Chapter 28 Tessa
I lasted eleven hours.
And I did not say one word about it. Neither did he. It sat there through dinner and the eight o'clock and the whole of the following morning, squared up on my mother's kitchen table under a ceramic corgi.
Here is what my head did in that time.
He has decided already.
That one arrived at about four fifteen in the afternoon. It came fully formed and in my own voice, with the confidence of a thing that has been said in a house for twenty years.
The second one is underneath. It is older and worse. It goes, the deciding is the leaving. Those are the same event. Every single time in my life a man has gone away and done sums, the sum has come out to a duffel bag in 2001 or a hallway in Fort Collins.
So I did what I do. I got very calm and efficient and pleasant. I did four consults and a dental. By eleven the next morning Sofia had asked me twice what was wrong and I had told her nothing twice.
"You have said fine to me four times in a day and a half," Sofia said. "In April you said it to me with a blood pressure of one sixty-two."
"It's not that."
"I did not say it was that. I said you have a word you use." She took her glasses off. "Go into your house."
At one o'clock on the 3rd of July I went into my house.
He was at the table with the paper in front of him and Willa in the crook of his arm. There was a coffee he had made me on the mat where mine goes.
"Sit down a minute," Beckett said.
And every single thing in my chest went up at once, because here was the sentence. I sat down at my mother's kitchen table with my hands flat on it like a woman in a disciplinary meeting.
And he turned the paper around so it faced me and slid it across.
"What is this?"
"You know what it is."
"I'm asking what you're doing."
"Decide with me," Beckett said.
I did not have anything ready for that.
"It's your job."
"It's four years."
"Beckett."
"It's four years of a hundred and ninety nights I'm not at this table," he said.
"It's you doing every Tuesday and Wednesday in October on your own.
It's a February where I'm in Florida eleven days.
She's two and she's got an ear infection.
It's four more years of somebody putting my name in a headline.
You're going to be Douglas in that headline and I hate it. "
"I'm not married into anything."
"Tessa."
"I'm being accurate."
"Read it," he said. "Every page. Change anything you want. And if the answer's no, it's no."
"You can't do that."
"I can do that."
"That is not a thing that people…"
"Do you remember what you slid across an exam table in November?" Beckett said.
And I did not answer, because I did remember it exactly, with the light and the hum of the fridge and Bear's tail going on the lino.
"You couldn't say the soft thing out loud," he said, "so you put a piece of paper where I could see it and let the paper do it. That's what this is. I've done it in your language on purpose."
I put both hands over my face for a second.
"You absolute…"
"Read page one," he said, "and then argue with me. That's the order."
We did it for four hours, properly, the way we did the deed. The light was on and the coffee went cold. A nine-week-old was passed back and forth across the table like a document.
"Four years takes you to thirty-five."
"Thirty-five and a bit."
"That's the end of it."
"That's the end of it," he said. "There's no thirty-eight. I'd be lying if I said there was."
"So you'd finish here." I turned a page. "Page nine is a relocation clause and it contradicts the no-move."
"It's boilerplate. Fran's flagged it, they'll strike it."
"Then strike it before I initial anything, because I'm not signing a thing with a contradiction in it. I've had that year already." I turned another one. "What happens if you get hurt?"
"Page nineteen. It's the best part of the deal. Four years guaranteed."
"Say what that means."
"If I go through a knee in November they pay all four years," Beckett said. "It means the thing that happened to my father does not happen to us."
I sat back.
"And what do you want?"
"I want to play."
"Say the rest of it."
He put his hand flat on the table.
"I've been in this game since I was five and I've never once played it for fun.
I played it for a number, and to make a man put my name on a wall.
I've got about four years left in a body that's been good to me.
This last one is the first time I've ever gone out there and enjoyed a single minute of it.
" He looked at me. "I want four years of the good kind.
That's the whole want. And I'm not going to have it if the price is you doing a February on your own. "
"That's not the price."
"It might be."
"It isn't," I said, "because I'm not on my own. That's the actual answer. It's taken me nine months to be able to say it in a sentence."
And then I told him about the clinic. I had not said it out loud to anybody, not to Sofia or Violet or myself in any way that had words in it.
"The ground is ours," I said. "That's the thing that changed and I don't think either of us has sat with it.
For twenty-four years that building has been run by somebody who was going to lose it.
My mother ran it that way and I ran it that way.
It's why she poured forty feet of covered concrete in 1998 so she'd never have to walk home. It's why I've never taken a Sunday.
"It isn't that any more. It cannot be taken off me. And I keep waiting for somebody to come and correct the mistake. Nobody's coming. So now I have to run it like a woman who's going to have it for thirty years. That's a completely different job and I've never done it."
"And it doesn't need me the way it needed me," I said. "That's the part that hurt. Because if it doesn't need me at four in the morning, then I have to find out what I am when nothing's on fire."
Beckett did not say anything.
"Ask Sofia," I said.
"Ask her what?"
"To stay. Properly. Not a locum, not by the day. Partner. Her name next to mine on the sign under my mother's."
"Is that what you want?"
"Yes. And I've wanted it since February. I haven't asked her, because asking somebody for something is…"
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
I asked her at half past five that afternoon in the corridor, badly, with a chart in my hand. If I had planned it I would not have done it.
She said, "Yes. Obviously. I will need my own key to the drug cabinet and I'm going to reorganize your imaging room, it is a disgrace." Then she cried for about four seconds and denied it while it was happening.
We signed at eight o'clock that night.
I read all thirty-one pages and made three notes in the margin, one of them substantive. Fran got the relocation clause struck on the Monday. I initialed every page the way I have initialed everything in this house since December, in my own hand, on the right.
Then I put the pen down in front of him and he signed it. He did it the way he does the runs and the four o'clock bottles, with no ceremony at all.
Except that when he got to the end he sat there with his hand still on the page.
"Page twenty-two," he said.
"I read page twenty-two."
"Read it again."
It is four lines of extremely boring language about the assignment of playing rights. The words no-move appear in it twice.
"It means nobody can send me anywhere," Beckett said. "Four years, in writing, filed with a league office in New York. Not the coach. Not Delisle. Nobody."
"I know what it means."
"Tessa."
"I know what it means," I said, and my voice did something, and I put my hand flat on the table.
Because I have known that man since I was twenty-one and every single thing about him has been provisional.
He has been moved four times. He has spent eleven years in a job where a phone call at one o'clock on a Tuesday can put a man in another time zone by Thursday.
I have spent nine months in a house listening for exactly that.
In February I stood in a gravel lot in the cold with no coat on pretending to look at a gate.
And a man who could be taken away at any moment went into an office and made himself impossible to take away. He did it on paper, in a filing cabinet in New York.
"That's not a contract," I said.
"It's definitely a contract, it's thirty-one pages."
"Beckett. Come here," I said, and he came there.
I kissed him over the top of a hundred and ninety nights a year for four years, with my hands on either side of his face.
He put one hand flat on my back and the other in my hair.
We knocked the coffee over and neither of us did anything about it for some time.
The celebration was a walk. Auggie offered to book a room and Violet offered to do something with a boat.
We went at eight, when it goes gold, the dusk route through the park we walked in October with a dog who had been cut open six days before.
Bear set the pace. He does about a mile an hour and he stops to read things. The entire party moves at his speed by unanimous consent, including a stroller and a professional athlete and my brother.
"He's stopped again."
"He's reading."
"He's been reading that post for a full minute, Beckett."
"It's a good post," Beckett said. "There's a lot on it."
Eli had Willa. He had taken her out of the stroller at the top of the park with no announcement. He walked the whole loop with her against his shoulder and one hand over her back. Nobody said anything about it. That stopped being a thing we say anything about in the second week of June.
Under the trees at the far end, where the path bends, Beckett stopped and pulled me in by the front of my shirt and kissed me. My brother stood a few feet away holding my daughter and looking at the sky with great interest.
"You two are disgusting," Eli said.
"Go and look at the ducks."
"There's no ducks, it's a quarter to nine."
"Go and look at where the ducks were," Beckett said.
Then we came back along Federal, which is not the pretty way, and went past the diner.