Chapter 19 Tessa
The rescue does not close for Christmas.
"There isn't one."
"There's a schedule and then there's the holiday version of the schedule."
"Beckett. It's the same schedule."
He looked at the sheet a second, the way he looks at a thing that has come back with a number he did not expect.
"Then I'll take the mornings," he said.
"Which mornings?"
"The mornings," he said. He went back out.
I woke on Christmas Eve at twenty past six because the dryer stopped. That is the only thing that wakes me now.
There was a decaf on the counter with a saucer on top of it to keep the heat in. On the laminated sheet, in the column that says Seniors, four small check marks in pencil. Next to Stevie's, a note in that handwriting like an engineering drawing.
Refused PB. Took in butter. Will keep watching.
He was in the doorway of the back hall with a kitten in one hand.
"You're up," I said.
"It's six-twenty."
"It's Christmas Eve."
"Yeah," Beckett said. "The dog still has a thyroid."
"Did you sleep?"
"Enough to do the runs," he said. That is not a number. That man gives me a number for everything, so I knew.
Sofia came at nine and took her coat off like a woman arriving at a scene.
"Go and lie down."
"It's the 24th. We've got two drop-offs and a suture check."
"I've done forty Christmases in this business and I've never seen a suture check that could not be done by me. One hour. Horizontal."
"It's my clinic."
"It's your one hour," Sofia said.
So I lay down at ten past nine in the morning like an invalid.
I got about a minute of feeling foolish about it before Margaret came off the back of the couch and stood on my chest. She has never sat on me in nineteen years.
She put her paws together and faced the door with her back to me.
That is how that cat says a thing is under her management now.
I slept. When I woke up Beckett was going past the doorway with a laundry basket on his hip and did not say anything.
I lay there with a cat on my sternum and my hand where it goes now, low and flat.
I felt absolutely nothing except a building I've held up alone for nine years making noise without me in it.
Eli came at seven the next morning for the runs. He never once said Merry Christmas and I did not expect him to. He stopped dead in the kitchen.
"Who did the runs?"
"Beckett."
"Why?"
"Because he gets up at five."
"That's not a reason," Eli said. "That's a symptom."
He went out and looked at them. He came back with a face on him.
"He coiled the hose wrong. And the food bins are in the wrong order."
"They're alphabetical."
"They were in the order of who eats first," Eli said, "which is a system." Then he stopped, because he heard it.
He put his coffee down. "Did he do the pills?"
"He did. Stevie's on butter now."
Eli turned around. "Since when?"
"Since she started refusing peanut butter and he wrote it down."
There is a thing my brother does with his jaw that he got from our mother and it means he is holding a sentence.
"I'm not saying anything nice," he said.
"I know."
"I want that on the record. Not one nice thing. He coiled the hose wrong," Eli said. He went out and did the runs anyway, which had already been done. I stood at the window and watched a twenty-two-year-old man hose clean concrete out of spite.
I went out to him at the third run and told him standing up, with the water still going. I said I was pregnant. I said it was Beckett’s. I said June.
Eli turned the tap off. He stood there about four seconds with his hand still on it.
Then he said, “Right,” and put the hose down and hugged me hard enough to hurt. Into my shoulder, in a completely flat voice, he said, “I’m still not saying one nice thing about him.”
He did not drop a shift. He did not move in. He came Wednesdays and he came Sundays and that was the whole of it, and I know exactly what that cost him, because I am the one who taught him how to do it.
Violet arrived at noon with an eight-foot inflatable snowman.
It came out of the back of her car with the seat folded flat. She stood over it on the gravel like a woman who had killed something.
"Where's the outlet?"
"Violet."
"Tessa, the lot is sad."
Auggie's truck came around the row at twenty past twelve. He opened the tailgate. There was an eight-foot inflatable snowman in it.
"No," Violet said.
"They had two." He came down the gravel with his arms out. "I stood in that aisle and I thought, is this too much. Then I thought, Augustin, when has that ever been the question?"
"I asked the guy if it was the last one."
"He told me it was the last one," Auggie said. Violet Ocampo put her hand out and Auggie shook it. The two of them looked at each other a second longer than two people need to look at each other. Then they put both snowmen up on either side of my clinic sign, facing each other, like a gate.
Beckett came out to see what the noise was.
"There's two."
"They're the same one," I said.
He looked at them a while. "They're going to fight," he said, and went back in.
Around two I asked where Violet was. Beckett said, "In the clinic with your friend," and I said, "He's your friend.
" Beckett said, "She has the mistletoe," in exactly the voice he uses to say Mister Tony is noncompliant.
Neither of us did one thing with that information.
They came out forty minutes later. Violet's lipstick was on the wrong part of her mouth and Auggie said the laminator was fascinating.
We did the gifts at nine at night, after everybody had gone, at the kitchen table with the good lamp on and five kittens in a crate by the radiator. It was my idea. I regret it the way I regret a thing that changed my life.
"I got you something," I said. "It's not a thing. It's small."
"You're setting expectations low," Beckett said. "Set them wherever you want. I got you something too."
"You did what? When?"
"November. It took a while," he said. "It was at a place."
So we sat at a table where the towels used to live and did it like two people defusing a device. He made me go first.
It was flat and heavy and wrapped in the paper the clinic uses for surgical packs. That man does not own wrapping paper and would not buy any. He had taped it in a way that suggested he had thought about the taping.
I got it open.
It was my mother.
June Reeves on the sidewalk on Federal in front of a storefront with the lettering half done, arms crossed, squinting into the sun. She was in a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled. Behind her in the window was the ghost of a man on a ladder holding a brush. It was 1998, the morning she opened.
I've never seen it in my life.
Plain wood frame. In the bottom corner there should have been a bloom of water damage the size of my hand. There was my mother's boot and the edge of the curb, put back.
"Where," I said, and it came out wrong. I started again. "Where was this?"
"Storage room. Third shelf. There's a box marked 2004 with rabies certificates in it. It isn't 2004 and they aren't rabies certificates." He had his hands flat on the table. "It got wet at some point. Everything on the bottom is gone. That was near the top."
"You went in the storage room."
"I didn't reorganize it. Clause four. I took one photograph out and put the box back the way it was. I can show you exactly where it goes."
"That's not what I'm…"
"I know," he said.
"There's a place on Broadway that does that. How long did they…"
"Six weeks. They call you when the scan's done. You go in and look at it on a screen and tell them if it's right. I didn't know if it was right. I've never seen her." He turned his cup a quarter turn. "In the first one they'd taken the squint out and it looked like somebody else."
I put my hand over my mouth.
"They took the squint out."
"They smooth it. They do that." He was looking at the table. "I told them to put it back."
Then it was his turn. By then my hands were not good.
It is a four-by-six in a cheap black frame from the pharmacy on Thirty-Eighth, because I did not have six weeks and a place on Broadway. I had a shoebox and a Sunday.
He got the paper off and went still.
I've seen this man stand in his net with eighteen thousand people screaming and not move. That is not what this was. This was a man who had been talking a second ago.
It is the back booth at Walt's. An old man in a white apron with his forearms on the table, laughing at something with his eyes shut.
Across from him a twenty-one-year-old with a plate of eggs and his hair too long and a bruise on his cheekbone.
He was half turned toward the camera because somebody had said his name.
I took it in August, on a disposable camera, because it was 2015 and I was a broke vet student. That is what I had. I got them developed at a drugstore in Fort Collins. There were pictures of a dog on the roll and one of these.
He did not pick it up. He put one finger on the corner of the frame and moved it an inch toward himself. He left it there.
I counted thirty seconds. At about twenty I started to genuinely wonder. At thirty-one I said, "Beckett," and he said, "Yeah," in a voice like a door in another room. I said, "You're not breathing." He said, "I am."
"You went white."
"I'm all right." He had not looked up. "That's the booth. Third from the register. He sat on that side because he could see the door and the kitchen at the same time."
"I know."
"That's my second year of junior."
"It's August," I said. "You'd been hit in the face by a defenseman from Brandon. You told me it was a puck and it was not a puck."
"It was a puck."
"It was a defenseman named Kyle."
"It was a puck, Tessa," he said. Something in his face came apart about a quarter of an inch and he pulled it back. He still had not looked up.
And then he said it to the table.
"You had this the whole time."