Chapter 18 Beckett
The house does not have a system, so I built one. I understood clause four. I do not reorganize her chaos.
I did not reorganize anything. I documented it. There is a difference and I explained it twice.
The feeding chart went up first. Nine animals on four schedules, all of it run out of one woman's head, which is a single point of failure. Columns are animals, rows are times, colors are the food. A color can be read across a room at four in the morning and a word cannot.
"You laminated it," Tessa said.
"It's next to a sink. Paper by a sink is a temporary document," I said. She looked at the ceiling a while.
Then the spreadsheet. The five fosters get weighed every morning before the seven o'clock feed. In a four-week-old kitten a bad twelve hours is a number before it is anything a person can see. Tessa has been writing them on the back of an envelope. I've watched her look for the envelope.
So it is a spreadsheet now, to the gram, on my laptop at the end of the kitchen table where the towels used to be.
Down the left side are the names. The second-grade class names them and their teacher's husband is a hockey person.
So every foster through that building is named after a goaltender who won the Stanley Cup.
Hasek. Brodeur. Parent. Plante. And a fifth they insisted on calling Mister Tony.
There is a column at the right that calculates the gain over the previous day. I sort it descending every morning. This is a medically appropriate way to look at that data.
It is also a leaderboard. Brodeur has been winning since the ninth.
He was two hundred grams behind Hasek on the 3rd of January.
He has taken it back forty grams at a time like a man grinding out a road trip.
I have no defense for how invested I am in this.
There is no prize. Nobody else is looking at it.
On the 16th Mister Tony gained four grams in a day.
I sat at that table at one in the morning and thought, seriously, about what I could change for him.
And there is a sixth line on that spreadsheet that has nothing to do with the current litter. There is a grey cat in that house named Roy.
He came in with the October litter. The October litter went to homes in November and he did not.
His card was never put out. I've never once said a word to anybody about that cat.
I sat on an exam room floor in October. He climbed out of a tub and fell asleep against my leg.
I haven't been able to explain the months since to myself, let alone out loud.
He is enormous now. He sleeps on the back of the couch behind my head.
Nobody in this house has ever said one word to me about the name.
Everybody in this house has noticed. Violet noticed in nine seconds and had the grace to only look at me.
Eli has spoken to me four times since December, all of them logistics.
He stood in that kitchen on a Tuesday. He looked at the grey cat asleep on the back of the couch. He looked at me and left the room.
And Tessa has never mentioned it. That is how I know how much she has thought about it, because that woman mentions everything.
The house fought the system. It did not fight fair. It was led from the top of the refrigerator.
Margaret's opening move was the scale. I came out on the fourth morning and every kitten in that litter weighed five thousand one hundred grams. All five were identical.
She was on the fridge. Paws together.
"That was you," I said.
She did not blink.
Her second move was the couch. I have a side. She had it inside a week. I got up for water on a Sunday and came back to nine pounds of cat asleep in it with her back to the room. Tessa said from the kitchen without looking, "Take the other end."
"It's my end."
The third move was the ambush.
So I left counter-notes.
Note: The scale has been zeroed. Please do not sit on the scale.
Note: A cat was found in the clean towel bin. This is the second occurrence.
Note: Occupant of the left couch cushion has been asked to relocate and has declined.
Tessa found the third one at seven in the morning and I heard her from the hallway.
She laughed until she had to sit down on the arm of the couch.
Then she read it again and did it a second time.
I stood in a doorway with a bottle in my hand and did not go in, because I wanted to keep listening to it.
I text her from the road.
Plante 412g, up 9. Brodeur up 14. Mister Tony noncompliant. Dolly took hers in bread. Stevie refused cheese, took it in peanut butter, log updated. No further developments.
She has never once texted back anything except a thumbs up. On the 11th of January she texted back, No further developments is not a thing a person says. I read it in a hotel in Vancouver about nine times.
Baranov caught me in the hallway before the Winnipeg game. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the wall a while.
"November you were fine. December you were good. This month you are the best goalie in this building and it is not close. I have been coaching twenty-six years and I do not say that in a hallway."
"Okay."
"Do not say okay."
"Yes."
"Something is different. I asked you in November and you told me nothing was happening. It was a lie and I let you have it. I am not asking again. I am telling you." He tapped my pad with the flat of his hand. "Whatever it is, it is working. Do not let anybody take it off you."
Then he went to talk to somebody about a defenseman's ankle, which is where that man goes when he has said too much.
We won it four to one. Thirty-one saves, two of them work. The rest was standing in the right place, which is the whole job and nobody believes it.
I've played eleven years and for most of them the game was the whole building. I went out and I was worth what the number said at the end. Then I went back to an apartment with nothing in it and lay in the dark being worth that number until morning.
That night I got in my truck at eleven-ten with wet hair. I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal. There was a light on over a stove in a house with eleven dog beds in it. There was a woman in it who is never asleep at that hour. I sat in that lot a second before I went in.
Auggie has decided something is happening and has begun to work on it.
"So you're living there."
"I'm in the guest room."
"Right. So at the fundraiser the woman from the foundation asked whether you had pets. You said, and I want to quote this correctly, we have nine."
"There are nine."
"We!" Auggie said. "And then you looked like a man who had been shot. I'm not doing anything with it." He put both hands up. "When I do, and I will, it will be enormous and you will not see it coming. Also, Violet Ocampo and I have exchanged phone numbers."
"You've what?"
"Good night," Auggie said.
I came in the back at twenty past eleven. The kitchen light was on and the television in the front room was off. The television in that front room is never off. The remote was on the arm of the couch about a foot from where she was sitting with a blanket over her knees.
"Hey," Tessa said. "How was…"
"Fine. Four one."
"Mm." She looked at a magazine that was upside down.
She has not once said she watches. I put a plate together at the counter, because she had not eaten. The soup was on the stove where I had left it before I went to the rink.
I brought it over. The couch in that room is low and I'm not. Handing a person a plate on it means going down on one knee. I went down beside the arm of the couch and held it out. She reached. Neither of us let go of it.
She had her hair down. There is a lamp behind that couch with a shade the color of a paper bag and it does something to a room.
"You're bleeding," she said.
"It's a lip. It's from the second. It's nothing."
"Beckett," she said. "Come here."
So I came here.
She got her thumb under my jaw and turned my face toward the lamp. It is the exact thing she does to a dog. She has never once done it to me.
Her hand stayed there about four seconds longer than the medicine.
"It's nothing," she said.
"That's what I said."
"Your face is hot."
"I played hockey."
"Beckett."
She did not say anything.
There is a red clause on a refrigerator eleven feet from that couch. At that moment I could have recited it and it did not mean anything. Her thumb was still under my jaw. She was looking at my mouth. I was going to do it and I was not going to be sorry.
The door from the hall does not latch. It is a strike plate and an $8 part and I haven't fixed it. In this house I've learned not to fix things I haven't been given.
Bear put his whole shoulder into it from the other side.
Eighty pounds of shepherd came through at the speed he does everything, which is slowly.
He got his head under her hand and put his entire weight against my back at the same time.
I went forward into the arm of the couch.
The plate went and there was soup on the floor.
"Bear."
"He wanted in," Tessa said. Her voice was not right. "He always wants in."
She went and got a towel and did not come back for a while. I cleaned up soup off the floor with a fourteen-year-old dog standing directly in it. Margaret came off the refrigerator to supervise from four feet.
At midnight I sat at the end of the kitchen table and put the day's weights in.
Brodeur, up eleven. Hasek, up six, which is not enough. I will be watching that. Plante, up nine. Parent, up nine. Mister Tony, up two. He has been last since the 28th of December and does not appear to have any opinion about it at all.
I sorted it descending.
Margaret was asleep on my end of the couch in the next room, on her side with her feet out. It is not a thing she does in front of people.
And on my chest, inside my shirt, was a grey cat named after my father. That is where he goes now. He weighs four pounds and has never earned one single thing in his life.
Down the hall the bathroom lamp that is not a timer was on. The dryer was running with nothing in it. If the dryer is running the whole house sleeps. I stopped feeling anything about that on day three.
I put my hand flat on the cat so he would not fall when I stood up.
Then I sat there a while longer and did not stand up.