Chapter 6 Tessa
The last appointment on Thursday was a four-fifteen that arrived at five-forty.
By the time I'd finished with a cat named Beans and his questionable ear, the building was empty.
Marisol was gone and the fosters were fed.
Bear's kidney recheck was on the schedule at seven o'clock, where I had put it myself.
"You're early."
"Two minutes early is on time," he said. "On time is late."
"Who told you that?"
"Every coach I've ever had."
"That is a horrible way to live," I said. I took the dog.
The bloodwork took nine minutes to run. I put Bear on the mat in exam three and sat on the rolling stool. Beckett sat on the bench. We had nine minutes with nothing in our hands, which was a mistake.
He looked at the ceiling tile with the hole in it.
"You never fixed that."
"I put a new hook in."
"The tile still has a hole."
"Different hole. That one's from the swamp cooler. I have a building my mother bought in 1998. Half of it is held together by hope and one very committed roll of duct tape." I spun a quarter turn on the stool and back. "How's the season?"
"Fine. We're four and three."
"Are you good?"
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know," he said.
The centrifuge stopped in the other room, and neither of us got up.
"Do you remember," he said, "that Walt used to call us the ten o'clock crowd?"
Memory was not warm. It was more like banging the same knuckle I banged last week.
"He'd flip the sign at nine-thirty," I said, "and leave the door unlocked anyway."
"And put the fryer back on."
"For nine weeks straight. For a vet student and a goalie who could not afford to eat there and who he never once charged."
"He charged me. $2. He said it was for the labor. And at the end of that summer, when I moved out of his house, he gave me a coffee can with all of it in it. $142. In ones."
I had not known that. It was so precisely, molecularly Walt that I had to look at the floor and be a person about it.
"He asked me what I was studying and then he remembered. Every time. He'd say, how are the horses, because he thought vet school was horses."
"He thought that until the day he died. He asked me last Christmas whether you'd ever gotten into the horses."
The room went completely quiet.
"He asked about me," I said.
Beckett looked at the mat.
"Once a year, maybe. Sometimes twice."
"And what did you say?"
"I said I didn't know."
"That's it?"
"That's what I had."
"Can I ask you something, and can you not do the face?"
"What face?"
"The television face."
He put his hands flat on his knees, which was what that man did instead of bracing.
"Ask."
"Why didn't you ask me to stay?"
I'd been carrying that sentence since I was twenty-one.
I'd never said it out loud to another human being.
Not to Violet, not to my mother in the last months I had her, not to a dark ceiling at three in the morning.
And it came out over the noise of a centrifuge like I was asking about a parking spot.
He didn't move.
"You'd have said no," he said.
"That is not an answer."
"You were going back up to Fort Collins in three weeks. You had four years of school left and a mother running a clinic that was already…"
"Beckett."
"You'd have said no."
"You don't know that."
"You'd have said yes," he said. "And then you'd have hated me by thirty. I'd have had to watch it happen."
"So you did me a favor."
"I didn't say that."
"You're saying it right now. You told me in June that you'd choose me.
You said those words. In the truck, at the reservoir, with the windows down.
And then in September a man with a clipboard called you.
You got very quiet. You sat on that tailgate and let me stand in a gravel lot and ask you a question three separate times.
You never answered it. I walked, and you let me. "
"Yes."
"That's your whole defense. Yes."
"It's what happened."
"You don't get to agree with me," I said. "You are supposed to fight with me about this. You have had ten years to come up with something."
He did what he always did, which was nothing. It went on long enough that I nearly stood up and left my own exam room.
Then he said, "My father drove out."
I stopped.
"That September. The clipboard call was Wednesday.
He was in the driveway Friday." Beckett was looking at a spot on the floor four feet in front of his boots.
"I'd already turned it down. That's the part nobody knows.
I told them no on the Thursday morning. I was going to stay.
I was going to play beer league in Broomfield if that's what it took.
Walt knew. Walt was the one who told him. "
"Walt told him?"
"Walt thought he'd be proud of me." Something happened at the corner of his mouth that was not a smile. "That's the only thing my grandfather ever got wrong."
The centrifuge clicked and began to cool.
"What did he say to you?" I said.
"He wasn't angry." He turned his hands over on his knees and looked at them.
"He sat at Walt's kitchen table and he was kind about it.
He said: every man who gives it up for a woman spends the rest of his life making her pay the bill.
He said, you'll be thirty-four and you'll be selling something.
You'll look across a kitchen at her and you will know to the dollar exactly what she cost you.
You'll be too well-raised to say it out loud, and she'll know anyway. Every day. For forty years."
"Beckett."
"And then he said, I know because I did it to your mother."
I put my hand over my mouth. I don't remember deciding to.
"She left when I was seven. I've told you that.
What I didn't tell you is what it was like in that house for the four years before she did.
I was small and I didn't have a word for it.
By the time I had a word for it I was already the kind of person who doesn't use words.
" He looked up. "He was describing my childhood to me and telling me it was a forecast. And I was twenty-one.
And he has never once lied to me. He is unkind and he is accurate.
I had never in my life caught him being wrong about anything. "
"So you believed him."
"I believed him. And in the parking lot I was doing the arithmetic on what I was going to do to you over the next forty years. I couldn't think of a single sentence that wasn't a lie, so I didn't say one."
I sat on a rolling stool in a room that smelled like disinfectant. I could not get any air into the top of my lungs.
Ten years of a story I had written and rewritten and finally laminated: he was always going to choose the ice. It was a clean story. It was a story I could run a business on.
And the true one was so much worse. A boy I loved was handed a prophecy by the one person he'd been trained to believe. He took it. He protected me from himself with the only tool he had, which was disappearing.
"He was wrong," I said.
Beckett didn't answer.
"Beckett. He was wrong."
"He was wrong about the first part," he said.
I heard the size of what he left out. The second part was still sitting there in the room with us like a third body.
I just didn't ask. I was twenty-one again and I could not have survived the answer. And he put his hand flat on the exam table right then, not near mine, but near enough.
"I thought about it for ten years," he said. "I never came up with anything better."
I looked at his hand, four inches from mine. I thought with total clarity that if either of us moved two inches, the last decade was going to become extremely difficult to explain to myself.
And then the front bell went off like a fire alarm.
"It's me!" Violet shouted from the lobby. "I have Thai food and I have opinions!"
She came around the corner and stopped so hard her bag kept going.
Violet Ocampo was five foot one. She ran the foster program and managed forty-one volunteers by text message. She had the temperament of a woman who had been fighting a war with a phone for six years and was winning it.
She looked at Beckett. She looked at me. She looked at the four inches between our hands. I had not moved mine, because moving it then would have been infinitely worse.
"Well," she said. "No, it's fine. I'm putting the food down," she said, putting the food down very slowly and without looking at it even once, "in the break room. Where I will be. Alone. Contemplating."
She left. Two seconds later her head came back around the doorframe.
"I'm Violet."
"Beckett."
"I know who you are," Violet said, with enormous warmth and total menace. Then she went.
The bloodwork was okay. Not great, but okay. His kidney numbers were holding. His phosphorus was up a little, so I told him to add a powder to the food that would soak it up. He typed it into his phone while I was still talking, which I decided was not charming.
"His hips are the thing now. See the leg kicked out? That's the arthritis. He needs to move more, not less. Short and often. Flat ground."
"There's a loop by the house that's flat."
"We could do it now," I said. He looked up. "To see his gait. Because if he's dropping a hip I want to see it before I put him on anything. I cannot see it in a room this size."
"Okay," he said.
"It's clinical."
From the break room, through a wall, Violet said, "Mm."
The park was fourteen blocks up. It had a gravel loop around a pond and a standing population of geese with a bad attitude. Everything had gone the color it goes for twenty minutes in October, when the whole city looks like the inside of a peach.
Bear walked like a very old man on a very good day.
Nothing happened. We walked a dog around a pond.