Marcus found the calendar app open on Diane's laptop when he came in from the garage, the fifteenth circled in red like a wound.

"Seven years," she said, not looking up from the counter where she was slicing peppers. "You remembered."

"I remembered in February. I've been quietly panicking since then."

She laughed. The knife kept moving. "We could do the thing where we go to Bernardi's and pretend the prices don't bother us."

"We did that for five. And six." He leaned against the fridge. "What if we didn't go anywhere?"

Diane set the knife down. Outside, their neighbor's dog was losing an argument with a sprinkler. "Meaning what."

"Meaning I have a bottle of that Oregon pinot in the closet and no plans, and the deck still isn't stained, and I thought—" He stopped, aware of how it sounded. "I thought we could stain the deck. Then drink the wine on it."

She was quiet long enough that he started rehearsing a retraction.

"That's the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me," she said. "I love it. But I want the wine first."

"That's structurally unsound."

"Marcus."

"Fine."

They spent the fifteenth in old clothes, arguing mildly about whether to go with the grain or against it, both of them wrong in different ways. Diane got stain on her forearm and didn't notice for an hour. Around six the light went long and gold across the half-finished boards, and Marcus went inside for the bottle and two juice glasses because the wine glasses were somewhere in the box they'd never unpacked from the move.

They sat on the finished half. It smelled like solvent and cut grass.

"Seven years," Diane said again.

"You want to say something profound?"

"No," she said, and put her feet in his lap. "I want to sit here."

He topped off her glass.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated seven years ago that Saturday. She'd bought a doorstop the day she moved her boxes into Ren's apartment on Cortland Street. She brought it to the kitchen and set it beside his coffee cup.

"Seven years," she said.

Ren picked it up, squinting. "You kept this?"

"It was in the drawer with the twist ties and the dead phone chargers. I keep everything by accident."

He turned it over. On the back, in his own handwriting, was a grocery list: eggs, tortillas, the good salsa. He laughed. "We were so broke."

They'd talked about doing something big this year. Marisol had floated a weekend in Asheville; Ren had mentioned a restaurant downtown where the tasting menu ran eleven courses and required a deposit. But the truck needed new brakes, and Marisol's mother was coming in October, and neither of them had said out loud that the numbers didn't work.

"What if we didn't," Ren said.

"Didn't what?"

"Didn't go anywhere. What if we cooked the thing you made that first night. The chicken with the burnt lemons."

"It was burnt because our oven was broken."

"So we burn them on purpose."

She considered this. Outside, a neighbor was running a leaf blower, badly. "We'd have to get the good salsa," she said.

They went to the store together on Saturday morning and argued mildly about cilantro. At home, Ren scorched the lemons in a cast-iron pan while Marisol tacked the old receipt to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like Ohio. They ate at the coffee table because the dining chairs were still holding books.

Later, doing dishes, Ren said, "Eight years, we do Asheville."

"Eight years," she agreed, and handed him a plate.


Marcus found the takeout menus fanned across the kitchen counter when he got home, which meant Priya had been thinking about it too.

"Seven years," she said, not looking up from her laptop. "Do we do something?"

He set his keys in the ceramic dish her sister had made them. "We could go back to Antonio's."

"Antonio's closed in 2022."

"Right." He opened the fridge, considered the leftover rice, closed it again. "There's that place on Delaney with the tasting menu. Kevin at work said it's worth it."

Priya made a face. "A hundred and forty dollars for foam."

"You're the one who brought it up."

"I brought up whether we should do something. I didn't say we had to spend four hundred dollars proving it." She finally closed the laptop. "What did we do last year?"

They both thought. Last year had been the week her father was in the hospital. The year before, they'd moved into this apartment and eaten pizza on the floor because the couch was still on the truck.

"Pizza on the floor was good," Marcus said.

"Pizza on the floor was excellent."

He leaned against the counter. "Okay, but here's what I actually want. I want to drive out to Sandy Point and walk around and then get crab cakes at that shack. The one with the picnic tables."

"It's going to be forty degrees Saturday."

"So we wear coats."

Priya was quiet for a second. Then: "I want to leave early. Like seven. Before the parking lot fills up."

"Seven's brutal."

"Seven or the tasting menu."

"Seven's fine. Seven's great." He pulled the rice out after all, started spooning it into a pan. "Should we get a cake or something? Is that a thing?"

"We can get one of those grocery store ones with the too-sweet frosting."

"Now you're talking," Marcus said, and turned on the burner.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated seven years ago exactly. The day they'd bought the deadbolt for the apartment on Fremont, the first place they'd shared.

"Look at this," she said, holding it up when Teddy came in from the garage, sawdust on his forearms.

He squinted. "Eleven dollars for a lock. Those were the days."

"Seven years tomorrow."

Teddy set down his coffee. They'd talked around the anniversary for two weeks, both waiting for the other to propose something. He'd assumed she wanted dinner somewhere with cloth napkins. She'd assumed he wanted to stay home and would feel guilty about it.

"I was thinking," he said, "we could do Costa Verde. The place with the plantains."

Marisol made a face. "It's forty minutes each way and we'd be there for two hours."

"You don't want to go?"

"I want to not sit in traffic on a Thursday." She pulled out a chair and sat. "What if we did something with the backyard? You've been saying you want to finish the fire pit."

"That's not a celebration, that's a chore."

"It's a chore we'd do together. With beer. And I could make the shrimp thing."

Teddy considered it. The half-laid ring of pavers had been mocking him since April. "The shrimp thing with the garlic?"

"Obviously."

"And we'd get a cake."

"From the Vietnamese bakery," Marisol said. "The one with the strawberries."

He nodded slowly. "Okay. But I'm buying you something."

"You don't have to buy me something."

"I know I don't have to." He picked up the receipt, folded it carefully, and slid it into his shirt pocket. "I'll frame this. Eleven-dollar gift. That's within budget."

She laughed and went to find the batteries.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a Tuesday matinee, five years ago, the first movie she and Devon had seen together. Neither of them had liked it much.

"You kept these?" Devon asked, coming in with a bag of groceries.

"I keep everything. It's a problem." She smoothed one flat against the counter. "Five years next Saturday."

He set down the bag and leaned against the fridge, thinking. Their apartment in Dayton was small enough that he could see her whole from where he stood: bare feet on the linoleum, her braids piled up, that concentrated frown she got when she was calculating something.

"We could do the fancy thing," he said. "Reservations. I'd wear the jacket."

"You hate the jacket."

"I do hate the jacket."

Marisol laughed and slid the ticket stubs toward him. "What if we saw whatever's playing Saturday afternoon? Doesn't matter what. Whatever's on at two."

"Even if it's terrible."

"Especially if it's terrible. That was sort of the point the first time."

Devon considered this. He'd been saving for something—a weekend in Chicago, maybe, or a ring, though he hadn't gotten there yet and she hadn't asked. There was time. There was, it seemed, a lot of time.

"Deal," he said. "But I'm buying the big popcorn. The obscene one."

"Obviously."

Saturday, the two o'clock was a monster movie with bad reviews and worse dialogue. They shared the obscene popcorn. Devon fell asleep somewhere in the second act, his head tipping onto her shoulder, and Marisol didn't wake him, just sat there in the dark with the buttery smell and the dumb explosions, thinking that this was the whole thing, really—someone falling asleep on you, someone letting them.

Afterward they walked to the diner on Wayne Avenue and argued cheerfully about whether the movie had been bad enough to keep the stubs.

They kept them.


Marcus found the calendar notation in Priya's handwriting on a Tuesday morning: *7 yrs — the diner.*

"You remembered," he said, holding up the phone photo he'd taken of it.

Priya looked up from her oatmeal. "I remembered in February. I've been quietly stressing about it since."

"Stressing why?"

"Because seven is one of those numbers people make a fuss about, and we never make a fuss, and I couldn't tell if that was fine or if it was avoidance."

He sat down across from her. This was how they'd always worked — one of them naming the anxious thing out loud before it calcified. Seven years ago they'd met at a twenty-four-hour diner on Grand Avenue at two in the morning, both of them alone and reading, both of them ordering the same terrible coffee.

"We could go back," he said. "The diner."

"It closed. It's a vape shop now."

"That's bleak."

"It's very bleak." She stirred her oatmeal. "Here's what I actually want. I want to do nothing. I want to not go anywhere. I want you to make that lemon chicken, and I want to sit on the floor and look at the pictures from the Utah trip, and I want to go to bed early."

Marcus considered this. He'd been half-planning a reservation somewhere with cloth napkins, mostly out of a vague sense of obligation to the number seven.

"That's it? That's the whole plan?"

"That's the whole plan. Unless you want more."

"No," he said, and found that he meant it. "No, I think that's exactly right."

She smiled and reached across the table, tapping his knuckles twice — a thing she did instead of saying certain sentences.

On Saturday he made the chicken. They sat on the living room floor with the laptop and a bottle of wine, and neither of them mentioned the number once.


Nine years to the day since they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, Priya sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor while Marcus rummaged through the cabinet above the stove.

"I know we have candles," he said. "The tall ones. From Christmas."

"Those are red."

"Anniversaries can be red."

She laughed and pulled her knees up. The original plan had been dinner at the place downtown with the tasting menu, the one they'd been saying they'd try since they moved in together four years ago. Then Marcus's sister had needed the car, and the restaurant had quoted a two-hour wait, and somewhere in the negotiation they'd both admitted they didn't really want to put on hard shoes.

"What if we did the thing," Priya said.

"Which thing."

"The list. Nine things."

Marcus came down off his toes and shut the cabinet. They'd done it on their fifth anniversary, drunk on cheap prosecco, each naming five moments from the years behind them. Some had been obvious—the road trip through Utah, the night his father was in the hospital. Others had surprised them both. She'd named a Tuesday in February when he'd brought home the wrong kind of oranges and they'd eaten them anyway on the fire escape.

"Nine's a lot," he said.

"We've had a lot happen."

He found the candles eventually, in a drawer with the batteries and a phone charger for a phone neither of them owned. They ate reheated dal and rice off the good plates, at the actual table, with the overhead light off. Priya went first. Marcus interrupted her twice to correct details and once to argue that a moment she'd claimed as hers was actually his.

They made it to seven before the wax pooled and the conversation drifted somewhere else, which was, they agreed later, close enough.


The Fifth of October

Marisol found the receipt while looking for a stamp — a crumpled slip from the taco place on Wilshire, dated five years ago almost to the day.

"You kept this?" she asked, holding it up.

Dev looked over from the couch, where he was pretending to read a work email. "That was our first date. You spilled horchata on my shoe."

"You told me it was fine."

"It wasn't fine. Those were new shoes."

She sat down beside him, tucking her feet under his thigh the way she'd been doing since their second apartment, the one with the broken radiator. "So. Five years. What do we do?"

They'd never been good at this. Their third anniversary they'd both assumed the other was planning something, and ended up eating cereal at eleven at night, laughing about it in a way that felt slightly like defeat. Their fourth, Dev had booked a restaurant with tasting menus and small plates that left them hungry and eighty dollars poorer.

"I could cook," he said.

"You could burn something."

"I could burn something with great care and attention."

Marisol pulled her laptop over and opened a browser tab, then closed it. "What if we just went back? To the taco place."

Dev considered this. "It's a strip mall."

"It's our strip mall."

"There's fluorescent lighting."

"Deeply romantic."

He was quiet for a moment, and she watched his face do the thing it did when he was deciding whether to admit he liked an idea. "We could get the same thing we got. If I can remember what I ordered."

"Al pastor. Three of them. You were showing off."

"I was hungry."

"You were showing off."

They went on Saturday. The place had new tile and the same handwritten menu board. Marisol ordered horchata and held it very carefully, and Dev watched her do it, and neither of them said anything about how five years was both nothing and an enormous amount of time.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a mutual friend's disastrous housewarming party, Nadia found Owen in the kitchen with two mugs of coffee and a legal pad.

"I made a list," he said.

"Of course you did." She took the mug he slid toward her and read over his shoulder. *Dinner at Piccolo. Drive to the coast. Do nothing.*

"Do nothing is an option?"

"It's a serious option." He tapped the pen against the counter. "Last year we drove three hours to that inn and you spent the whole weekend answering emails."

"That's fair." She hopped up onto the counter, feet swinging. "But it feels like ten should be bigger than nothing."

"Bigger how?"

She thought about it. Their friends who'd married around the same time had rented a barn upstate for their anniversary, invited forty people. That wasn't it. She and Owen had never wanted the barn.

"What if we did the party again," she said. "Not the party. But Deb's old street. Get takeout from that Thai place on the corner, if it's still there."

Owen set down the pen. "It closed. There's a bank."

"God."

"But the Thai place across the alley is still there, and it was better anyway." He was smiling now, which she took as a good sign. "We could eat it on the hood of the car like idiots."

"Like the idiots we were."

"You were wearing that terrible green jacket."

"I still have that jacket."

"I know you do." He came over and stood between her knees, and she put her hands on his shoulders, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was its own kind of answer.

They went on the Saturday. The house had new siding and a basketball hoop. The Thai place had raised its prices and kept its recipes. They ate on the hood of the car, and Nadia wore the green jacket, and Owen took one photo, badly, on purpose.


Every October, Marisol circled the fourteenth on the kitchen calendar in green marker, and every October, Dev pretended not to notice until she caught him grinning at it.

Six years since the night they'd met at a friend's disastrous housewarming, where the oven caught fire and they'd ended up eating cold pizza on the fire escape.

"We could do the tasting menu place," Dev said, scrolling on his phone while Marisol repotted a spider plant at the kitchen table. Soil dusted the newspaper she'd laid down. "The one with the twelve courses."

"Twelve courses is a hostage situation."

"It got written up in the paper."

"So did the sinkhole on Delmar." She tamped the soil down with her thumbs. "Remember what we did the first year?"

He remembered. They'd had eleven dollars between them and had walked to the reservoir with a bag of grapes.

"You want to walk to the reservoir," he said.

"I want to do something we'll actually talk about later." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "The tasting menu we'd talk about for a week. Then it'd just be a receipt."

Dev put the phone face-down. This was the thing about her—she was right often enough to be annoying, and she never gloated, which was somehow worse.

"Compromise," he said. "We cook. The complicated thing from your grandmother's book, the one with the ninety steps."

"The mole?"

"The mole. And we start at noon, and we don't rush, and we put on the records."

Marisol considered this. The mole took six hours and made an unholy mess of the kitchen, and the last time they'd made it together, they'd had a genuine fight about whether to strain the sauce.

"We're straining it this time," she said.

"We are absolutely not straining it."

She smiled and pushed the spider plant toward him. "Fine. Hold this. I'll make the shopping list."


Marisol found the ticket stubs in a shoebox under the bed while looking for the good extension cord. Five years, almost to the day, since she and Dev had gone to see that terrible sci-fi movie at the Roxy and stayed up until two arguing about whether the ending made sense.

"We should do something," she said that night, holding up the stubs like evidence.

Dev looked up from the sink, hands wet. "The Roxy closed."

"I know. I checked."

They talked about it over the next week, in pieces, the way they talked about most things—while folding laundry, while waiting for the dog to finish sniffing a particular patch of grass. Dev wanted to go somewhere. Not far. He'd been reading about a lake about ninety minutes north with cabins that had woodstoves.

"In November," Marisol said.

"That's the point of the woodstove."

She wasn't sure. Five years felt like it wanted something with more ceremony, though she couldn't say what. A dinner reservation somewhere with cloth napkins. Something they could photograph. But when she imagined sitting across a small table making conversation under recessed lighting, she felt tired.

"Does the cabin have a kitchen?"

"Kitchenette. There's a picture of a two-burner stove."

"Then I want to make the mushroom thing."

Dev put down his book. "That takes four hours."

"We'll have four hours."

They left on a Friday afternoon and hit traffic outside the city, which Dev had predicted and Marisol had said he was being pessimistic about. The cabin was smaller than the photos suggested. The woodstove took forty minutes and three attempts to light, mostly because neither of them had done it before and both had opinions.

The mushroom thing came out well. They ate it late, sitting on the floor because the two chairs wobbled, and Dev said he still didn't understand the ending of that movie.

"Nobody did," Marisol said. "That was the point."


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from Pho Golden Bowl, dated seven years ago to the week.

"Hey," she called toward the living room, where Dev was untangling Christmas lights in March because he'd finally admitted the box needed sorting. "Look what survived."

He squinted at it, then laughed. "You ordered the beef and then didn't eat it."

"I was nervous. You talked about your grandmother's citrus trees for twenty minutes."

"You asked."

They stood in the kitchen a moment, the receipt between them like a small artifact. Seven years since that first dinner. Four since they'd signed the lease on the duplex with the sloping floors.

"So what do we do?" Dev asked. "Something big?"

Marisol considered. Her sister had done a whole weekend in Sonoma for her fifth anniversary — the wine tour, the inn with the claw-foot tub, the photos. It had looked exhausting.

"Honestly? I don't want to drive anywhere."

"Thank God." He set down the lights. "I was going to suggest we just go back to Golden Bowl, but I thought it was too cheap."

"It's not cheap, it's specific." She pinned the receipt to the fridge with a magnet shaped like Oregon. "Okay. Golden Bowl. And then?"

"There's that thing at the botanical garden. The night one, with the lanterns. Tuesday's our actual day."

"Tuesday's a work night."

"We're adults. We can be tired on Wednesday."

She agreed, and they wrote it on the wall calendar in Dev's cramped handwriting — *pho + lanterns* — which felt right, unceremonious, the way most of the important things in their life got recorded. Later, brushing her teeth, Marisol thought about how nobody would send them a card for this. There'd be no toast, no registry, no photographer. Just two people who'd chosen the same address for four years running and would probably choose it again.

She spat, rinsed, and went to bed, where Dev had already claimed too much of the blanket.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that terrible open-mic night in Sacramento, and Renata still hadn't decided what she wanted.

"We could do the thing where we drive to the coast," Desmond said. He was standing at the sink, scrubbing the pan from Sunday's eggs, which meant it was Tuesday and he'd been avoiding it for two days. "Bodega Bay. Get oysters. Come back Sunday."

"That's four hundred dollars we don't have."

"We have it. We just have other plans for it." He set the pan in the rack. "Which is a different sentence."

Renata pulled her feet up onto the kitchen chair. The house was small and had a specific smell she'd stopped noticing years ago, some combination of the neighbor's jasmine and the old carpet in the hallway they kept meaning to replace. Ten years. Her sister had gotten married and divorced in less time.

"What if we did nothing," she said.

Desmond turned around.

"Not nothing-nothing. I mean, what if we stayed here. You make the short ribs. We put on the record player. We don't go anywhere, we don't take pictures, we don't post anything, nobody knows about it but us."

He considered this, drying his hands on the dish towel with the faded lemons.

"That's not nothing," he said. "That's a whole production. Short ribs take five hours."

"You love a five-hour project."

"I do love a five-hour project." He came over and leaned against the counter across from her, arms folded. "Okay. But I'm getting the good wine, and I don't want to hear about the price."

"Deal."

"And I'm putting on the Alice Coltrane."

"Absolutely not."

"Ten years," he said, "and you still have no taste."

She reached over and took the dish towel out of his hands, folded it, and hung it on the oven door where it belonged.


Marisol found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for the good scissors: a diner check from seven years ago, two coffees and one slice of pie, dated March 14th.

"Devon," she called toward the kitchen. "You kept this?"

He came in wiping his hands on a dish towel and squinted at the faded paper. "That was the night your car wouldn't start. We sat there until three because you didn't want to call your mom."

"You paid for the pie."

"I had eleven dollars. It was a real financial decision."

The anniversary was Saturday. They had spent the past week floating ideas at each other in the low-stakes way people do when neither wants to be the one who cares too much. Devon had mentioned a restaurant downtown with a tasting menu and a two-month waitlist. Marisol had suggested a cabin, then remembered the dog, then remembered that boarding the dog cost more than the cabin.

"What if we just went back?" she said, holding up the receipt.

"To Wally's? It's a Denny's now."

"It is not."

"It closed in 2021. There's a vape shop."

She sat down on the arm of the couch, deflated in a way that surprised her. Seven years in the same house, the same mismatched dishes, the same argument about the thermostat, and she'd wanted one specific booth back.

Devon leaned against the doorframe, thinking. "There's that place on Fifth with the pie case in the window. Terrible coffee. Open till two."

"Terrible coffee is important."

"Essential."

So Saturday they drove there at nine at night, ordered two coffees and one slice of pie to split, and Devon put the old receipt on the table between them like a place setting. The waitress asked if they were celebrating something.

Marisol looked at Devon across the sticky laminate. "Sort of," she said. "We're just repeating ourselves."


Maya found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for a phone charger: a diner in Flagstaff, two coffees and a plate of hash browns, dated seven years ago that Saturday.

"You kept this?" she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage.

He squinted at the faded thermal paper. "That's the morning after we drove all night. You fell asleep with your head on the window and drooled on my jacket."

"I did not drool."

"You absolutely drooled."

They'd talked about the anniversary for weeks in vague terms — *we should do something* — without landing anywhere. Desmond had floated a nice dinner downtown, the kind of place with a wine list and a valet. Maya had made a face she wasn't proud of. Money was tight since her hours got cut, and she didn't want to spend two hundred dollars pretending to enjoy foam on a plate.

"What if we cooked," she said now, still holding the receipt. "Hash browns. Terrible coffee. Do it right."

Desmond leaned against the doorframe, considering. "That's kind of sad, though. That's a Tuesday."

"Okay, fair."

They compromised the way they usually did, which was to keep talking until something better appeared. Desmond suggested driving out to the state park, the one with the reservoir, and taking the good cooler. Maya added the camp stove, so they could actually make the potatoes there. They'd bring the bad instant coffee on purpose. He wanted to leave at six in the morning; she negotiated him to seven-thirty.

On Saturday the light came sideways through the pines and the potatoes stuck to the pan. Desmond scraped at them with a spatula, swearing cheerfully. Maya poured coffee into two mismatched mugs from the kitchen and handed him one.

"Seven years," she said.

He tapped his mug against hers. "Still not married."

"Still not drooling, either."

"Sure," he said.


On the third of October, Delia found the receipt tucked in the junk drawer beneath a dead battery and a rubber band ball. Six years ago, that receipt. Two coffees and a scone at the place on Ludlow that had since become a vape shop.

"Look what I found," she said, holding it up when Marcus came in from the garage, smelling like sawdust.

He squinted. "Is that from the first date?"

"You kept it?"

"I kept everything for a while. Then I got over it." He took the paper carefully, the way he handled anything old. "We should do something."

They had, over the years, developed opinions about anniversaries. Marcus liked plans. Delia liked plans to be ruined. Two years ago they'd booked a hotel two hours north and spent the whole weekend arguing about the thermostat, then laughing about arguing about the thermostat.

"Not a restaurant," Delia said. "Everyone does a restaurant."

"We could cook."

"We cook every night."

"We reheat every night. There's a difference." He leaned against the counter. "Okay. What about this. We drive to Ludlow, we get coffee at whatever's there now—"

"It's a vape shop."

"—we get coffee somewhere near the vape shop, we look at the vape shop, and then we do whatever you want."

She considered it. "That's stupid."

"It's a little stupid."

"I like it."

They went on a Saturday. The vape shop had become a nail salon, which felt like a betrayal of the bit, but they stood outside anyway and Marcus took a photo of Delia pointing at the window. Afterward they walked eleven blocks with no destination and ended up buying a wall clock at an estate sale because Delia said the numbers looked friendly.

That night, at home, Marcus hung it in the hallway. Delia watched from the doorway with the receipt back in her hand, deciding where to put it so she'd find it again.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries: a diner in Sacramento, seven years ago almost to the day, $14.82 for two coffees and a shared plate of fries. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"Look," she said, holding it up when Owen came in from the garage with grease on his knuckles.

He squinted, then laughed. "You told me you weren't hungry and then ate all my fries."

"I was nervous."

They'd been talking around the anniversary for a week. Owen had floated a weekend in Mendocino, which Marisol wanted but couldn't stop calculating against the water heater that was making noises. Marisol had suggested dinner at the place with the tasting menu, which Owen was game for until he looked up the price and made a sound like a punctured tire.

"What if we didn't do a thing," he said now, wiping his hands on a rag. "What if we just went back to the diner."

"It's two hours away."

"So we leave at eight, we're there by ten. Coffee and fries. Then we drive home."

Marisol thought about it. It was absurd, and it was cheap, and it was exactly the kind of plan Owen made — the kind that seemed like nothing until you were inside it.

"I want to bring a camera," she said. "Not my phone. The actual one."

"Fine. But I'm picking the music."

They left Saturday morning with a thermos anyway, because Owen couldn't be trusted to wait two hours for caffeine. The diner had new booths and the same fluorescent hum. Marisol ordered for both of them without asking, and Owen let her, and the fries came out too salty, the way they had before.

She took his picture across the table. He was mid-sentence, gesturing, unaware.

On the drive home he said, quietly, "Same time next year?"

"Obviously," she said, and put her feet on the dashboard.


Ten years to the day since they'd met in the checkout line at a hardware store, arguing over the last box of drywall screws.

Marisol found the anniversary written on the kitchen calendar in Dev's cramped handwriting, circled twice. She'd forgotten. Not the anniversary itself—she thought about it often, the way you think about the foundation under a house—but the specific date had slipped somewhere between a deadline and her mother's hip surgery.

"We should do something," she said that evening, leaning against the doorframe of the room they still called the office even though it held mostly bicycles.

Dev looked up from a tangle of derailleur cable. "I made a reservation at Ferraro's."

"You did?"

"Three weeks ago." He wiped his hands on a rag. "But I'll cancel it if you want. I keep thinking about that, honestly. Whether Ferraro's is what we actually want or just what people do."

Marisol sat down on the arm of the couch, which he hated, and he didn't say anything about it, which was its own kind of anniversary.

"What do you actually want?" she asked.

"I want to drive out to the reservoir and eat sandwiches on the hood of the car. Like when we were broke."

"We're still sort of broke."

"Comparatively broke."

She laughed. "That's it? Sandwiches?"

"And I want to look at that listing again. The blue house on Ridgeway." He said it carefully, the way he said things he'd rehearsed. "Not to buy it tomorrow. Just to look."

Marisol was quiet for a moment. Ten years of leases, of her name second on the utilities, of neither of them asking for the thing that would make it official in the eyes of anyone but themselves.

"Okay," she said. "Sandwiches, the reservoir, and the blue house."

Dev nodded and went back to the cable, but she saw him smiling at it.

They kept the reservation too. Marisol called and moved it to Sunday.


Marisol found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. Ten years ago, almost to the day: two tickets to a matinee neither of them remembered liking, and a diner breakfast afterward that cost eleven dollars total.

"We should do something," she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage with sawdust on his forearms.

He squinted at the faded ink. "Ten years is china, I think. Or tin. I never know which ones are real and which ones the card companies made up."

"We're not married, so probably neither applies."

"Then we can pick." He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, taking his time. "I vote for something that isn't a restaurant where the waiter explains the concept of the menu to us."

They had done that on year seven, at a place in Portland, and had spent the drive home agreeing it was a mistake.

Marisol suggested the coast, but October rates were still high, and the water heater was making a sound they'd been ignoring for a month. Desmond suggested a party, then withdrew it before she could answer, because he knew she'd say yes out of generosity and then dread it for three weeks.

What they settled on, sitting on the back steps with the last of the sun on the fence, was this: they would drive to the old diner if it still existed, order whatever eleven dollars bought now, and then go to whatever was playing at one o'clock, no matter what it was. Then home, and Desmond would make the pasta with too much garlic, and they would not answer the phone.

"That's it?" he said. "That's the ten-year plan?"

"It's what we actually like," Marisol said.

He considered that, then leaned back against the doorframe. "Okay," he said. "I'll call about the water heater Monday."


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that miserable office holiday party, and Dana still couldn't decide what she wanted.

"We could just stay in," Marcus said from the kitchen doorway, dish towel over his shoulder. "Order from the Thai place. Watch something terrible."

"That's every Friday."

"Every Friday is pretty good."

She laughed, but she was already opening her laptop, pulling up the website for the inn upstate where they'd gone the first year they lived together, back when the apartment had a broken radiator and they'd needed somewhere warm. "It's booked," she said after a minute. "Of course it's booked. It's October."

Marcus came and sat on the arm of the couch, looking over her shoulder at the photographs of white clapboard and yellow maples. "We could go in November."

"That's not the anniversary."

"Dana." He said her name the way he did when he thought she was being ridiculous but liked her anyway. "Ten years. We're not going to get it wrong by four weeks."

She closed the laptop. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what I want. I want to make the lasagna. The one from your mother's card, the one that takes four hours."

"That's what you want."

"I want to make it together, and I want to eat it late, and I want you to tell me the story about the holiday party again, the version where you were smooth about it."

"I was extremely smooth."

"You spilled wine on my shoe."

"I was making an impression."

She reached up and caught his hand. "And in November we go upstate. Book it now, before someone else does."

He did, on his phone, right there, reading the confirmation number aloud like it was a small vow. Then he went back to the kitchen, and she followed, and they started looking for the recipe card, which was somewhere in the drawer with the batteries and the take-out menus, where everything important ended up.


Marisol found the calendar note first, though she'd known the date for weeks. Five years since the night they'd met at Deion's terrible housewarming party, both of them hiding in the kitchen from the karaoke.

"So," she said, leaning in the bathroom doorway while Theo shaved. "Saturday."

"I know." He rinsed the razor. "I was thinking that place with the tasting menu. The one your sister keeps posting about."

Marisol made a face. "Twelve courses of foam. We'd spend two hundred dollars and leave hungry."

"Okay." He turned, half his jaw still lathered. "What do you want?"

That was the question that always stumped her. Five years, and she still felt strange asking for things outright.

"Honestly?" she said. "I want to not leave the house. I want to make that ridiculous lasagna from the Times, the one with the sixteen steps, and I want you to be my sous chef and not take over."

"I don't take over."

"You reorganized my mise en place last time."

"It was chaos."

"It was my chaos."

They ended up going to the Vietnamese grocery on Saturday morning, which wasn't part of the plan at all, but Theo wanted the good herbs for something else, and then they got distracted by a bin of jackfruit and stood arguing about whether they could finish one.

The lasagna took four hours. Marisol handled the béchamel; Theo, exiled to vegetable duty, sliced eggplant with the grim precision of a man proving a point. Around hour three they gave up and ate cheese and crackers standing at the counter, and Theo put on the playlist from their first road trip, and Marisol laughed at how much they'd both loved a band they now agreed was unlistenable.

They ate at eleven. It was too salty. Neither of them cared.

"Next year," Theo said, "we do the foam."

"Next year," Marisol agreed, "we absolutely do not."


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from Tung Hoy Palace, dated seven years ago that November. She brought it to the kitchen, where Dev was scrubbing the burnt bottom of a saucepan.

"Do you remember what we ordered?"

He squinted at it. "You got the salt-and-pepper tofu. I got something with too much star anise and pretended to like it."

"You said it was 'complex.'"

"It was complex. Complexly bad."

They had never made a ceremony of the date. Their friends who married had photographers and toasts; Marisol and Dev had a lease, a shared savings account labeled ROOF/FURNACE/DOOM, and a cat who had bitten both of them equally. Seven years felt like it warranted something, though neither could say what.

"We could go back there," Dev said.

"It closed. Became a vape shop, then a place that sells stand mixers."

He set the pan down. "Then we cook it ourselves. Whatever we can remember."

So on the Saturday, they went to the Asian market on Rowan Street and argued about which brand of doubanjiang, and Dev bought star anise out of spite. Marisol pressed the tofu under a stack of library books. The kitchen filled with smoke; they opened the windows and put on sweaters. The cat sat on the windowsill judging them.

The tofu came out fine — better than fine, crisp at the edges, too much white pepper. Dev's dish was, again, complexly bad. They ate it anyway, at the table with the wobbly leg, plates on top of the mail.

"Should we do something bigger?" Marisol asked. "Number eight. Take a trip somewhere."

Dev thought about it, chewing. "We could. Or we could get the furnace looked at and then do this again."

She lifted her water glass. He tapped his against it. Outside, the first real cold of the season pressed against the glass, and neither of them moved to get up.


Marcus found the calendar note first, though he pretended he hadn't. Seven years since the Tuesday they'd met at a friend's barbecue in Rochester, where he'd spilled potato salad on her sandal and she'd laughed instead of leaving.

"So," Priya said, folding laundry on the couch that Saturday morning. "Next week."

"I know what next week is."

"Do you, though." She held up one of his socks, hole in the heel, and gave him a look before setting it in the pile she'd mend later, because she was the kind of person who mended socks.

They'd done the big thing on year five — a rented cabin in the Adirondacks, hot tub, too much wine, a bill they'd felt for two months afterward. This year the water heater had died in March and Priya's mother had needed a plane ticket to Ahmedabad in June, and neither of them said the word *money*, but it sat there between them like a third roommate.

"What if we didn't go out," Marcus said.

Priya raised an eyebrow. "That's your pitch?"

"Hear me out. We make the thing you made the first time I came over. The dal with the burnt garlic."

"It was not supposed to be burnt."

"It was perfect burnt." He shrugged. "And I'll get the good bread from Fiorella's. And we put the phones in the drawer."

She considered this, still folding. "The whole night?"

"The whole night."

"Okay," she said. "But I want a cake. Not a homemade cake. A bakery cake, with the plastic ribbon and everything."

"Deal."

They shook on it, ridiculously, over a pile of towels. Then she went back to matching socks and he went to find the bakery's number, and the apartment settled around them, warm and unremarkable, in the way that seven years makes a place.


Maya noticed the date first, on a Tuesday morning while scrolling through her phone at the kitchen counter. Five years since the night they'd met at Dev's cousin's housewarming party in Sacramento, where she'd spilled red wine on his shoes and he'd insisted it was an improvement.

"Saturday's the anniversary," she said.

Dev looked up from the dishwasher he was unloading, a stack of bowls balanced against his chest. "The party one? Or the moving-in one?"

"Party one. Five years."

He set the bowls down. "That's a real number."

They'd let it slide the last two years—once because of her sister's wedding, once because Dev had been in Phoenix for work. This felt different. Five years meant something, even if neither of them could articulate exactly what.

Maya wanted to go back to the Italian place in Midtown, the one with the pressed tin ceiling where they'd gone on their second date. Dev pointed out, gently, that it had closed during the pandemic and reopened as a poke restaurant.

"Then somewhere new," she said. "Somewhere we've never been."

"Or," Dev said, "we do nothing."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Not nothing. I mean we stay home. I'll make the lamb thing. We put the phones in the drawer. No reservation, no traffic, no valet parking that costs more than the appetizer."

Maya considered it. She'd been picturing something with more ceremony—a photograph worth posting, a story to tell her mother. But she thought about their apartment on a Saturday evening, the good light that came through the west windows around seven, the way Dev sang badly while he cooked.

"The lamb thing," she agreed. "And I'm buying an actual cake. Not a grocery store cake. A bakery cake."

"Obviously a bakery cake."

They didn't talk about what came after five years. Not yet. But Maya wrote it on the calendar in pen, which felt like its own small declaration.


The Fifth of October

Dana found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from Marchetti's, dated October 5th, five years ago. She held it up when Rafael came in from the garage.

"You kept this?"

"I kept everything from that year," he said, not looking embarrassed about it. "There's a movie ticket in there somewhere too."

The anniversary was Saturday. They'd been circling the topic for a week, neither wanting to be the one who cared too much.

"We could go back to Marchetti's," Dana offered.

Rafael made a face. "It's forty dollars for pasta now. And the guy who used to seat us moved to Tucson."

"So what, then?"

He leaned against the counter, thinking. Outside, their neighbor's dog was barking at the recycling bins again. "What if we did nothing? Like, actually nothing. No reservations, no plans. We stay home, I make that thing with the peppers, we watch the whole Godfather trilogy."

"Even the third one?"

"Especially the third one. It's underrated."

"It is not underrated."

But she was already warming to it. Five years in this house—the one with the water stain shaped like Florida on the bedroom ceiling, the one they'd almost not been able to afford. It seemed right to spend the day inside it.

"I want one thing," Dana said. "I want to sit on the back steps with coffee in the morning. Just for a while. Like we used to before you got the early shift."

"That's easy."

"And I'm buying a cake."

"From the good bakery?"

"From the grocery store. The one with too much frosting."

Rafael laughed. "God, yes."

Saturday came gray and cool. They sat on the steps until the coffee went cold, not saying much. Later there were peppers, and a sheet cake with blue roses, and Michael Corleone dying alone in a courtyard while Dana fell asleep against Rafael's shoulder.


Miriam found the receipt in a coat pocket while looking for her chapstick: a diner in Barstow, five years ago almost to the day, $18.40 for two breakfasts and a coffee she'd spilled on the vinyl seat.

She brought it into the kitchen where Dev was chopping onions badly, the way he always did, in uneven chunks he insisted were "rustic."

"Look," she said.

He wiped his eyes with his forearm and squinted. "That's the place with the cowboy mural."

"It was a horse."

"It was a cowboy on a horse."

They'd been arguing about the mural for five years. Neither had a photograph.

The anniversary was Thursday. Miriam had assumed they'd do what they usually did—order Thai from the place on Chestnut, watch something, fall asleep before the ending. Dev had assumed the same thing, though he'd been quietly thinking about the wine bar downtown, the one with the little cheese boards, whether it was too much or not enough.

"We could drive back," Miriam said. "It's four hours."

"To Barstow."

"To the diner. Settle it."

Dev put down the knife. He thought about the drive, the flat brown stretch of the 15, the way she always fell asleep around Victorville and woke up insisting she hadn't. He thought about how they'd been living in this house for two years now and had never gone anywhere on purpose, only for weddings and funerals.

"We'd have to leave early," he said. "It's a Thursday."

"You have Thursdays off."

"You don't."

"I have three sick days I'm never going to use."

He picked the knife back up, then set it down again. "Okay," he said. "But if it's a horse, you're buying breakfast."

"It's a cowboy on a horse."

"That's not what you said."

She took the receipt back and put it on the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like Wyoming.


The Fifth of October

Renée found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from Marchetti's, dated October 5th, five years ago. Sixty-two dollars for two plates of gnocchi and a bottle of wine neither of them could pronounce.

"Look at this," she said, holding it up as Dev came in from the garage, hands still smelling of bike grease.

He squinted, then laughed. "You kept that?"

"I keep everything. You know this about me."

They'd talked about the anniversary for weeks in fragments—between shifts, over dishes, in the ninety seconds before sleep. Dev wanted to drive up to the cabin his cousin rented out, three hours north, where the maples would be turning. Renée had done the math on gas and the missed Saturday at the salon, where October was her busiest month.

"We could just do Marchetti's again," she offered.

"That feels like a rerun."

"Reruns are underrated."

He leaned against the counter, considering. In five years they'd gone from a sublet with a broken radiator to this house, a rental with a yard they'd slowly filled—tomato cages, a bird feeder Dev built badly, the fire pit they'd bought on clearance in February and used exactly twice.

"What if we stayed here," he said. "Cook something ambitious. Use the fire pit. I'll get the wood."

Renée thought about it. No driving. No reservation at seven-fifteen with a table by the kitchen door. Just the yard, and the maple in the neighbor's lot that dropped leaves over their fence every year like it owed them something.

"Ambitious how?"

"That mushroom thing you saw. The one with the twelve steps."

"Fourteen steps."

"I'll do half of them."

"You'll do four and open the wine."

"I'll open very good wine," he said.

She put the receipt back in the drawer, in the front, where she'd find it again.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, and Nadia still couldn't decide what to do about it.

"We could just stay in," Marcus said, leaning against the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder. "Order from that Thai place. Watch something dumb."

"That's what we do every Friday."

"Yeah, but we'd be doing it *commemoratively*."

She threw a dish sponge at him. He caught it, mostly.

The trouble was that neither of them liked fuss, but ten years felt like it deserved something. They'd built a life in this narrow rowhouse in Baltimore—replaced the water heater together, argued about paint colors, buried a cat in the back garden. Nadia had a drawer in her nightstand with a photo of them from that housewarming, both looking younger and slightly sunburned.

"What about the mountains?" she said. "That cabin place your sister used."

Marcus made a face. "Booked out through November. I checked in September."

"You checked in September?"

"I think about things," he said, wounded.

They ended up compromising, the way they usually did—not splitting the difference so much as finding a third thing neither had considered. Marcus remembered the diner off Route 40 where they'd gone after that party, three in the morning, eating pancakes and discovering they both hated the same movie. It was still there, somehow. Still open twenty-four hours.

So on the actual night they drove out at eleven, arrived close to midnight, and sat in a vinyl booth under fluorescent lights that made everyone look slightly ill. Nadia ordered the pancakes. Marcus got eggs, then ate half her pancakes anyway.

"Ten years," she said.

"Ten years." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, a thing he did when he was working up to something. "You ever think about—"

"Sometimes," she said. "Not tonight, though."

He nodded, and reached across the table, and stole the last bite.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, and Marisol still couldn't decide what she wanted.

"We could do the tasting menu place," Dev said, scrolling on his phone at the kitchen island. "The one your sister keeps talking about. Reservations open at nine."

"It's two hundred a person before wine."

"It's ten years."

Marisol turned the coffee grinder on, mostly to buy herself thirty seconds. When it stopped, she said, "I keep thinking about the drive we took. When we moved out here and the U-Haul broke down outside Barstow."

"That was miserable."

"It was," she agreed. "But we got that motel room with the broken AC and ate gas station burritos on the bed and watched that documentary about the guy who built the sculpture out of bottle caps. And I remember thinking, oh. This is going to be fine. Whatever happens."

Dev set the phone face-down. He had a way of doing that when he was actually listening, a small courtesy she'd noticed maybe four years in and never mentioned.

"So you want gas station burritos."

"I want us to go somewhere neither of us has been. Even if it's stupid. Even if it's the county with the weird cheese festival."

"The cheese festival is in October."

"You know what I mean."

He got up and refilled her mug without being asked, which was its own kind of argument, or its own kind of agreement. "There's that state park past Alpine," he said. "The one with the fire lookout you can rent. It sleeps two. I looked at it once, like, three years ago, and then didn't say anything because I assumed you'd hate it."

Marisol laughed. "I might hate it."

"That's the risk."

"Book it," she said. "And we'll get burritos on the way."

He picked the phone back up.


Ten years to the day since they'd first met at a mutual friend's barbecue in Ann Arbor, and Priya still hadn't decided what she wanted.

"We could do Bellamy's," Marcus offered from the kitchen doorway, dish towel over his shoulder. "I'd have to call now, though. They book out."

Priya looked up from the laptop where she'd been half-heartedly scrolling restaurant reviews. "Every year we do a nice dinner. And every year we spend the whole meal talking about whether the food was worth it."

"That's a fair assessment of our behavior."

She closed the laptop. Outside, the maple in the side yard had gone orange almost overnight, the way it did every October, and she'd barely registered it until now.

"What if we drove up to the lake?" she said. "The little place with the cabins. It's off-season, so it'd be empty."

Marcus considered this. He'd been the one pushing for a reservation, mostly because reservations were legible—you made them, you kept them, the anniversary was properly observed. But he also remembered the cabin trip four years ago, the woodstove that smoked, the way they'd played gin rummy until two in the morning because there was nothing else to do.

"We'd have to leave Friday," he said. "I'd need to move the Kowalski call."

"Can you?"

"Probably. Yeah." He folded the towel and set it on the counter. "You want to cook up there, or bring stuff?"

"Bring stuff. I'm not driving three hours to stand in a kitchen."

"Deal." He sat down across from her at the table. "Ten years."

"Ten years," she agreed. "We should probably do something about the guest room before your mother visits."

"Not tonight."

"No," Priya said. "Not tonight."

She opened the laptop again, this time to find the number for the cabins, and Marcus went to check whether the cooler was still in the garage.


Ten years ago, Dana had shown up at Marcus's apartment with a box of records and a rice cooker, and neither of them had ever gotten around to discussing whether she was moving in. It had simply happened, the way weather happens.

Now they lived in a rented bungalow outside Portland with a persistent draft in the back bedroom, and the tenth anniversary of that non-conversation was three weeks away.

"We should do something," Marcus said, standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder. "Something that isn't takeout."

Dana was on the floor with the cat, working a mat out of his fur. "Define something."

"I don't know. My sister keeps saying we should go to the coast."

"Your sister thinks a weekend in Cannon Beach solves everything."

"It solves some things."

She sat back on her heels. "What about the Chinese place on Belmont? The one that closed."

"It closed."

"I know. But there's that new place in the same building. We could go and be nostalgic and complain about how it used to be better."

Marcus laughed. "That's genuinely the most us idea I've ever heard."

"I'm full of them."

They talked it through over the next week, in fragments—while brushing teeth, while driving to the hardware store. Dana wanted something small. Marcus wanted something he could describe to people afterward. They compromised: dinner at the new place, then a night in a hotel downtown, the kind with a bathtub and a view of the river, because neither of them had ever stayed in one in their own city.

"It's stupid to pay for a room ten minutes from our house," Dana said, booking it anyway.

"Completely stupid," Marcus agreed.

On the night, the food was mediocre. They ate it happily, arguing about whether the old owners had used more garlic, and walked to the hotel through a light, ordinary rain.


The rain had been coming down since Thursday, which was how Marisol and Dev ended up on the living room floor with a legal pad between them, arguing pleasantly about their tenth anniversary.

"Ten years since what, exactly," Dev said. He was lying on his back with his knees up, the way he did when he was thinking. "Ten years since the wedding we didn't have?"

"Ten years since you gave me your umbrella outside the Kroger and then walked six blocks in the rain like an idiot."

"I had a hood."

"You did not have a hood. I watched you the whole way."

He laughed. Outside, a car went by slowly, tires hissing. The house they'd bought together four years ago made its small settling noises, the radiator ticking in the hall.

Marisol wrote *Options* at the top of the pad and underlined it twice. She proposed the coast — a rental in Gualala, three nights, the kind of place with a wood stove and no cell service. Dev pointed out they'd both taken time off in March for his mother's surgery and the vacation days were thin.

"Then dinner somewhere absurd," she said. "Somewhere with tweezers involved."

"Or." He sat up. "Or we do the thing where we drive to the Kroger."

She looked at him.

"It's still there. We get a rotisserie chicken and those little potatoes you like and we eat in the car in the parking lot. And then we come home and watch something terrible."

Marisol considered this. She was a person who liked plans, and she recognized, dimly, that she was being handed one that would cost eleven dollars.

"I want a pie too," she said.

"Obviously a pie."

She crossed out everything on the legal pad and wrote *Kroger, 7 p.m.* Dev leaned over and looked at it for a while, then kissed the side of her head and went to find his shoes.


The morning of their seventh anniversary, Naomi found Dev already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with two mugs of coffee and a legal pad.

"You made a list," she said.

"I made three lists." He turned the pad toward her. Option A: the tasting menu place downtown, the one they'd walked past a hundred times. Option B: driving out to the lake where they'd spent a weekend the first summer, before the lease, before the dog, before Dev's mother's illness and the eight months Naomi slept on a hospital cot beside her. Option C was blank.

"What's C?"

"C is whatever you want. I left it open on purpose."

Naomi sat down and pulled the pad closer. She'd been thinking about it too, though she hadn't written anything down. Seven years felt like it deserved something, but she wasn't sure the something was a restaurant. Her sister had gotten married the year before and the whole family had spent a week talking about napkin colors, and Naomi had come home from the wedding exhausted and grateful for the ordinariness of her own life with Dev — the dishwasher that had to be run twice, the dog's vet appointments, the way he read out loud from the news while she made breakfast.

"C," she said. "But specifically: we stay here. We cook the thing we made the first night we lived in this house."

"The disaster risotto."

"The disaster risotto. And we finally hang the photos."

Dev laughed. There was a box of framed pictures in the hall closet that had been waiting fourteen months for a decision about the living room wall.

"That's not romantic," he said.

"It's completely romantic. You just don't know it yet."

They spent the afternoon with a level and a pencil, arguing about spacing. The risotto came out better than the first time. Not perfect. Better.


The morning of their seventh anniversary, Dana found Marisol already awake, cross-legged on the living room floor with a legal pad balanced on her knee.

"Options," Marisol announced. "I've made a list."

Dana sat down beside her, still in the T-shirt she'd slept in. The list had three items: *Nice dinner (the Portuguese place?), Drive up to the lake, Do absolutely nothing.*

"Absolutely nothing is tempting," Dana said.

"I put it there for honesty."

The Portuguese place would require a reservation they hadn't made, and the lake was two hours each way, and it was already nine-thirty. Dana pointed this out gently, the way she'd learned to over seven years — not as a refusal, just as arithmetic.

Marisol tapped her pen against the pad. "What did we do the first year? I genuinely can't remember."

"We ate at that terrible sushi place on Chestnut and you got food poisoning."

"That was the *second* year." Marisol laughed. "The first year we were still pretending we didn't live together, remember? You still had the apartment with the leaky radiator."

"I paid rent on that place for eight months without sleeping there once."

They ended up walking to the diner four blocks away, the one with the vinyl booths and the coffee that tasted faintly of the pot it had been sitting in. Marisol ordered pancakes. Dana ordered eggs and stole three bites of the pancakes.

Afterward they took the long way home, past the community garden where the tomatoes were coming in, and Marisol said, apropos of nothing, "I think I want a real party for ten. Something with a cake."

"Three years to plan it," Dana said.

"I'll start the list tonight."

At home they put on a record and Marisol fell asleep on the couch with her feet in Dana's lap, and Dana let her, and read, and it was, she thought, a fairly good way to mark a thing.


Marguerite found the receipt in a coat pocket, faded to near-illegibility: a diner in Nebraska, two coffees and a slice of pie, dated eleven years ago that Saturday.

"We should do something," she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage with grease on his knuckles.

He squinted. "Is that from the Bluebird? The one with the waitress who called us both 'hon' about forty times?"

"Forty-two. I counted."

They had never married, a decision that stopped requiring explanation somewhere around year six, when both their mothers gave up asking. But they kept the anniversary of that road trip, the week they'd loaded a hatchback and driven west with no particular plan, because it was the first time either of them had thought of the other as permanent.

Desmond wanted to go back. "Two days' drive. We could leave Friday, be there Saturday night."

"With Bea's recital Sunday?" Marguerite meant his niece, who had been practicing the same four measures of Debussy for a month. "You'd never forgive yourself."

He conceded that. They sat at the kitchen table and negotiated, which was how most of their decisions got made — not romantically, but with the patience of two people who had learned each other's stubbornness.

What they settled on was smaller. Saturday morning Desmond made coffee too strong, the way the Bluebird had, and Marguerite baked a sour cherry pie that came out slightly burnt at the edges. They ate it at eight in the morning on the back steps, still in pajamas, the dog nosing hopefully at their ankles.

"Hon," Desmond said, passing her the mug.

"Hon," she agreed.

Later they drove nowhere in particular for an hour, windows down, the radio finding and losing stations. It was not Nebraska. It was, they both privately decided, enough.


Marisol found the receipt tucked in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries — a faded slip from Tortilla Flats, dated seven years ago that week. She brought it into the living room where Dev was untangling the lamp cord.

"Look," she said. "Our first date. You paid eleven dollars for chips and salsa."

"I paid eleven dollars for the privilege of watching you eat all of them," he said, taking the receipt. He held it up to the window light like it might be worth something.

They'd talked vaguely about doing something for the anniversary. Dev wanted to drive up to the cabins on the lake, but the cabins were booked and the drive was four hours each way, and Marisol had a deposition Monday morning she couldn't move.

"We could just go back to Tortilla Flats," she said.

"It closed. There's a vape shop there now."

She sat on the arm of the couch. Outside, a neighbor's dog was losing its mind at a delivery truck. "Okay. What if we cook the thing you made me the first time you cooked for me?"

Dev thought about it. "The chicken that was still frozen in the middle?"

"You've improved."

He laughed. They ended up at the Korean market on Grand, arguing pleasantly about whether the recipe had included scallions. At home Marisol chopped and Dev handled the pan, and they ate at the kitchen table instead of the couch, which felt like effort, which felt right. He'd bought a bottle of wine that cost more than the original date.

Later, doing dishes, Marisol said, "Seven years."

"Seven years." Dev handed her a plate to dry. "You want to do something bigger next year? Ten's coming."

"Ask me in three years."

"That's not a no."

"It's not," she agreed, and put the plate away.


Marcus noticed the date first, circling it mentally while pouring coffee on a Tuesday morning. Five years since Dani had shown up at his apartment with two duffel bags and a rice cooker, saying she'd figure out the rest later.

"So," he said, when she came into the kitchen with her hair still wet. "Sunday."

"I know." She took the mug he handed her. "I've been thinking about it."

They'd never landed on a good tradition. Their first anniversary of living together, they'd gone to a restaurant that turned out to be too loud and too expensive, and they'd eaten cereal at midnight afterward. The second year, Dani had food poisoning. The third and fourth had passed with a card and a good bottle of wine, which was fine, but Marcus had started to feel like fine wasn't enough for five.

"I could get us a hotel downtown," he offered. "That place with the rooftop."

Dani made a face. "That's four hundred dollars to sleep in a different bed."

"It's supposed to be romantic."

"It's supposed to be expensive." She sat on the counter, feet swinging. "What if we did the drive?"

He knew immediately which drive she meant. The route out to the coast they'd taken when she first moved in, stopping at every terrible roadside attraction between here and the water. The world's second-largest ball of twine. A gas station that sold homemade jerky and airbrushed t-shirts.

"That's six hours round trip," he said.

"So we leave early." She was already grinning. "I'll make the sandwiches. You make the playlist, but no ska this time."

"One ska song."

"None."

"Half of one."

She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it, and he was already thinking about which exit had the good jerky, and whether the twine place was still open.


The apartment smelled like burnt garlic when Dana got home, which meant Marcus had started dinner without her again.

"Ten years," he said, not looking up from the pan. "You realize that's a decade."

"I can do math." She set her bag on the counter and peered over his shoulder. "You scorched it."

"I salvaged it. There's a difference."

They'd been debating for two weeks. Marcus wanted to go back to the Italian place in Providence where they'd had their first real fight—the one about whether she'd move in with him—and then made up in the parking lot. Dana thought that was maudlin. She wanted to drive up to Vermont, stay somewhere with a fireplace, not answer their phones.

"Vermont's four hours," Marcus said, sliding the pasta into bowls. "Four hours each way for two nights."

"That's the point. It's far."

They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a repository for tax documents neither of them wanted to file. Dana pulled her feet under her on the couch.

"What if we didn't leave?" Marcus said after a while.

She looked at him.

"I mean it. We take Friday off. Both of us. We sleep in, we get the good bagels, we walk down by the water. We cook something ambitious and probably ruin it. We don't do anything." He shrugged. "Ten years of this place. Seems weird to celebrate it somewhere else."

Dana considered. Their apartment had a radiator that clanked and a bathroom door that didn't quite close. It was where his father had died and where she'd gotten the call about the job. It was where they'd decided, silently and repeatedly, not to get married—not out of doubt, but because it had never seemed necessary.

"The good bagels," she said. "Not the ones on Sixth."

"Obviously not the ones on Sixth."

She put her feet in his lap. "Okay."


Every year Priya insisted the anniversary date was March 12th, and every year Dev insisted it was March 14th. The disagreement had become its own tradition, older now than the argument that started it — something about whether the first date counted as the night they met at the loading dock behind the theater, or the following Saturday when he'd actually asked her out.

"Ten years," Priya said, standing in the kitchen doorway with her laptop balanced on one forearm. "That's a real number. We should do something."

Dev was scraping burnt rice off the bottom of a pot. "Define something."

"I don't know. Vermont? Everyone goes to Vermont."

"In March? It'll be mud season." He set the pot down. "What about the thing you keep almost booking. The pottery class."

She made a face. "That was a joke."

"It was three separate joke browser tabs."

They ended up compromising, which was how most decisions got made in the house on Fenwick Street. Priya booked the pottery studio for the twelfth. Dev made reservations at the Ethiopian place on Warren for the fourteenth, the one they'd gone to when they were both broke and had split a single combination plate.

The pottery was a disaster. Priya's bowl collapsed twice. Dev, who claimed no artistic ability whatsoever, produced something the instructor called "genuinely lopsided in an interesting way." He gave it to her in the parking lot, still wet, and she carried it home in a shoebox.

At dinner two nights later, Dev said, "So we're just never resolving the date thing."

"Why would we." Priya tore off a piece of injera. "It gets us two anniversaries."

"That's twice the pressure."

"That's twice the dinner." She reached across the table and took his hand, briefly, the way she had a thousand times. "Ten years."

"Ten years," he agreed, and let her steal the last of the lentils.


The Fifth of October

Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from a taqueria in Sacramento, dated five years ago almost to the day.

"You kept this?" she called toward the living room.

Dev appeared in the doorway, dish towel over his shoulder. "That was our first date. You ordered wrong and I let you eat half my burrito."

"I ordered correctly. You just have bad taste in salsa." She turned the receipt over. "Sunday's the fifth."

They'd talked around it for a week. Their friends Tomás and June had gotten engaged over Labor Day, and the question had been hovering in their apartment ever since like a smoke detector chirping in another room.

"I don't want a whole thing," Dev said, sitting down at the kitchen table. "Not that I don't want to celebrate. I just don't want to do the reservation-and-nice-shirt version."

Marisol pulled out the chair across from him. "Good. Because I already looked and everywhere decent is booked."

He laughed. "So what, then?"

She thought about it. They both worked Saturdays now—she at the clinic, he at the shop he'd taken over from his uncle. Sunday was the only day the apartment was quiet.

"We could drive up to Sacramento," she said. "Get the burritos. It's two hours."

"Four hours round trip for burritos."

"For the burritos where we met." She shrugged. "Or we stay here and I make the mole. The one that takes all day."

Dev considered this. "Both. We drive up, we get the burritos, we come back and you start the mole and we eat it at ten at night like animals."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's a great plan."

She was already writing the grocery list on the back of the receipt. He watched her hand move and didn't say anything about rings, and she didn't either, and that was fine.


The Fifteenth of October

Every October, Dana pretended she'd forgotten the date, and every October, Marcus pretended to believe her.

This year she came home from the clinic to find him at the kitchen table with a spiral notebook, the kind he used for grocery lists and half-finished poems he never showed anyone.

"Twelve years," he said. "I made a list."

She dropped her bag by the door and read over his shoulder. *Dinner at Nomi's. Drive to the coast. Ferris wheel? Do nothing.*

"Ferris wheel has a question mark."

"Ferris wheel is a bad idea. I put it down because it sounded romantic, then I remembered you get sick on the swings at the park."

She pulled out the chair beside him. The radiator ticked. Outside, someone's leaf blower whined against the afternoon.

"Nomi's is eighty dollars a person now," she said.

"I know. I looked."

"And the coast is four hours and the forecast is rain."

"I know that too." He tapped the last line with his pen. "Which leaves us."

Dana thought about the twelve years. The apartment above the laundromat. The year his mother was sick and they didn't leave Ohio once. The wedding they kept deciding they didn't need, mostly because neither of them could articulate what it would change.

"Do nothing," she said, "but with the good wine. The bottle Anthony gave us."

"We were saving that."

"For what? This is the what."

Marcus considered. Then he crossed out everything above the last line, closed the notebook, and got up to find the corkscrew.

They ate leftover chili out of mismatched bowls and drank forty-dollar wine on the couch, and around nine she put her feet in his lap and he complained about it and didn't move them.

"Same thing next year?" he asked.

"Same thing," she said.


Mara found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for winter gloves: two tickets to a Tuesday matinee, October 14th, seven years ago. She brought it into the kitchen where Devon was scraping the last of the oatmeal into a bowl.

"You kept this?"

He squinted at the faded thermal paper. "That was the movie where you fell asleep."

"I did not fall asleep. I closed my eyes during the loud part."

The anniversary landed on a Thursday this year. They'd never been consistent about it—some years a nice dinner, one year nothing at all because Devon's mother was in the hospital, one year a weekend in a rented cabin where the heat didn't work and they'd laughed about it for months afterward.

"We could do the cabin again," Devon offered that evening, feet up on the coffee table.

"The one with no heat?"

"A different cabin. A functioning cabin."

Mara considered it. She was three weeks from a project deadline and the thought of driving four hours made her tired. "What if we just did the movie theater? The same one. It's still there, on Grand."

Devon set down his book. "They only show new stuff now."

"So we see whatever's playing. Matinee. Tuesday, even, if you can move your afternoon."

He liked that she'd remembered it was a Tuesday. "I can move my afternoon."

So they did. The theater had new seats—reclining ones, absurd and enormous—and the film was mediocre, some thriller with too many twists. Devon bought popcorn they didn't finish. Halfway through, Mara's eyes drifted shut during a shootout, and Devon nudged her, and she said "I'm listening" without opening them.

Afterward they walked six blocks to a taco place and ate at the counter, coats still on. Devon said the movie was bad. Mara said the movie was irrelevant. They walked home in the cold, arguing amiably about whether the twist had made sense.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries—a faded slip from a diner in Bakersfield, dated seven years ago that Saturday.

"You kept this?" she asked, holding it up.

Devon looked over from the couch, where he'd been failing to fix a lamp. "That's the night you told me you hated my truck."

"I said it smelled like feet. I stand by that."

They'd talked vaguely about the anniversary for weeks, the way they talked about repainting the hallway. Neither of them wanted a restaurant with cloth napkins. Devon had suggested a weekend in Monterey, but the transmission on the Corolla was making a noise, and Marisol's mother was coming through town on Sunday.

"We could just drive out there," Devon said. "To the diner. It's three hours."

"It's probably closed. Places like that close."

He looked it up. Still open, four stars, someone in the reviews complaining about the coffee. Marisol read that aloud and laughed, because the coffee had been terrible then too, and she'd drunk four cups anyway because she hadn't wanted the night to end.

They left at six that Saturday morning with a thermos and a bag of tangerines. Devon drove the first half; Marisol took over near Buttonwillow and put on the country station he pretended not to like. The diner had new booths, red vinyl instead of brown, but the same laminated menus with the pie list stapled inside.

They ordered what they'd ordered before, more or less. Marisol couldn't remember exactly. Devon claimed he could and was probably lying.

Afterward they sat in the parking lot with the windows down, not in a hurry.

"Seven years," she said.

"Feels like less."

"Feels like more, some days."

He took her hand across the console. "Same diner next year?"

"Different pie," she said.


Ten years to the day since they'd met in the laundromat on Fulton Street, Nadia found the note on the coffee table: *Don't cook. I have a plan.*

She texted him from work. *Should I be worried?*

*Very*, Desmond wrote back.

She came home at six to find him on the floor of the living room with the rug rolled up against the wall and a cardboard box open beside him, records fanned out in loose arcs. Some of them she hadn't seen in years — the ones from the first apartment, the ones with water damage on the sleeves from the leak in the Clinton Hill ceiling.

"I was going to make a reservation," he said. "Then I thought about how we'd just sit there and talk about the reservation."

"So instead we're going to sit on the floor."

"We're going to sit on the floor and I'm going to make you listen to that Ohio Players album you claim to hate."

"I don't claim. I hate it."

He put it on anyway. She got two beers from the fridge and a bag of the salt-and-vinegar chips he pretended not to eat, and lowered herself down beside him, back against the couch. The needle caught, hissed, found its groove.

They talked about the year Desmond's mother stayed with them for four months. About Nadia's failed pottery phase. About whether the tenth anniversary counted if they'd broken up for six weeks in 2019, which Desmond insisted didn't count and Nadia insisted did, because she remembered every day of it.

Around ten she said, "We should do something bigger. Next year. Take a trip somewhere."

"We say that."

"I know."

He reached over and turned the record, and the room filled up again, and neither of them moved for a long time.


Marguerite found the calendar reminder while looking for something else entirely — a note she'd typed into her phone four years ago that said simply *first apartment, Oct 12.*

"That's Saturday," she told Dev, who was standing at the stove pushing a spatula around a pan of eggs he'd already overcooked.

"Four years since we hauled that couch up the stairs."

"Three flights. In August."

"You cried."

"I sweated. There's a difference." She leaned against the counter. "So what do we do about it?"

Dev turned the burner off. He had opinions about anniversaries, mostly that other people's versions of them — the tasting menus, the surprise trips — felt like performances for an audience that wasn't there. But he also knew that four years of shared rent and shared groceries and shared silences was not a small thing, and that Marguerite kept the note in her phone for a reason.

"There's that place on Delaney," he said. "The one with the good bread."

"We go there all the time."

"Right, but we could go there and order the expensive fish."

She considered it. "Or." She pulled a stool over and sat down, which meant she was serious. "Or we drive out to the lake and walk around it, and then we come back and cook the mushroom thing you made when we didn't have any furniture yet."

"We ate it standing up."

"We ate it on the floor. Off a moving box."

Dev nodded slowly. "We'd have to buy mushrooms."

"That's the plan. Mushrooms, the lake, and the floor, if you're up for the floor."

"My knees have opinions."

"Chairs, then. A compromise." She held out her hand, and he shook it like they'd closed a deal, which was more or less how most things got decided between them. Saturday, then. The lake, the mushrooms, four years, and no audience but themselves.


The Fifth Year

Nadia found the reservation confirmation still open on Emmett's laptop when she came home Thursday, and she closed the tab without saying anything, because she knew what it cost him to plan things.

But over dinner he brought it up himself. "I made a reservation at Corvo. For Saturday."

"The place with the tasting menu?"

"Nine courses." He was watching her face the way he did when he wasn't sure he'd done the right thing. Five years in the same apartment in Somerville, and he still checked.

"Em." She set down her fork. "That's four hundred dollars."

"It's five years."

"I know it's five years." She reached across and turned his wrist so she could see the time, an old habit, though there was a clock on the microwave. "Can I say what I actually want?"

He waited.

"I want to drive out to Wingaersheek. Bring the camp stove. Make the terrible coffee you make and sit on the rocks until we're cold."

Emmett laughed, short and relieved. "In November."

"Especially in November. Nobody's there."

"You want to spend our anniversary being cold on a beach."

"We spent the first one being cold on a beach. I had that awful gray coat." She pulled her knees up onto the chair, which he hated and never mentioned. "You said something. About how you weren't going anywhere."

"I remember what I said."

"I want to see if you still mean it."

He got up and started clearing plates, which was how he bought himself a moment. At the sink, with the water running, he said, "I'll cancel the reservation tomorrow. But we're stopping at the good bakery on the way, because I'm not eating gas station food on my anniversary."

"Deal."

"And you're bringing a better coat."

"That coat is a piece of history."

"That coat is a piece of felt."

She came up behind him and put her forehead between his shoulder blades, and he stood there with his hands in the dishwater, not moving, letting her.


Maya found the receipt while cleaning out her wallet — a faded slip from Nguyen's Diner, dated three years ago to the day. She'd kept it because it was the first time Theo had paid for her pancakes without making a thing of it.

"We should go back," she said, holding it up to him across the kitchen island.

Theo squinted at the paper. "That place closed. Remember? They put in a vape shop."

"Right." She set the receipt down beside her coffee. "Then what?"

He leaned against the counter, thinking. Three years. Two apartments, one badly behaved cat, a spectacularly failed attempt at growing tomatoes on the fire escape. It didn't feel like something you marked with a reservation and a bottle of wine, though he suspected some part of her wanted that.

"What if we cooked?" he said. "The pancakes. Here."

"You burn pancakes."

"I burn the first one. That's tradition."

Maya laughed, and he watched her decide to be pleased instead of disappointed. She got that look sometimes — a slight recalibration behind the eyes — and he'd learned to notice it, and to let her have it.

They shopped that afternoon at the Korean market on Ninth, arguing amiably about whether buttermilk mattered. Maya insisted it did. Theo bought it to be agreeable and then, secretly, agreed. At home she found the good plates, the ones from his grandmother, still wrapped in newspaper from the move eight months ago.

He burned the first pancake. She photographed it.

They ate at the coffee table because the dining chairs held laundry, and the cat sat on the arm of the couch judging them both. Around nine, Maya put her feet in Theo's lap and said, "Same thing next year?"

"Sure," he said. "But we're unpacking the plates for real."

"Deal," she said, and meant it, and they left the dishes in the sink until morning.


Marisol had been circling the date on the calendar for a month, though she pretended not to. Eight years since the night they'd met at that terrible open mic in Somerville, where Dev had played three songs and forgotten the words to all of them.

"So," she said Tuesday morning, leaning against the doorframe of the second bedroom he used as an office. "Friday."

Dev didn't look up from his monitor. "I know what Friday is."

"Do you, though."

He spun the chair around. "I was thinking Oleana. I called. They have a seven-thirty."

Marisol made a face she immediately regretted. Not because Oleana was wrong—it was lovely, it was where they'd gone for their fifth—but because she'd been carrying around a different idea for weeks and hadn't found the courage to say it out loud.

"What," Dev said.

"Nothing. Oleana's great."

"You did the thing with your mouth."

She sat down on the futon that never got used. "I want to go back to the Cantab. The open mic. It's still Wednesdays, I checked, but they do a Friday one now too, and it's the same guy running it, the one with the vest."

Dev laughed, then stopped. "You want to watch people be bad at music."

"I want to watch you be bad at music."

"Absolutely not."

"You still have the guitar. It's under the stairs behind the Christmas boxes."

He was quiet for a second, doing the thing where he pressed his thumb into his palm. "Two songs," he said. "And you have to sit in the back so I can't see your face."

"I'll sit wherever you want."

"And we're getting dinner first. A real dinner."

"Obviously."

Friday, he forgot the second verse of "Thunder Road." From the back of the room, Marisol didn't correct him. She just watched him find his way to the next line, the way he always did.


Maya found the receipt in a shoebox under the bed, faded to the color of weak tea. Nine years ago, a hardware store in Bloomington: one deadbolt, one set of keys cut, $18.47.

"You kept this?" Devon said, taking it from her. He was still in his work clothes, the smell of the print shop on him — toner and hot paper.

"I keep everything. You know this about me."

They had never gotten married, and by now the not-doing-it had its own quiet momentum, like a house settling. But they marked the day they'd moved in together, which was easier to remember than any other date because it had rained so hard the U-Haul flooded and they'd spent the first night on a bare mattress in the middle of the living room, listening to water hit the windows.

"So what do you want to do," Devon said. "Actual question. Not a trap."

Maya sat down on the edge of the bed. Last year they'd done a restaurant with a tasting menu and she'd been hungry afterward and too polite to say so. The year before, a cabin with no cell service where Devon got a migraine.

"Honestly? Nothing. Stay here. You make the thing with the short ribs."

"That takes four hours."

"I know. That's the point. Four hours of you standing in the kitchen and me pretending to help."

He considered this. Outside, someone's dog was barking at nothing.

"I want to invite Rosalie and Tam," he said. "Not for dinner. For after. Cake, maybe."

"You want a party."

"I want two people. That's not a party, that's a quorum."

Maya laughed and lay back on the bedspread. The receipt was still in his hand.

"Fine," she said. "Two people. And you're not allowed to give a toast."

"I'm absolutely giving a toast."

"Devon."

"Short one."

She let it go, which was, she thought, most of what nine years was.


Nine years to the day since they'd met at a friend's chili cook-off, and Renata still couldn't decide what to do about it.

"We could go back to Marchetti's," Dev said from the kitchen doorway, holding a dish towel he'd apparently forgotten he was using. "The place with the bread."

"We went there for year seven. And year eight." She scrolled through her phone, frowning. "It feels like we should do something. Nine feels like it counts."

"Nine's a weird number to feel strongly about."

"Ten is the milestone, so nine is the last one before we're obligated to make a fuss. That's my logic."

Dev sat down across from her at the table, which wobbled, as it had for three years. "Okay. What if we finally fixed the table?"

Renata looked up. "As the celebration?"

"As part of it. Hear me out. We've been saying we'd shim the leg since the Obama administration—"

"That's not true, it's a 2019 table."

"—and it would take twenty minutes, and then we'd have a table that doesn't try to spill soup on us." He shrugged. "Then Marchetti's. Then that thing you like where we walk around the neighborhood and criticize everyone's landscaping."

She considered it. Outside, someone's sprinkler ticked in the heat. "I want to write down the year, too."

"Write it down where?"

"In the notebook. From the first apartment." She'd started it as a joke—a list of small facts about each year, mostly petty complaints and the names of stray cats. It had gotten sincere without her permission.

"Fine, but I get to dictate my own entry this time. Last year you wrote that I was 'largely reliable.'"

"You were largely reliable."

He got up to find the level and a piece of cardboard. Renata found a pen. The reservation could wait until four.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that awful office holiday party, and Renata still couldn't decide what the occasion called for.

"We could just do dinner," Sam offered from the kitchen table, where he was sorting through a shoebox of receipts for taxes. "Somewhere with cloth napkins."

"We did that for eight. And nine." She leaned against the doorframe, holding a mug of coffee gone lukewarm. "Nine was that place with the deconstructed lasagna. You said it tasted like ambition."

"It did taste like ambition." He set down a crumpled gas receipt. "Okay. What do you actually want?"

She thought about it. Ten years felt like it should mean something structural — a beam in a house, not a picture hung on the wall. But she also knew that whenever they tried to make things momentous, they got stiff with each other, overly polite, like guests at their own party.

"I want to drive out to Pescadero," she said. "Get the artichoke bread. Sit on the beach and freeze."

Sam looked up. "That's what we did the first year. When we had no money."

"We had eleven dollars between us."

"You wore my sweatshirt the whole time and then kept it."

"I still have it." She sipped the cold coffee, grimaced. "It's in the garage with the camping stuff."

He was quiet a moment, doing some arithmetic that had nothing to do with taxes. Then he pushed the shoebox aside.

"Saturday," he said. "We leave early, before the fog burns off. And we get two loaves this time, because you always eat mine."

"I don't always—"

"Renata."

"I eat a portion of yours."

They went on Saturday. The beach was empty and gray and loud, and they ate warm bread out of a paper bag with their coats zipped to the chin, not saying much, her shoulder against his arm, the sweatshirt draped over both their knees like something salvaged.


Marisol found the receipt in a coat pocket while doing laundry — a diner in Barstow, faded thermal paper, dated seven years ago that Saturday. She brought it to the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt garlic out of a pan.

"Seven years since the road trip," she said.

"Since the road trip where you told me my playlist was a war crime."

"It was. You had four Coldplay songs in a row."

He took the receipt, held it up to the window light. "We should do something."

They did what they always did, which was overthink it for three days. Dev floated the idea of driving back out to Barstow, which Marisol vetoed on the grounds that Barstow was, and she quoted herself, "a parking lot with weather." She proposed a nice dinner downtown, the kind with tasting menus, which Dev vetoed because he'd just paid the deductible on the Civic.

Wednesday night, folding towels on the bed, Marisol said, "What if we just cooked the thing?"

"The thing."

"The chicken thing your mom makes. You've been saying you'd learn it for like two years."

So Saturday they called his mother on speakerphone and she talked them through it, interrupting constantly to say they were doing it wrong, that the onions needed longer, that Dev had never in his life had patience. Marisol laughed so hard she had to put down the knife. The kitchen got hot and they opened the window and the neighbor's dog started barking at nothing.

It came out decent. Not as good as his mother's. They ate at the coffee table because the dining table had become a place where mail lived.

"Eight years next time," Dev said. "We should do something bigger."

"We say that."

"We do say that."

She leaned into his shoulder. Outside it had started to rain, lightly, the kind that wouldn't last.


Their fifth anniversary landed on a Tuesday, which felt appropriately unglamorous.

Dana brought it up while scraping the last of the oatmeal out of the pot. "So. Tuesday."

"I know," Marcus said. He was standing at the counter, sorting mail into two piles: things that mattered and things that didn't. "I was thinking we do the thing at Ferraro's. The tasting menu."

"That's two hundred dollars."

"It's five years."

Dana turned the water on and let it run over her hands longer than necessary. Five years since the party in Highland Park where he'd talked to her for forty minutes about a documentary she hadn't seen, and she'd let him, because he had the kind of face that made bad conversation forgivable. Three years since the lease with both their names on it. Two since her mother stopped asking when.

"I don't want to sit in a dim room and be handed tiny food," she said. "I want to be somewhere I can hear you."

Marcus set down a credit card offer. "Okay. What, then."

"Remember the first apartment? The Filbert Street one, with the radiator that screamed?"

"You made that terrible chicken thing."

"It wasn't terrible. It was ambitious." She dried her hands. "Let's do it again. The chicken thing. And that awful jug wine. And we can put the mattress on the living room floor like we're twenty-six and broke."

He laughed, then didn't. He was quiet in the way that meant he was actually considering it, which was one of the reasons she'd stayed.

"We'd have to move the coffee table," he said finally.

"We can move the coffee table."

"And I'm buying real wine. I'll drink the jug wine, but I'm buying one real bottle, and you can't stop me."

"Deal."

On Tuesday, the chicken came out dry and the mattress made her back ache and neither of them mentioned it. Marcus fell asleep first, on the floor, in the middle of a sentence about the radiator.


Ten years to the day since they'd signed a lease on the apartment above the laundromat, Priya found Marcus in the kitchen with a legal pad.

"I'm making a list," he said. "Options."

She looked over his shoulder. Option one: dinner at Ferraro's, where they'd gone after the closing on the house. Option two: drive to the coast, stay somewhere with a view. Option three was just the word *Vegas*, underlined twice, which she chose to ignore.

"Ferraro's closed in March," she said. "The son didn't want it."

Marcus crossed it out. "I forgot that."

They stood there a minute. Outside, someone was arguing with a parking enforcement officer. Priya poured coffee into the mug she liked, the one with the chipped handle he kept threatening to throw away.

"What if we didn't go anywhere," she said.

"That's not on the list."

"Add it."

He wrote *stay home* and looked at it skeptically. "Ten years feels like it should be bigger than that."

"Ten years is a lot of ordinary days," she said. "That's what it is. That's the whole thing." She sat down across from him. "We could cook the lamb. The one your mother taught you. That takes four hours, so it's not like it's nothing."

Marcus considered this. "I'd have to go to the halal market on Dearborn."

"So go."

"And you'd have to actually help. Not sit there commenting."

"I make excellent comments."

He laughed, and she watched him tear the page off the legal pad, crumple it, and start a new one — a grocery list this time. Onions, yogurt, the good cinnamon. She added *wine* and he added *the expensive kind*, and by then it was nearly ten and they hadn't gotten dressed, and neither of them seemed in any hurry to.


Marcus found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from the taqueria on Fillmore, dated seven years ago that Saturday.

"You kept this?" Nadia asked, drying her hands on a dish towel.

"Apparently I did." He held it up. "Three carne asada tacos and a horchata. You paid for yours because you said you didn't want to owe me anything."

"I stand by that decision."

They'd talked about doing something big for seven years. Nadia's sister had suggested Napa. Marcus had looked up flights to Mexico City twice and closed the tab both times. Now it was Thursday, and the anniversary was in two days, and neither had booked anything.

"We could just go back," Nadia said. "To the taqueria."

"It closed. Became a poke place, then closed again."

She sat down on the arm of the couch, which he had asked her not to do approximately nine hundred times. "Okay. Then what do you actually want to do?"

Marcus thought about it honestly, which took a minute. "I want to not leave the house. I want to make something complicated. I want you to not check your work email."

"That's three things."

"I'm allowed three."

They settled on cassoulet, which took eleven hours and required a trip to two different stores. Nadia handled the beans and the arguing about whether duck fat was necessary. Marcus handled the sausage and the playlist, which was mostly songs from the year they met, some of which had aged poorly.

At eight, they ate at the small table by the window with the good bowls, the ones from his grandmother. Nadia's laptop stayed closed in the bedroom.

"Seven years," Marcus said.

"Seven years." She tapped her glass against his. "The horchata was better."

"It really was."

Outside, someone's car alarm went off, and neither of them got up to look.