Knocked Up By My Ex

Chapter 1 Beckett

The moving truck ahead of me had a bison painted on the back doors and one busted brake light. I tracked that light most of the way into Denver the way I'd track a puck through traffic. That was a habit. I picked a thing and I watched it. It kept my hands quiet.

My phone had been face down in the cup holder since Kearney.

It buzzed a few times before the state line.

I knew who most of them were. Auggie texted in bursts.

My agent texted in paragraphs. My father did not text.

My father left voicemail. He talked into a phone the way he talked into a broadcast mic, like there was a camera on him and a producer counting him down.

I let it ride until the truck took my exit. Then I hit play.

"Beck. It's your dad."

Thirty-one years old and the man still identified himself.

"So. Denver. I'll be honest with you, because nobody else in your life will be. One year, league minimum plus change, and not one line of trade protection in it. That’s not a contract, that’s a tryout with a hotel room.

I said as much on the segment Tuesday. People are going to ask me about you and I'm not going to lie for you.

I've never lied for you. It's the one thing I've given you. "

The light at the bottom of the ramp went yellow. I braked. The truck kept going and I lost it.

"Anyway. Your grandfather's house. Sell it. He never fixed a thing in it after your grandmother died. Call me back."

Then I heard him breathing while he decided whether to say one more thing. He decided against it.

Auggie: welcome to the mile high city. you will be short of breath for three weeks and every person here will lie and say you get used to it. are you in the state or did you defect?

I didn't answer him either. The light went green.

The whole drive from Buffalo I'd been telling myself I felt fine.

Walt's house sat on a street where every third yard had a chain-link fence and somebody's tomatoes still going in October. It was brick, one story, with a porch chair that had been rained on since 1994.

The movers finished fast because I didn't own anything. I had identical practice shirts, two duffels of gear and a bed. Everything else in that house was Walt's.

I stood in the front room after they left and the smell got me in a way I hadn't planned for.

The smell was cigarettes from a man who quit in 2009, still living in the drapes.

It was old coffee and a kitchen that ran hot for fifty years.

He'd been dead eight months and the house still smelled like the middle of his life.

Bear came out of the hallway then, taking his time, his back end doing the swing-and-catch thing it did now. He was eighty pounds of shepherd mix with a gray face and hips that had been going since he was nine. Walt got him from a parking lot in Aurora.

He walked into my leg and stopped there. He leaned.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

He leaned harder.

I got down on the floor with him, which took a while, because my knees were a joke. He put his chin on my thigh and sighed like a man sitting down after a double shift.

"We're going to fix this place up," I told him. "Gutters are shot. There's a soft spot by the back door."

He didn't care.

I unpacked until nine. I hung my shirts at the same width. I found coffee cans, all half full and all different brands. In the drawer by the sink there was a stack of index cards with recipes in his handwriting. I shut the drawer.

Around ten I made eggs and gave him a piece of one. He took it out of my fingers so carefully it was like he was worried about the fingers.

"You're a soft touch. Walt made you soft."

Then I did the dishes and turned off the kitchen light. Behind me I heard a sound I had heard maybe a few times in my life. It was a scrape and then a thud, and it was small. Bear was on the tile.

"Bear."

He was breathing fast and shallow like he'd sprinted. He hadn't sprinted. He'd walked across a kitchen. His eyes were open and looking at me. For a second there was nothing behind them. Then there was, and that was worse.

I got my hand under his jaw and pulled his lip up, because I saw a trainer do that once. His gums were the color of the inside of an envelope.

"Hey. Hey. Get up."

He tried, front legs first. He got a few inches and went back down.

I didn't panic. I'd had a hundred and eighty pounds of forward land on my neck. There were men in that league who called me a robot and meant it as an insult. I had never been insulted. I panicked completely.

I don't remember deciding anything. I remember being on the porch with the dog in my arms, the screen door catching me in the shoulder. I did not know where one single thing was in this city, not a hospital and not a grocery store.

I pinned him into the passenger seat with my elbow. I drove one-handed with the phone in my lap saying emergency vet near me over and over. It gave me something a couple of miles east.

It was past midnight on a Tuesday in a city that went to bed. At Federal the light was red with nothing coming in either direction. I sat there a couple of seconds with my hand flat on the dog's ribs, feeling how fast it was going in there. Then I ran it.

I had never run a red light in my life. I got my license at sixteen with my father in the passenger seat. He told me a man who doesn't respect a rule when nobody's watching doesn't respect it at all.

I ran it and felt nothing about it whatsoever.

The place was a storefront. A lit sign said Reeves Rescue Veterinary, and under it, smaller, Open.

I hit the door with my shoulder because my hands were full.

"I need somebody. I need help."

There were six chairs and a fish tank. A woman stood behind the desk with her back to me, reaching up to a shelf.

And on top of a file cabinet by the window there was a cat. I had a dying animal in my arms and some part of my brain still logged it. She was a tortoiseshell with one and a half ears and her paws together like a magistrate.

She looked at me. She did not blink. Then she put one paw on a pen cup and pushed it off the cabinet.

"Ma'am, please, he collapsed, his gums are white, he's not…"

The woman turned around.

Everything in me went out like a breaker tripping.

Ten years and a month, and I had the number.

Her hair was shorter. She wore scrubs the color of dishwater, with something dried on her forearm. She was thinner than I remembered, and tired in a way faces are not at thirty-one.

"Tessa," I said.

She looked at the dog. That was the reunion. A second and a half, and then she was moving around the desk. Her hand went under his jaw doing exactly the thing I'd done, lifting his lip.

"How long has he been down? Vomiting? Trauma? Was he hit by anything?"

"Ten minutes. Twelve. No. He walked across a kitchen and went down."

"Age? Name?"

"Thirteen, almost fourteen. Bear."

"Bear," she said, and her voice changed for the dog. Then it changed back and got a lot louder. "Marisol! Front."

A technician came through a swinging door with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, which she threw in a trash can.

"Down dog, unknown cause, white as paper," Tessa said. "Table, oxygen, get a line in his front leg. I want his blood counts inside four minutes." She got both arms under him and looked at me for the first time. "Give him to me."

I gave her the dog. She took all eighty pounds like a woman who had been doing it for a decade. She went through the swinging door. The door swung twice and stopped.

I stood in the middle of the waiting room with my hands empty.

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."

She stopped with her palm flat on the swinging door. There were about forty sentences stacked up behind my teeth and every one of them was worse than the one underneath it.

"He's my grandfather's dog," I said.

She stood there a second with her back to me.

"I know whose dog he is." Her shoulders came up and went down. "I ate in that diner every Thursday for a year after you left."

Then the door swung shut.