the lights half on and the grill warming. He'd put a plate down in front of me. He'd sit across from me in the back booth and read the paper and not ask.

Not once. In forty-one years of that man's life I don't believe he ever asked me about a hockey game.

"He gave you to me. He wrote it into a will. My dog, Bear, to my grandson. Like you were the house."

Bear put his chin on my knee.

"He was smarter than all of us."

My father called Thursday during morning skate. I listened to it in the parking garage.

"Beck. Watched the practice clips. Your glove's low. It's been low since Buffalo. I've said it on air and I'll say it again this week, because that's the job. Baranov's a good coach and he will not carry you." There was a pause. "Also somebody's going to ask you about the Minnesota thing again, because it's a slow month. Have a line ready. You should have had a line ready two years ago."

There was a thing that happened in Minnesota. It had been a closed subject for two seasons. My value went from a contract offer with real numbers on it to a one-year deal in about nine days. There was a twenty-year-old goalie involved. I said nothing then.

I kept saying nothing.

What my father said on the air that spring was that his son quit on a room. Eleven words, hands folded. He has never taken it back. He did not know one thing about that night and neither did anybody else, and that was my doing. I have never worked out how to hold a man responsible for a hole I dug myself.

I deleted the voicemail and drove to the clinic.

Auggie found me there on the fifth day, because Auggie could find anything. He came through the door with a balloon.

"Do not," I said.

"Too late." He handed it to Marisol, who took it. "It says Get Well Soon, which… look. At the store the options were that, congratulations on your retirement, or one that was simply a large foil star. I felt the star lacked a message."

"There's a dog back there with staples in him."

Marisol put the balloon behind the desk.

August Petrakis was twenty-eight, a second-line center. We had two years together in the minors. He was the most relentless human being I had ever met, and one of maybe three people whose calls I answered.