Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the ticket stubs, the cheap plastic ring Danny had bought from a gumball machine outside the courthouse in Reno, and the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten breakfast at four in the morning, still married for less than five hours.

"Twenty-five years," she said, setting the box on the kitchen table.

Danny looked up from his crossword. His reading glasses had slid down his nose. "We said we'd do something big."

"We said that at ten. And fifteen. And twenty."

"And we went to Olive Garden."

"We like Olive Garden."

He laughed, took the glasses off, rubbed his eyes. The kitchen in the Cleveland house had yellow walls now; Marisol had painted them the summer his mother died, when he couldn't stand to sit still. "Sarah says we should go to Portugal."

"Sarah is twenty-three and thinks credit cards are free money."

"She gets that from your side."

Marisol sat down across from him and pushed the shoebox toward the center of the table, the way she pushed a bowl of chips at people she loved. "What do you actually want to do?"

Danny turned the gumball ring over in his fingers. It had gone chalky and pale. "I want to drive to Reno," he said. "Not fly. Drive. Take a week, stop wherever. Find that diner if it's still there."

"It's not still there."

"Then we'll find another one and pretend."

She was quiet. Out the window, the neighbor's dog was working himself into a state over a squirrel.

"I'd want to leave on a Tuesday," she said finally. "Traffic's better."

"Tuesday's fine."

"And you're not driving the whole thing. Your back."

"Half."

"Sixty-forty."

He put his glasses back on and returned to the crossword, smiling at it. "Deal," he said.


Marisol found the shoebox first, wedged behind the winter coats. Inside were the receipts from their first apartment on Halsted Street—the one with the radiator that clanked like someone was trapped inside it.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt edges off toast. "We should do something."

"We should do something," he agreed, which is what he'd said in March, and again in June.

They had a running list on the refrigerator. *Napa*, someone had written in optimistic capitals. *That inn in Door County*. *Iceland???* Every entry was a version of the same idea: go far, go expensive, make it count.

Dev set down the toast. "What if we didn't leave?"

Marisol looked up.

"I mean—hear me out. We drive to Chicago. We park on Halsted. We look at the building." He shrugged. "It's four hours. We could do the whole thing in a weekend."

She thought about the radiator. She thought about the summer they'd eaten cereal for dinner because the stove had broken and neither of them had wanted to call the landlord, who was terrifying.

"Sanchez's is still there," she said. "The taqueria."

"Is it?"

"Kim checked last year. She sent a picture."

They made the plan at the kitchen table over cold toast: leave Friday after Dev's last meeting, stay at whatever hotel had a decent rate, walk the old block, eat at Sanchez's, come home Sunday. Marisol wrote it on the refrigerator list beneath *Iceland???* and drew a box around it.

"It's not very romantic," Dev said.

"It's extremely romantic. It's just cheap."

He laughed. She put the shoebox on the counter where they'd both keep tripping over it, which meant they wouldn't forget.

Friday came. They went.


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors.

"You kept these?" she called from the hall closet.

Danny came out of the kitchen, dish towel over his shoulder. The box held movie stubs, a parking garage receipt from Sacramento, a napkin with her handwriting on it—*call me, I mean it*—from the night they met at his cousin's wedding.

"I keep everything," he said. "You know that about me."

Twenty years next month. They'd talked around it for weeks. Her sister kept pushing for a party, something with a rented hall and a slideshow. Danny's mother had already asked what she should wear.

"I don't want a party," Marisol said, sitting down on the hallway floor with the box in her lap.

"Thank God."

"But I don't want nothing, either. Twenty years isn't nothing."

He lowered himself down beside her, knees popping, and picked up the napkin. The ink had gone brown at the edges.

"What if we drove up there," he said. "Sacramento. Same route."

"The hotel's a Days Inn now."

"So we stay at the Days Inn."

She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and looked at him, considering it seriously, the way she considered everything—turning it over, checking the weight.

"Three days," she said. "We leave Friday after I finish the Kellerman file. We stop at that place in Lodi with the peaches."

"They might not have peaches in October."

"Then we stop and find out they don't have peaches."

Danny nodded slowly. "I'll tell my mother we're doing something small."

"Tell her we're doing something private. Small sounds like she can talk you out of it."

He got up, offered his hand, and pulled her to standing. She kept the napkin, folded it once, and put it in her back pocket. It stayed there through dinner, and she found it again in the laundry two days later, softened but still legible.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a Tuesday matinee in 2013, the movie so forgettable neither of them could name it now. He brought them to the kitchen where Dev was slicing peppers.

"Ten years next Saturday," Marcus said.

Dev set down the knife. "I know. I've been thinking about it."

They'd talked around it for weeks. Dev's sister kept hinting about a party, and Marcus's coworkers assumed there'd be something big, a rented hall, a slideshow. But the anniversary they cared about wasn't the wedding—that had been three years ago, quick and joyful at the courthouse with fourteen people. This was the anniversary of the Tuesday they'd met, when Marcus had shown up late to a movie he didn't want to see and taken the last seat next to a stranger who offered him popcorn.

"I don't want a party," Dev said.

"Thank God."

They landed on the plan over dinner: they'd drive out to the theater, which had closed in 2019 and become a furniture outlet, and stand in the parking lot for exactly as long as it took to feel ridiculous. Then dinner at the Vietnamese place two blocks down, the one where they'd gone afterward and talked until the staff started stacking chairs.

"That's it?" Dev asked. "That's the whole plan?"

"We could get a cake."

"We should get a cake."

Saturday came humid and gray. They stood in the parking lot for four minutes, holding hands, feeling exactly as ridiculous as expected. A woman loading a bookshelf into her hatchback gave them a curious look.

At dinner, Dev raised his glass of iced tea. "To bad movies."

"To free popcorn," Marcus said.

They stayed until the staff started stacking chairs.


Marguerite found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from Woo's Garden, dated eleven years ago, the night before Daniel drove her to the hospital with a fever of 103 and a diagnosis nobody had expected.

"Look at this," she said, holding it up.

Daniel came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag. He squinted at the paper, then laughed. "Mu shu pork. You made me get extra pancakes and then didn't eat any."

"I remember feeling awful and pretending I wasn't."

They stood in the kitchen of their house in Fort Collins, the late October light coming in gold through the window over the sink. Ten years since remission. That was the anniversary neither of them had known how to name. It wasn't a wedding date. It wasn't a birthday. It was the anniversary of a phone call from Dr. Ellsworth, a Tuesday in November, and the strange quiet that had followed.

"We could go somewhere," Daniel said. "Actually go somewhere. Santa Fe. Or that place in Moab you circled in the magazine."

Marguerite considered it. She was fifty-four now, her hair grown back thick and streaked with gray she refused to color. "I don't want a trip. I want—" She stopped, trying to find it. "I want to invite people. The ones who showed up."

Daniel nodded slowly. "Your sister. The Nakamuras. Pastor Bill, even though he talks too much."

"Especially Pastor Bill."

So they made a list, thirty-one names, and Daniel built two long tables out of sawhorses and plywood in the backyard, and Marguerite ordered mu shu pork for thirty-one people from Woo's Garden, which confused the owner considerably.

On the night, the tables were crowded and loud, and Daniel stood to say something and couldn't. Marguerite took his hand. Everyone waited. Eventually he just said, "Thanks for coming," and sat down, and that was enough.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from the Uptown Theater, September 14, 2009. She brought them into the kitchen where Dev was scrubbing a pan.

"Fifteen years since our first movie," she said.

He dried his hands and squinted at the paper. "That's next Saturday."

They'd planned nothing. The last few years had eaten their planning muscles—his father's illness, her promotion, the roof they'd finally replaced in April. Anniversaries had become texts sent from separate offices.

"We could go back," Dev said. "The Uptown's still open."

"It's a Marvel movie now. It was a Kurosawa retrospective when we went."

"You slept through most of it."

"I did not sleep. I closed my eyes to concentrate."

They sat at the table with coffee and argued pleasantly about options. Dev wanted to drive to the coast, four hours each way, stay in the same motel with the broken ice machine. Marisol pointed out they'd both be exhausted and irritable by Sunday, and that the motel had likely been demolished.

"Then what do you want?"

She thought about it. "I want to cook something ridiculous. That duck thing you tried in 2016 that set off the smoke alarm."

"That was a disaster."

"It was the best night of that whole year."

So they made a list. Duck, the good wine from the shelf they'd been saving for a reason neither could name, and the projector Dev's brother had loaned them, aimed at the garage door so they could watch *Seven Samurai* in the driveway with blankets, the way they'd once watched movies in his old apartment before they could afford anything else.

On the fourteenth, the duck came out edible. The neighbors wandered over around the second hour and stayed. Marisol fell asleep during the rain battle, her head on Dev's shoulder, and he let her.


Marcus found the calendar page still turned to March, three weeks into April, and laughed at himself before flipping it forward. There it was, circled in Dana's handwriting from January: *Twenty years.*

He found her in the garage, sorting through a box of paint cans she'd been meaning to deal with since the Obama administration.

"So," he said. "The fifteenth."

Dana didn't look up. "I know. I've been avoiding thinking about it because every idea I have costs too much or sounds like something from a magazine."

"Napa?"

"Too expensive. And you get sleepy after two glasses."

"That's called being relaxed."

She set down a can of primer and finally turned around. Her hair was pulled back with a rubber band, which meant she'd been out here longer than she'd admit. "What if we didn't go anywhere?"

Marcus leaned against the workbench. "Say more."

"We drove to Asheville for our first anniversary because it was the only place we could afford. We ate at that diner with the terrible coffee. Remember? You spilled some on the map."

"I remember you laughing so hard the waitress checked on us."

"So we do that again. But here. We cook the thing we cooked when we moved into the first apartment—the chicken with too much rosemary. We put the record player in the backyard. We invite nobody."

He considered it. Twenty years of school pickups, a miscarriage, two job losses, a kitchen renovation that nearly ended them. It seemed strange to mark all of that with rosemary chicken.

Then again, it seemed strange to mark it with anything else.

"I'll get the rosemary," he said.

"Get too much."

"I always do."

She went back to the paint cans, but he noticed she was smiling, and he stood there a moment longer than he needed to, watching her work.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a movie theater that had closed six years ago.

"Look at this," he said, holding them up as Ellen came in with grocery bags. "Our first date. You made me sit through that documentary about beekeeping."

"You said you liked it."

"I lied. I was trying to impress you."

She set the bags on the counter and took one of the stubs, turning it over. "Ten years next month."

They'd talked about the anniversary in vague terms, the way they talked about repainting the guest room. Ellen wanted to go somewhere—Charleston, maybe, or the little coastal town in Maine where her sister had gotten married. Marcus kept doing the math on flights and pet-sitting for their ancient beagle, Rutherford, who couldn't be boarded anymore.

"What if we didn't go anywhere," he said that night, from his side of the bed.

Ellen put down her book. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning we cook. Actually cook, not the thing where I stand there and hand you onions. And we invite the people who were at the wedding."

"That's forty people."

"The people who *stayed* at the wedding. Till the end."

She laughed. "So, eleven."

"Twelve. Your uncle came back for the cake."

They spent the next three weeks planning. Ellen made lists in the notebook she kept by the coffee maker; Marcus called his brother in Sacramento, who agreed to fly out. They argued once, briefly, about whether to hire someone to help serve, and then agreed they'd rather not have a stranger in the house.

On the day, it rained. Rutherford slept under the dining table through all of it. Ellen burned the first batch of rolls and Marcus ate one anyway, and around eleven o'clock the last guest left and they stood together in the kitchen looking at the dishes, not touching them yet.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the winter hats. Inside were ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten breakfast at 3 a.m. after the courthouse.

"Fifteen years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen. "What do you want to do?"

Dev was standing at the stove, pushing eggs around with a spatula. He'd been up since five, unable to sleep, though he hadn't said why. "I keep thinking about Portugal," he said. "But then I think about the roof."

"The roof isn't going anywhere. That's kind of the problem."

He laughed. "Right."

They ate at the counter, the box open between them. Marisol pulled out a photo — the two of them on the courthouse steps, Dev in a borrowed blazer that didn't fit, her holding a bouquet from the grocery store. Her mother hadn't come. His had, and had cried the entire time, which they'd interpreted generously.

"What if we just did the diner again," Dev said. "The 3 a.m. thing."

"You go to bed at nine-thirty now."

"I could stay up. For this."

She considered it. The diner was still there, on Route 9, with the same cracked vinyl booths. They'd driven past it a hundred times without stopping.

"Okay," she said. "But we're taking a nap first. And you're not wearing that blazer."

"I don't even have that blazer."

"Good."

They set an alarm for one in the morning. When it went off, Dev was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, holding out her coat. Marisol took it, still half-asleep, and followed him down the stairs and out into the cold, where the car was already running.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer — two faded rectangles from a 2009 showing of a movie neither of them could remember choosing. She brought them to the kitchen where Devon was scraping burnt edges off the pancakes.

"Fifteen years," she said, holding them up.

"Since the drawer was cleaned? Feels right."

"Since the first date, smartass."

He set down the spatula. They'd been talking around the anniversary for weeks, the way they talked around most big things — obliquely, in fragments, until one of them finally said the actual sentence.

"I keep thinking we should do something," Devon said. "Something big. Chicago, maybe. That hotel with the rooftop."

Marisol did the arithmetic in her head, the one that always ran underneath: the water heater making its noise, Kayla's braces consultation in March. "We could."

"But you don't want to."

"I want to sit somewhere quiet with you and not look at a phone."

Devon laughed. "That's the cheapest anniversary in history."

"That's not why."

He knew it wasn't, mostly. He came around the counter and leaned against it beside her, close enough that their arms touched.

"What if," he said slowly, "we drove out to Hollow Creek. Where we got caught in the rain that time."

"With the terrible sandwiches."

"I'll make better sandwiches. Fifteen years of improvement."

She turned the ticket stubs over in her fingers. Outside, a neighbor's dog was losing its mind about something.

"I'd like that," she said. "Bring the good blanket. Not the one from the car."

"The car one's fine."

"The car one smells like the car."

They settled on Saturday, weather permitting. Devon went back to the pancakes, salvaging what he could, and Marisol tucked the ticket stubs into the corner of the mirror by the door, where she'd see them every morning until then.


Marcus found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from the Bluebird Diner, dated March 12, 2009. Two coffees, one slice of pie. Four dollars and eighty cents.

"Dana," he called. "Look what survived fifteen years."

She came in from the garage still holding a paintbrush, and when she saw it she laughed, then went quiet. "That was the night I told you about the job in Denver."

"And you cried into the pie."

"You ate the pie."

They had planned nothing for the anniversary. Both of them had assumed the other would raise it, and neither had, and now it was eleven days out and their calendar showed only a dentist appointment and Dana's mother's birthday.

"We could do the coast," Marcus said. "That place in Cannon Beach."

Dana set the brush across the lip of a jar. "It's four hundred a night in March. And I'd spend the whole time thinking about the deck."

The deck had been rotting for two years. They both knew it.

"So we don't go," he said.

"I didn't say that."

He looked at the receipt again. "What if we just went back? The Bluebird's still there. Cheryl still works Thursdays."

Dana considered it, and he watched her do the thing she did — the small sideways tilt, the tongue against her molar. "Coffee and pie," she said. "And then we come home and I want you to help me pick out the composite boards. The gray ones."

"That's your anniversary present? Decking?"

"No. The pie is the present. The decking is what I want to do after, with you, because I like doing things with you." She picked the brush back up. "Also, you're the one who measured wrong last time."

"I measured fine. The lumber was warped."

"Sure it was," she said, and went back to the garage.


Marcus found the note taped to the coffee maker at 5:40 a.m., which was the only reliable way to catch him before his shift at the hospital.

*Twenty years. Don't book anything. I have an idea. —D*

He laughed out loud in the dark kitchen, then texted her a single question mark. Deb was still asleep upstairs, which meant she'd written it sometime after midnight, probably after grading the last of her seventh-graders' persuasive essays.

The idea, it turned out, involved a rental car and a cooler.

"We're driving to Erie," she said Saturday morning, holding a road atlas she'd bought at a truck stop specifically because she thought it would be funny. "The whole route. Every place we stopped that first summer."

"Deb, half those places are Wendy's parking lots."

"Two of them are Wendy's parking lots. And one is that overlook where you told me you'd never get married, and I said good, neither would I."

Marcus poured coffee into the thermos she'd left on the counter. "In my defense, I was twenty-four and had a ponytail."

"You had a *lot* going on."

They left at nine. Somewhere outside Youngstown, the AC gave out and they drove with the windows down, shouting over the wind about their daughter's tuition, about the roof, about whether Deb should apply for the vice principal job or keep her classroom. At the overlook, the guardrail had been replaced and someone had built a subdivision in the valley, but the light was the same, gold and low, and they ate turkey sandwiches out of the cooler standing up.

"I was wrong, by the way," Marcus said. "About the marriage thing."

Deb wiped mustard off her thumb. "You've had twenty years to bring that up."

"I'm a slow processor."

She leaned into his shoulder. Below them, a lawnmower droned somewhere in the new houses, and neither of them said anything for a while.


The Twentieth

The invitation had been sitting on the refrigerator for three weeks, held by a magnet shaped like a lobster.

"Ellen's throwing us a party," Marcus said, scraping the last of the eggs onto Priya's plate. "She's already booked the back room at Antonelli's."

Priya set down her coffee. "Did we agree to that?"

"I said I'd ask you. Which I'm doing now, badly."

She laughed. Twenty years of marriage, and he still did this—committed to things sideways, then negotiated backward. "Twenty-two people in a room with a set menu," she said. "Or."

"Or?"

"Or we drive to Point Reyes and sleep in the car like we did in 2004."

Marcus sat down across from her. Outside, their neighbor's sprinkler ticked against the fence. "We had a Corolla in 2004. We have a Subaru now. It's actually comfortable."

"That's the boring version of the story."

"The boring version is the one where we don't wake up with backaches."

They went back and forth over the second pot of coffee. Priya wanted the fog, the cold sandwiches, the specific loneliness of a headland at dawn. Marcus wanted Ellen not to be hurt, and also, he admitted, he wanted the toasts—wanted to stand up in front of people and say something about her he'd been rehearsing since roughly year eleven.

The compromise came together the way most of theirs did: not elegant, but theirs. The party on Saturday, small, with Ellen's set menu and Marcus's toast. Then Sunday morning, early, before anyone was awake, the drive north. Two sleeping bags in the back. Coffee in a thermos that leaked.

"You'll complain about the cold," Priya said.

"Constantly," Marcus agreed. He wrote *Point Reyes* on the calendar in pen, which in their house meant it was real.

She took the invitation off the fridge and wrote *yes* on the back.


Marguerite found the invitation on the kitchen counter, tucked under a bag of coffee beans. Twenty-five years at the elementary school, and the district wanted to throw a dinner in the gymnasium. Rubber chicken, she assumed. A plaque.

"They spelled your name wrong," Yusuf said, coming in from the garage with sawdust on his forearms. "Margarite. With an A."

"They always do." She set the invitation aside. "It's the same weekend as ours."

He wiped his hands on a rag and did the arithmetic he already knew. Twenty-two years, that October. They had married in a courthouse in Sacramento with two witnesses and a lunch afterward at a Vietnamese place that had since become a vape shop.

"So skip it," he said.

"I can't skip it. Ruby's retiring, they'll want me to say something about her."

"Then we do ours the night before."

That was how they landed on it. Not a restaurant—they'd tried a restaurant for their twentieth and spent ninety dollars feeling like they were auditioning for someone else's life. Instead Yusuf drove out to the Armenian market on Fulton and came back with lahmajoun, string cheese, olives, and a jar of the pickled cauliflower Marguerite pretended not to love. She made a cake from her mother's recipe card, the one with the water stain shaped like Florida.

They ate on the back steps because the evening was warm. The neighbor's dog barked at nothing. Yusuf had brought out the folder of photographs from the courthouse day, and they went through it slowly, arguing about whether Marguerite's cousin had actually cried or just had allergies.

"Next year we should go somewhere," she said.

"You say that every year."

"I mean it every year."

He nodded and cut her another slice of cake, and neither of them moved from the steps until the mosquitoes found them.


Marguerite found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the winter hats. Ten years of ticket stubs, a wilted corsage, the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten breakfast after the courthouse.

"You kept the receipt," Dev said from the doorway, still in his work clothes, tie loosened.

"I keep everything. It's a character flaw."

They'd been circling the question for a month. Ten years felt like it demanded something. Dev's sister had suggested Lisbon. His coworker had booked a hot air balloon for his own anniversary and hadn't stopped talking about it since.

"We could go back to the diner," Marguerite said.

"It closed. Two years ago. It's a vape shop."

"Right." She sat down on the floor with the box in her lap. "Okay. What do you actually want?"

Dev thought about it honestly, which was one of the things she'd married him for. "I want to not be in a car. Or an airport. I want to sleep in our bed."

"So nothing."

"Not nothing." He sat down across from her, knees cracking. "You know what I keep thinking about? The first apartment. When the stove didn't work and we made everything in that electric skillet for four months."

"You made saag paneer in a skillet."

"It was terrible."

"It was not terrible." She was smiling now. "You want to cook."

"I want to cook everything we made that year. The whole terrible menu. And eat it on the floor because that's where we ate it."

"We have a table now."

"I'm aware."

She looked at the receipt in her hand, the faded ink, the two coffees and one order of hash browns they'd split. "Saturday," she said. "I'll get the paneer. You handle the rest."

"On the floor."

"On the floor," she agreed, and put the shoebox back in his hands to return to the shelf.


Marcus found the calendar in the kitchen drawer, the one Priya still insisted on keeping even though her phone did everything. He'd circled April 14th in blue pen last year and forgotten why.

"Fifteen years since the apartment on Delmar," she said, reading over his shoulder. She had her coat half on, keys in hand, already late for her shift at the clinic. "The one with the radiator that screamed."

"You wanted to break the lease after two weeks."

"You wanted to buy a space heater and call it a solution."

They'd meant to plan something. There had been talk in February of Charleston, of a hotel with a courtyard, but then the transmission went out on the Honda and Priya's mother had the fall in Ohio, and by April the money and the vacation days had gone elsewhere, the way they always did.

That Saturday, Marcus drove them to Delmar Boulevard instead. The building was still there, repainted a color someone in a marketing meeting had probably called "oyster." They stood on the sidewalk across the street and looked up at the third-floor window.

"Somebody's got plants," Priya said.

"We had plants."

"We had one plant. It died in June."

They ate at a Vietnamese place four blocks down that had been a laundromat back then, and Priya ordered the thing she couldn't pronounce and Marcus ordered what he always ordered, and she took half of his anyway. Afterward they walked to the park where he'd proposed badly, without a ring, sitting on a bench that had since been replaced with a metal one bolted to concrete.

"This is better than Charleston," she said, and he wasn't sure if she meant it, but she reached for his hand and he decided it didn't matter much either way.

They were home by eight. He made tea. She fell asleep during the movie, as she always did.


The Twentieth Year

The invitation had been sitting on the counter for three weeks, propped against the fruit bowl: a hotel package in Charleston, two nights, a champagne welcome. Priya kept moving it when she wiped the counter, and it kept ending up back in the same place.

"We could just go," Nadia said Tuesday night, standing at the stove with a wooden spoon. "It's twenty years. People do things for twenty years."

"People do things," Priya agreed. She was grading papers at the kitchen table, red pen capped, her attention drifting. "Do we want to be people who fly somewhere and take a picture in front of a fountain?"

Nadia laughed. "You're making it sound worse than it is."

But she'd been thinking the same thing. They had gotten married in a courthouse in Iowa in 2005, before it was legal in most places, with Nadia's brother as a witness and a Dairy Queen afterward because nothing else was open. There had been no fountain then either.

"What if we drove," Priya said slowly. "Back to Des Moines. Stay in a terrible motel. Go to the same Dairy Queen if it still exists."

Nadia turned. "That's four days of driving."

"Yes."

"Through Nebraska."

"Yes."

They looked at each other. Twenty years had taught them how this went: one of them said the impractical thing, the other one made the objections out loud, and then they both discovered they'd already decided.

"I'll ask Dev to watch the dog," Nadia said.

They left on a Thursday in September. The Dairy Queen was a Verizon store now. They ate Blizzards from a different one two miles away, sitting on the hood of the car in a parking lot, and Nadia said the light was exactly the same, that particular flat Midwestern gold, and Priya said she remembered it too, and neither of them was entirely sure that was true, but it didn't matter.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer — two faded rectangles from a community theater production of *Our Town*, dated eleven years ago.

"You kept these?" Priya asked, drying her hands on a dish towel.

"I keep everything. You know this about me. It's why the garage is the way it is."

She took one, holding it to the kitchen light. Their first date, arranged by her cousin against Priya's explicit wishes. Marcus had worn a blazer that didn't fit. She had planned an exit strategy involving a fake phone call from work.

"Eleven years next Saturday," she said.

"So what do we do? Ten was the big one. Eleven feels like the anniversary nobody plans a party for."

Priya sat down at the table. "I don't want a party."

"Good, because I don't want to clean the house."

They kicked ideas around for twenty minutes. Marcus lobbied for the steakhouse downtown, the one with the leather booths, but Priya pointed out that they'd gone there for their anniversary three years running and she couldn't remember a single conversation from any of those nights. Priya suggested a weekend in Asheville; Marcus reminded her that his sister's kids were staying with them Thursday through Sunday.

"What if we just went back," Priya said finally. "To the theater. See whatever they're putting on."

Marcus considered it. "It might be terrible."

"It was terrible the first time. You fell asleep in the second act."

"I did not fall asleep. I closed my eyes to concentrate."

"Marcus."

"I fell asleep."

She was already searching on her phone. "*Arsenic and Old Lace*. Saturday, seven-thirty. Twenty-two dollars each."

"Buy them," he said. "And then let's get pancakes after, at that diner on Fifth. The one that's open late."

Priya tapped the screen. "Done."

He put the old stubs back in the drawer, under the batteries and the takeout menus, where he'd find them again in another eleven years.


The kitchen still smelled like burnt toast when Priya set down her coffee and said, "Twenty years."

Daniel didn't look up from the seed catalog. "I know. I've been thinking about it since March."

"You have not."

"I have." He turned the catalog around and pushed it across the table, tapping a photo of a dogwood. "Remember the one outside the apartment on Lyndale? The one that dropped petals all over your car?"

Priya remembered. She remembered scraping them off the windshield in April, cursing, and Daniel laughing at her from the third-floor window.

"You want to plant a tree."

"I want to plant that tree. In the back, where the swing set was."

She'd expected him to suggest Charleston, or that inn in Door County they'd talked about for six years and never booked. A tree was so unromantic it circled back around to being romantic, which was, she thought, exactly how Daniel worked.

"The Nagarajans are coming in June," she said. "My mother will want to see something."

"So she'll see a tree."

"She'll say it's too small."

"It will be too small." He shrugged. "That's sort of the point."

They went to the nursery on a Saturday, and it took longer than either of them expected—Priya insisted on walking the whole lot twice, and Daniel kept quietly moving the price tags out of her line of sight. They chose a six-foot Cherokee Princess with a slight lean to it.

He dug. She held the trunk straight and complained about mosquitoes. When it was in, they stood back farther than the tree deserved, hands dirty, and looked at it.

"It's crooked," Priya said.

"So are we."

She leaned into his shoulder. Later they ate frozen pizza on the porch, because neither of them wanted to cook, and watched the light go amber over a very small tree that would outlive them both.


The Fifteenth

Maya found the flyer under a magnet on the fridge: a wine tasting, forty dollars a head, live jazz. She'd put it there in March and forgotten about it.

"We could still go," Priya said, reading over her shoulder while stirring the dal. "It's Saturday."

"We could." Maya sat down at the kitchen table, the one they'd bought secondhand in Sacramento eleven years ago and hauled to three apartments before this house. "Or."

"Or what?"

"Or we drive out to Point Reyes and eat sandwiches on the rocks like we did after the courthouse."

Priya turned the burner down. Fifteen years since the courthouse in Oakland, the clerk with the sinus infection, the witness they'd recruited from the parking lot — a woman named Deb who'd cried harder than either of them. They'd been so broke that year. The sandwiches had been turkey and provolone from a corner store, eaten out of wax paper while the fog came in.

"I don't remember it being cold," Priya said.

"It was freezing. You wore my jacket and I complained the whole drive home."

"That does sound like you." Priya wiped her hands on a dish towel and leaned against the counter, considering. "The jazz thing is nicer. Objectively."

"Objectively," Maya agreed.

Neither of them moved. Outside, a neighbor's sprinkler ticked on.

"Turkey and provolone?" Priya said.

"Obviously turkey and provolone."

"We're bringing real coffee this time. Not that gas station sludge."

"Fine. Thermos." Maya took the flyer off the fridge, folded it in half, and dropped it in the recycling. "And blankets. We're forty-three, not twenty-eight."

"Speak for yourself. I'm forty-one."

"Barely."

Priya laughed and went back to the stove. Maya stayed at the table a while longer, looking at the empty magnet, already thinking about the drive — the long curve of Sir Francis Drake, the eucalyptus, the fog waiting for them at the end of it.


Marcus found the calendar page on the fridge, the fifteenth circled twice in red marker.

"Ten years," he said, not really a question.

Priya was rinsing spinach at the sink. "Ten years since the courthouse. Twelve since the driveway."

He laughed. The driveway — her U-Haul, his terrible attempt at parallel parking it, the way she'd sat on the bumper and eaten cold pizza while he apologized to a mailbox.

"So what do we do?" he asked. "Ravi keeps saying we should go to Lisbon."

"Ravi has no children." Priya shook the colander. "Also I don't want Lisbon. I want something small."

Marcus leaned against the counter. "Small like dinner, or small like meaningful?"

"Both. Neither." She turned around, wiping her hands on the towel. "Remember when we couldn't afford the honeymoon and we drove to that motel in Asheville and it rained for three days?"

"You said you'd never forgive me."

"I lied. It was the best week of my life." She hesitated. "Could we do that again? Not Asheville, necessarily. Just — a bad motel and rain."

"You want to plan for rain."

"I want to plan for nothing," she said. "I want to get in the car on Friday and stop when we're tired."

Marcus thought about the work email he'd been dreading, the gutters that needed clearing, Leela's soccer schedule. Then he thought about Priya on the bumper with the pizza box.

"My mother will take Leela," he said. "She's been asking."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure I don't want Lisbon."

Priya smiled and went back to the spinach. Later, after dinner, they sat on the porch and argued pleasantly about which direction to drive — west toward the mountains, or east until they hit water — and decided, finally, that they'd flip a coin at the end of the driveway.


Marisol found the folder on the kitchen table Saturday morning, labeled in Dev's blocky handwriting: TEN YEARS — OPTIONS.

"You made a folder," she said.

"I made a folder." He poured her coffee without asking how she wanted it, because he'd known for a decade. "Napa. Or that place in Asheville with the hot springs. Or—" he flipped a page, "—Lisbon, if we cash out the miles."

She sat down and read through his printouts, the neat columns of prices, the hotel photos with their identical white bathrobes. Outside, the neighbor's dog was barking at the recycling truck.

"They're all nice," she said carefully.

"You hate all of them."

"I don't hate them. I just—" She looked at the folder. "Ten years ago we had that party in your cousin's backyard and it rained and your uncle grilled anyway and someone's kid broke the cake table."

"That was a disaster."

"It was the best day of my life." She turned her mug in a slow circle. "I don't want a bathrobe. I want that."

Dev leaned back against the counter. He was quiet for a while, which was one of his better qualities.

"The yard's too small now," he said finally. "But Pete would let us use his."

"Pete's got that awful gazebo."

"Pete's got a gazebo and a smoker, and we'd only have to invite him."

She laughed. "So we throw the wedding again. Same food. Same terrible playlist."

"Not the same playlist."

"The exact same playlist."

He crossed the kitchen, took the folder off the table, and dropped it in the recycling bin. Then he sat down across from her with a legal pad.

"Guest list," he said. "Start with the people who came the first time."

Marisol started naming them. It took longer than she expected, because they had to stop and remember the ones who had died.


The invitation had been sitting on the counter for three days: a photography exhibit downtown, opening Saturday, the same night as their eleventh anniversary.

"We could go," Priya said, sliding the card across the granite toward Marcus. "Or we could do the thing you keep mentioning."

Marcus was rinsing basil at the sink, sleeves pushed to his elbows. "I mention it because you never say no, you just say 'mm.'"

"I say 'mm' because a whole day of driving to look at a lighthouse sounds like a lot of driving."

"It's ninety minutes. And there's that chowder place."

She laughed, and he knew he'd won something, though not everything. He shook the water off the basil and turned around. "What if we do both? Lighthouse Saturday morning, back by four, exhibit at seven."

Priya tilted her head, considering. She had a way of doing that—weighing a plan the way she weighed produce at the market, thoroughly, without hurry. "That's a lot of anniversary."

"It's eleven years. It should be a lot."

"Twelve is the big one. Ten was the big one. Eleven is a Tuesday of anniversaries."

"It's a Saturday."

"Marcus."

But she was already reaching for her phone, pulling up the tide chart, because she liked the beach better at low tide, when the flats went silver and you could walk out farther than seemed reasonable. He watched her scroll and felt the small, specific satisfaction of a marriage where the argument was never really an argument.

"Low tide's at ten forty," she said. "So we'd need to leave by nine."

"I'll make coffee at eight."

"You'll make coffee at eight fifteen and we'll leave at nine twenty."

"Probably."

She set the phone down and picked up the invitation, tucking it under the fruit bowl where they kept the things they meant to remember. Then she took the basil from him and started tearing it into the bowl, and neither of them said anything else about it, which was how they knew it was settled.


Marcus found the calendar in the junk drawer, the one from the hardware store with the pheasants on it, and circled October 14th in red.

"Twenty years," he said, sitting down across from Denise at the kitchen table. She was grading papers, a stack of eighth-grade essays about *The Outsiders* fanned out beside her coffee.

"I know what day it is." She didn't look up. "I've been thinking about it too."

He waited. Twenty years had taught him that Denise arrived at things sideways.

"Everybody does the trip," she said finally, capping her pen. "Cabo, Charleston, whatever. Ruth and Dale went to Ireland and Ruth spent the whole time worried about the dog."

"So not Ireland."

"Not Ireland." She pushed the essays away. "I want to redo the porch."

Marcus laughed, then stopped, because she was serious. The porch had been sagging since the Obama administration. They'd had three contractors out and each time something else came first—the water heater, Simone's braces, the transmission.

"That's not romantic," he said.

"It is to me." She reached over and turned his hand palm-up, tracing the callus at the base of his thumb. "Twenty years of sitting out there on a folding chair because we can't trust the boards. I want to sit on a porch swing with you. I want to do it for the next twenty."

He thought about the money. He thought about Cabo, which he'd never wanted anyway, and about his father's porch in Beaumont, and the way Denise fell asleep out there in July with a book on her chest.

"Cedar," he said. "Not pressure-treated."

"Whatever you think."

"And I'm picking the swing."

She smiled and pulled the essays back. "Then you'd better start looking. Fourteenth is a Saturday."

He wrote *CEDAR* on the pheasant calendar, under the red circle, and went to find his tape measure.


Marcus found the shoebox on the closet shelf while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner on Route 9 where they'd eaten at two in the morning after the courthouse closed.

"Twenty years," Dana said from the doorway. She had a dish towel over her shoulder and reading glasses pushed into her hair. "I keep thinking we should do something."

"We should." He turned a stub over. "Renata keeps sending me links to resorts in Tulum."

"Renata's forty-one and divorced twice. Her advice is aspirational."

He laughed. They'd talked about a trip in March, then the transmission went out on the Subaru, and then Dana's mother needed the hip replacement, and now it was late September and the maples on Corbin Street were going orange.

"What do you actually want?" she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Marcus thought about it honestly, which took a minute. "I want to go back to the diner."

"It's a Verizon store now."

"I know. I drove past it in June." He set the box down. "Okay. Then I want to not do anything impressive. I want to make the pot roast, and I want you to not check your email after six, and I want to watch that documentary you keep pausing at minute nine."

Dana was quiet. Outside, someone was running a leaf blower.

"I want to give you the letter," she said finally. "I wrote it a while ago. Maybe four years ago? I've been waiting for an occasion big enough."

"Twenty's pretty big."

"That's what I figured."

They ended up ordering the pot roast ingredients for delivery because neither of them wanted to go to the store. Dana read the letter aloud at the kitchen table, badly, stopping twice. Marcus didn't say much afterward. He just kept his hand flat on the table where she could reach it, and she did.


Mara found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two paper rectangles from a Tuesday matinee in 2015, faded to the color of weak tea.

"You kept these," Desmond said, coming in from the garage with sawdust in his eyebrows.

"I kept everything. There's a receipt in here from a gas station in Nebraska."

He took the stubs and held them at arm's length, the way he did now that he refused to admit he needed reading glasses. "Ten years next month."

They had not planned anything. Every year they meant to and every year April arrived with its usual chaos—her students' portfolios due, his contracts running late, the water heater making that sound again.

"We could go back," Mara said. "To the theater."

"It's a vape shop now."

"Then we could go to the vape shop."

Desmond laughed and set the stubs on the counter, aligning their edges. He had a habit of squaring things. "What did we see, even?"

"Something terrible. There was a helicopter."

"There's always a helicopter."

That night they sat on the back steps with the porch light off so the neighbors' motion sensor wouldn't catch them, passing a bottle of the cheap red she liked and he tolerated. The maple they'd planted their second year had gotten tall enough to lose in the dark.

"I don't want a party," Desmond said.

"God, no."

"I want to take a day off. Both of us. No phones. We drive somewhere with a diner."

Mara leaned into his shoulder. "Nebraska?"

"Not that far."

"Pancakes, though."

"Obviously pancakes."

They didn't decide on a destination, only the date, which Desmond wrote on the kitchen calendar in his blocky capitals, and which Mara circled twice in green pen the next morning, standing barefoot on the cold tile, coffee cooling in her hand.


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the receipts she'd saved from their first year in the house—the hardware store, the paint samples, the emergency plumber they'd called at midnight when the pipe burst under the sink.

"Ten years," she said, carrying the box to the kitchen table where Dev was grading papers. "Ten years since we closed."

He set down his red pen. "You saved all this?"

"I saved everything that year. I thought if I could account for it, we could afford it."

They had talked about doing something big. A weekend in Charleston, maybe, or dinner at the place downtown with the tasting menu neither of them fully understood. Dev's sister had offered to take the dog. But sitting there, looking at the faded thermal paper, Marisol felt the pull of something quieter.

"What if we just stayed," she said.

Dev considered this. He was a man who liked a plan, who wrote itineraries for grocery runs, but he had learned over ten years that Marisol's instincts about time were usually right.

"We'd have to actually do something," he said. "Not just watch television and call it commemorative."

So they made a list. They walked the property line the way they had the day the realtor handed them the keys, pointing out the maple that had doubled, the fence they still hadn't fixed. Dev cooked the eggplant dish that had been a disaster their first Thanksgiving here and had since become good. Marisol pulled out the paint samples and they argued cheerfully about whether the hallway had ever really been the right color.

At dusk they sat on the back steps with beer and the dog between them.

"Same time next year?" Dev asked.

"Same steps," she said. "Different eggplant."

He laughed, and she leaned into him, and the porch light came on by itself, the way it did.


David found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for the good scissors—a faded slip from Halloran's Hardware, dated fifteen years ago that March. Two gallons of paint, one roller, a drop cloth they never actually used.

"Look what I found," he said, holding it up when Marcus came in from the garage.

Marcus wiped his hands on a rag and squinted at it. "Is that from the kitchen?"

"The kitchen." David laughed. "You said Sagebrush, I said Morning Fog, and we ended up with that awful green."

"It wasn't awful. It was *sophisticated*."

"It looked like split pea soup."

They'd talked about the anniversary for weeks without landing anywhere. Marcus's sister kept sending links to resorts in Tulum. David's coworker insisted they had to do the wine train up in Napa, that it was a bucket-list thing. But every option felt like it belonged to some other couple, people who took photographs of their meals.

Marcus set the rag down. "What if we just repainted it?"

David looked at him.

"Not green," Marcus added quickly. "But the trim's chipped, and we've been saying for three years we'd do something about that light fixture."

So that's what they did. They took a Friday off, drove to the same hardware store—still there, still smelling like sawdust and rubber—and stood in the paint aisle for forty minutes disagreeing about undertones. They settled on a warm white, which was David's pick, though Marcus argued he'd only conceded because he was hungry.

They painted all weekend. Marcus put on the terrible playlist he'd made in 2011. David got a streak of white in his eyebrow that didn't wash out until Tuesday. They ordered Thai food both nights and ate it sitting on the drop cloth, backs against the cabinets, looking at what they'd done.

"Fifteen years," Marcus said.

"In this kitchen," David said.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from the Orpheum, October 14th, eleven years ago.

"We kept these?" she called toward the kitchen.

Daniel came in wiping his hands on a dish towel. He took one, held it at arm's length the way he did now with small print. "That was the night the projector broke. We sat in the dark for forty minutes."

"You told me about your grandmother's farm."

"You told me you hated your job."

"I did hate that job."

They were quiet a moment. The ticket stubs sat on the counter between them like something excavated.

"So," Daniel said. "Twelve years next Saturday. Your sister keeps asking what we're doing."

Marisol had ideas. A restaurant downtown with tasting menus, or the bed and breakfast in Galena that Karen wouldn't shut up about. She said both aloud, and watched Daniel nod politely in the way that meant he was calculating the drive.

"What do you actually want?" she asked.

He set down the towel. "Honestly? I want to sleep in. I want to go to the farmers market and buy too many tomatoes. I want to cook something that takes four hours."

"That's just a Saturday."

"That's a good Saturday."

She considered this. The house was quiet—the kids at her mother's, the dishwasher humming through its cycle. Twelve years of Saturdays, most of them ordinary, a few of them terrible, some she'd trade nothing for.

"The tomatoes have to be from the Amish stand," she said. "Not the one by the parking lot."

"Obviously."

"And I want to watch a movie after. A bad one. Something with explosions."

Daniel grinned. "Deal."

She slid the ticket stubs into the drawer beneath the takeout menus, where they'd surface again someday, at some other kitchen counter, in some other quiet moment.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside were the ticket stubs, the receipt from the diner on Route 9, the napkin where Deirdre had sketched the layout of a garden they'd never actually planted.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen. "You kept the napkin."

Deirdre looked up from the stove, where she was scorching onions the way she always did. "I kept everything. You know this about me."

They'd been arguing pleasantly for a week about how to mark it. Deirdre wanted to drive up to the lake house her cousin rented out, the one with the temperamental water heater. Marisol wanted a real hotel, room service, a bathtub she didn't have to clean afterward. Neither had budged.

"What if we did nothing?" Marisol said, sitting down.

"Nothing."

"Not nothing. Here. We cook something ridiculous, we open the good bottle Frank gave us in 2019 that we keep not opening, and we look at all this." She tapped the shoebox. "And nobody has to drive anywhere or check out by eleven."

Deirdre turned off the burner. She came and sat across the table, pulling the box toward her, and lifted out a photograph: the two of them at a courthouse in Poughkeepsie, Marisol in a green dress, both of them squinting.

"You hated that dress," Deirdre said.

"I loved that dress. I hated the shoes."

"We could invite Robin and Tess."

"We could not."

Deirdre laughed. "Okay. Just us." She set the photo upright against the salt shaker, where it stayed for the rest of the week, and then for the rest of the month, and eventually somebody moved it to the refrigerator door, where it remains.


Mara found the sticky note on the bathroom mirror at 6:40 in the morning: *Ten years. Don't plan anything. I mean it.*

She planned something anyway, but only a little. By the time Desmond came downstairs, she'd set two mugs out and was scrolling through her phone.

"There's a place in Asheville," she said. "Cabin, hot tub, three hours away."

"We went to Asheville for our fifth."

"That's why it's good. Symmetry."

Desmond poured his coffee and leaned against the counter, still in the T-shirt he'd worn to bed, the gray one with the collar going soft. "I had a different idea."

"You said don't plan anything."

"I said *you* shouldn't." He set his mug down. "The house on Delmar. It's for sale again. Open house Sunday."

Mara looked up.

They'd rented the bottom floor of that house for two years, back when Desmond was adjuncting at three schools and Mara was waiting tables and studying for the bar. The radiator clanked. The neighbor practiced trumpet. They'd been broke and mostly happy.

"You want to spend our anniversary at an open house."

"I want to walk through it," he said. "See if the kitchen's still yellow. Then get lunch at that Vietnamese place if it's still there. Then come home."

"That's not a trip."

"No."

She turned the phone face-down on the counter. Outside, someone's sprinkler kicked on.

"The Vietnamese place closed," she said. "During the pandemic. I drove past in March."

Desmond absorbed this. "Then we find somewhere else."

"Okay." She picked up her coffee. "But we're getting the cabin in October. My birthday."

"Deal."

Sunday, the kitchen was white now, and smaller than either of them remembered. The realtor followed them room to room, talking about updates. Mara found the pencil marks still on the pantry doorframe — not theirs, someone else's kids — and stood there a while, and Desmond came and stood with her, and neither of them said anything, which was fine.


Marcus found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated fifteen years ago that March. A gallon of primer, two rollers, painter's tape.

"You kept this?" he asked, holding it up when Priya came in with the mail.

She set the envelopes on the counter and squinted. "That's the first weekend after closing. When we painted the living room that horrible sage green."

"You picked that color."

"I picked it because you said you didn't care." She took the receipt from him, turning it over. "Fifteen years. God."

They'd talked about doing something for the anniversary of the house—a stupid thing to celebrate, Marcus had argued initially, since their wedding anniversary was in September and that seemed like enough. But the house had been the harder thing. The mortgage they'd barely qualified for. The roof that failed in year three. The room upstairs they'd converted twice, first into a nursery and then, after the second miscarriage, into an office neither of them used much.

"We could go out," Priya said. "That place on Whitmore."

"We could." He leaned against the counter. "Or."

"Or what?"

"The dining room still has that sage green. Behind the hutch."

She laughed. "You want to spend our anniversary painting?"

"I want to spend it finishing something." He shrugged. "But I'll take the restaurant if you'd rather."

Priya looked at the receipt again, then at the doorway to the dining room, where a strip of the old color showed like a geological layer.

"Both," she said. "Paint Saturday, dinner Saturday night. We'll show up smelling like latex and they'll seat us by the kitchen."

"Deal."

She stuck the receipt to the fridge with a magnet from a pizza place that had closed years ago. It stayed there through the summer.


Every year, Dana bought the flowers before Marcus could remember to. This year he beat her to it—tulips, not roses, because roses had never been their thing.

"Fifteen," she said, setting her keys in the ceramic dish by the door. The dish had been a wedding gift from her aunt, chipped now on one side.

"Fifteen." Marcus was at the kitchen table with a legal pad, which meant he was making a list. He'd been making lists since 2009. "So I've got three options. One, that Portuguese place downtown. Two, we drive out to the lake, do the cabin thing. Three—" He tapped the pen. "Three is unconventional."

"Three's usually the good one."

"Three is we don't go anywhere. We make the lasagna. The bad lasagna, from the first apartment, with the wrong cheese."

Dana laughed and pulled out the chair across from him. "It wasn't bad. It was ambitious."

"It was ricotta-free."

"Because you were convinced cottage cheese was the same thing."

"I was twenty-six."

She looked at him a moment—the reading glasses he still refused to wear in public, the gray coming in at his temples like it had been applied by hand. Fifteen years of watching a face change so slowly you only notice in photographs.

"Do we still have the pan?" she asked.

"We still have the pan. It's the good pan now. It got promoted."

"Then that's the one." She took the pen from him and crossed out options one and two, drawing a small star beside three. "But we're doing it right. Wrong cheese, cheap wine, that terrible playlist you made."

"I stand by that playlist."

"You stand by a lot of things."

He caught her hand before she could pull it back and held it against the legal pad, over the crossed-out lines, and neither of them said anything for a while, which after fifteen years was its own kind of conversation.


Marcus found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the winter hats. Inside were ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner on Fifth where he and Elena had eaten pancakes at two in the morning after their courthouse wedding.

"Twenty years," Elena said from the doorway. She was still in her work clothes, blazer draped over one arm. "You're going through the box again."

"I was looking for the extension cord."

"Sure you were."

They ended up on the living room floor with the contents spread between them, the way they'd done every few years since they bought the house. Elena held up a Polaroid of the two of them standing in front of a rented U-Haul, both impossibly thin, Marcus with a mustache he'd since agreed to never speak of.

"So what are we doing?" he asked. "Real question. Kids are at your mother's that whole weekend."

Elena had been thinking about it for a month. There was the resort in Asheville that her coworker kept recommending, and there was the flight to Lisbon they'd talked about for a decade and never booked.

"I want to go to the diner," she said.

Marcus looked up.

"It's still there. I checked. Different owners, but the sign's the same. I want to order pancakes at two in the morning and then come home and sleep in our own bed."

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

"We could stop at that hardware store you like on the way back. The one with the good hinges."

Marcus laughed, then didn't say anything for a moment. Outside, a car door slammed somewhere down the block.

"Okay," he said. "But I'm buying you the corsage this time. A real one."

Elena put the Polaroid back in the box and closed the lid.

"Deal."


The Twentieth

Dana found the box while looking for the good scissors—a shoebox of receipts, ticket stubs, a folded diner napkin with her own handwriting on it: *ask him about the dog.*

"Ray," she called. "Come look at this."

He came in from the garage with sawdust on his forearms and squinted at the napkin. "That was the second date. You wanted to know if I'd ever had a dog, and I lied and said yes because you were wearing that green coat."

"You lied about a dog."

"I contained multitudes." He sat down on the edge of the bed, which creaked the way it had creaked for eleven years. "So. Twenty."

They had talked around it for a month. Her sister thought they should go to Charleston. Ray's cousin had offered a timeshare in Gatlinburg, which was the kind of generosity you had to decline carefully. And there was the roof, which needed doing before winter, and Nora's tuition bill sitting on the counter like a dare.

"I don't want Charleston," Dana said.

"Thank God."

"I want to go back to that diner. If it's still there."

Ray pulled out his phone, thumbed at it a while. "It's a vape shop."

"Of course it is."

He set the phone face down. "There's the place on Route 9 that does the pie. We could get the pie, drive out to the reservoir, sit on the hood like teenagers, come home, and I'll make that pasta you like. And we don't answer the phone."

Dana considered it. It was a small thing. It cost maybe forty dollars.

"Nora will want to come," she said.

"Nora is nineteen and has opinions about her own Saturday."

"Okay." She folded the napkin and put it back in the box. "Okay. But you're buying two pies."

"Two pies," Ray agreed, and went back to the garage.


Marcus found the paint swatches on the kitchen table Saturday morning, fanned out like a poker hand: Heron Gray, Ottoman Blue, something called Salt Cellar.

"We're not repainting the porch for our anniversary," he said.

Dana looked up from her coffee. "Ten years. I want something that lasts longer than a dinner."

"Dinner lasts. It becomes a story. Remember Bellini's? You dropped a mussel shell in my wine glass."

"You drank it anyway."

"I was nervous."

She laughed, and he saw her consider it — the nice restaurant, the babysitter for her mother's dog, the drive into the city. Then she shook her head. "Everything's expensive right now. And I don't want to spend it in traffic."

They'd bought the house in Warren the same spring they married, a 1940s two-bedroom with a porch that sagged on the east side. Marcus had promised to fix it before the first winter. That was nine winters ago.

He picked up Ottoman Blue. "This one's nice."

"You hate blue."

"I hate blue cars. Porches are different."

Dana got out a notepad and they made a list at the table, arguing pleasantly about primer and whether to rent a sander. She wanted to do it over the long weekend in June, when her sister could take the kids to the lake. He wanted to add new spindles, which meant a trip to the lumberyard, which meant it wouldn't be finished in two days.

"So it takes three," she said. "So we sit out there in July with a beer and look at it."

"That's not much of an anniversary."

She reached over and put her hand flat on his forearm, the way she did. "It's ten years of not leaving. The porch is just where we'll be sitting."

He turned his hand over and held hers. Then he wrote *sander* at the top of the list, underlined twice.


Marguerite found the folded pamphlet in the junk drawer, under the takeout menus and dead batteries: a brochure for a state park three hours north, creased soft as cloth. Twenty-five years ago she and Dev had spent their honeymoon there, in a cabin with a woodstove that smoked and a mattress that sloped toward the middle.

"We could go back," she said, holding it up when he came in from the garage.

Dev wiped his hands on a rag. He was fifty-six now, and his knees complained on stairs. "That mattress nearly killed us."

"It brought us together. Literally. We rolled into each other every night."

He laughed and took the brochure, studying it the way he studied everything, thoroughly, longer than necessary. "They've probably renovated. It'll be nice now. Ruined."

"Then we go somewhere else. Or nowhere." She sat at the kitchen table. "I just want it to be something. Not a card and a nice dinner."

They talked it through over the next week — a cruise, too expensive; a trip to see their daughter in Portland, too much like an ordinary visit; a party, which Dev vetoed on principle. What they landed on came from him, on a Tuesday night, apropos of nothing while they were watching the news.

"We should redo the back porch," he said. "Together. Not hire anybody."

Marguerite looked at him.

"We said we'd do it the first summer. Twenty-five years of saying it."

So that was the anniversary: two weeks in June, sawdust in the coffee, arguments about the pitch of the roof, a splinter in her thumb that he dug out with a needle by lamplight. On the last evening they sat in mismatched chairs on new cedar boards, drinking wine out of jam jars because the good glasses were packed away, and neither of them said anything for a long time, which was, they both understood, the point.


Marcus found the calendar page already circled in Priya's handwriting: October 14th, ten years.

"I keep thinking we should do something enormous," he said, leaning in the kitchen doorway while she rinsed rice. "Iceland. Or that restaurant in Chicago with the tasting menu."

"We'd spend the whole time worrying about the dog." Priya shut off the tap. "And you hate tasting menus. You always eat a granola bar in the car afterward."

"That was one time."

"That was every time."

He laughed and came to stand beside her, taking the colander. Outside, the maple in the backyard had gone the color of a struck match. They'd bought the house four years ago, mostly for that tree.

"What if we did the drive," she said. "Route 9, up past Cummington. Where we got lost that first fall."

"With the terrible sandwiches from that gas station."

"They were fine sandwiches. You're a snob."

They talked it through over dinner, the way they talked through most things, circling and doubling back. Marcus wanted to book a room somewhere in case it got late. Priya wanted to leave early enough to stop at the orchard that pressed its own cider. They compromised: leave at seven, cider by nine, room at a bed-and-breakfast in Shelburne Falls if they felt like staying.

"And no phones," Priya said. "Except for pictures."

"You'll last forty minutes."

"I'll last two hours, and you'll be the one checking scores."

On the fourteenth, they drove north with the windows cracked and the heater on, the way they both liked it despite each pretending it was the other's preference. Priya read the road signs aloud in a newscaster voice. Marcus missed the turn for the orchard and didn't mention it for six miles.

They found their way back. They usually did.


Marisol found the notebook while clearing out the hall closet — the cheap spiral one they'd used in 2010 to track expenses down to the dollar, back when they were saving for the down payment. Fifteen years since they'd closed on the house on Bellflower Street.

"Look at this," she said, carrying it into the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt rice off a pan. "October fourteenth. We wrote 'KEYS!!!' with three exclamation points."

He dried his hands and took it, squinting at his own younger handwriting. "We spent eleven dollars on lunch that day and I remember feeling reckless about it."

The anniversary was two weeks out. They'd talked vaguely about dinner somewhere — the Italian place on Fifth had good reviews — but Marisol kept circling back to the notebook.

"What if we didn't go out," she said. "What if we just — did the day again. The way it actually was."

Dev raised an eyebrow. "Sitting on the floor eating pizza because we had no furniture?"

"We had the two lawn chairs."

"The lawn chairs are in the garage. Under the Christmas stuff."

She was already reaching for her phone to text their daughter that she'd be on her own for dinner that night. Dev watched her, then set the pan down.

"I'll get the chairs," he said. "But I'm ordering from Rosetti's, not the place with the cardboard crust."

"That's not authentic."

"Marisol. I've earned better pizza."

On the fourteenth, they dragged the lawn chairs into the empty half of the dining room and sat facing the wall they'd repainted three times. Dev read the notebook aloud — the tiny purchases, the hopeful arithmetic — and Marisol laughed until her eyes ran.

Later, folding the chairs, he said, "We should do this at twenty."

"Twenty-five," she said. "I want to see if the handwriting still holds up."


Marisol found the box in the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside were the paper plates from their wedding reception, the ones with the sunflowers, still wrapped in cellophane because her mother had bought four times too many.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Devon was scrubbing a pot. "We could use these. Serve dinner on them like it's 2005."

He laughed, drying his hands. "My mother would rise from the grave."

"Your mother loved paper plates. She just pretended not to."

They had been debating for three weeks. Devon wanted to go back to Asheville, to the cabin where they'd spent their honeymoon eating cold pizza because neither of them knew how to work a woodstove. Marisol wanted something that wasn't nostalgia. She'd been reading about a place in Door County with a lighthouse, somewhere neither of them had memories to compete with.

"Here's the thing," Devon said, sitting down at the table. "If we go to Asheville, we're going to spend the whole weekend saying remember when. And I like remembering. But I don't want that to be the whole point."

Marisol turned a paper plate over in her hands. "So Door County."

"So Door County, and we take the plates."

"To Wisconsin."

"We eat cheese curds off sunflower plates by a lighthouse. It's stupid enough to remember."

She thought about it. Their son was at college now, the house too quiet in a way she was still adjusting to, and she understood suddenly that Devon had been adjusting too, in his own sideways manner, proposing lighthouses.

"Book it," she said. "The one with the porch."

He was already reaching for his laptop. She put the plates back in the box, but left it on the counter, where she'd see it.


Marguerite found the paint chips on the kitchen counter Tuesday morning, fanned out like a hand of cards: Sage Whisper, Colonial Butter, Rainstorm.

"You've been thinking about the porch again," she said.

Dev looked up from his coffee. "Twenty years in this house next month. Seemed like the thing to do."

She sat down across from him. The porch had been the reason they bought the place—that long sagging front porch on a street in Dayton where every other house had one too, so summer evenings turned into a slow conversation passed down the block. They'd painted it once, badly, the first year, when they were both twenty-nine and thought a Saturday was plenty of time.

"I was going to suggest Charleston," she said.

"We could still do Charleston."

"No, you're right. The porch." She picked up Rainstorm, held it toward the window. "This one. It'd look good against the brick."

They took a Friday off work. Dev borrowed a scraper from his brother-in-law, and Marguerite spent the first two hours on her knees with a wire brush, getting after the balusters, swearing quietly at the previous owners' choice of a glossy enamel that had cracked into a thousand little continents. Dev ran the sander and made a mess of the hydrangeas. By noon they were both gray with dust and arguing pleasantly about whether the ceiling should be haint blue.

It took the whole weekend, longer than they'd planned, the way it always did. Sunday evening they sat on the still-tacky steps with beers, not touching the wet rail, watching the Kowalskis walk their terrier past.

"Twenty years," Dev said.

"We're going to have to do this again in ten."

"I know it."

She leaned into his shoulder. The paint smelled sharp and clean, and the light went long and gold down the street.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside were the ticket stubs — twenty years of them, the movies they'd walked out of, the minor-league games where the beer was overpriced, a folded program from a friend's wedding in Duluth.

"You kept these," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen.

Dev looked up from the stove. He was making the eggs the way he always did on Sundays, too much butter, the pan too hot. "I kept some. You kept the rest. I found half of them in your sock drawer years ago and just consolidated."

They'd been arguing, gently and without heat, about the twentieth anniversary for three weeks. His mother thought they should do a party. Her sister had sent links to resorts in Tulum, all of them featuring couples younger than they'd been at the wedding. Dev had floated the idea of renewing their vows, which Marisol had greeted with a look he described later as *the face you make at a raccoon in the garage*.

"What if we did nothing," she said now, sitting down with the box. "Not nothing. But nothing announced."

He turned the eggs off. "Meaning what."

"Meaning we drive to Ashland. Stay at that motel with the bad paintings. Walk on the beach in coats because it'll be forty degrees. Eat at the place with the whitefish."

Dev thought about it. Twenty years ago they'd stopped in Ashland on the way to somewhere else, and it had rained, and they'd been broke, and it had been one of the best three days of his life.

"We'd have to get someone for the dog," he said.

"Rachel owes us."

"Then yes." He set two plates down. "Yes. Absolutely yes."

Marisol closed the shoebox and put it on the chair beside her, where it stayed all through breakfast.


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the winter blankets. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage gone brown, and the receipt from the diner on Route 9 where they'd eaten pancakes at two in the morning after their courthouse wedding.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying it into the kitchen where Deb was scrubbing the burnt bottom of a saucepan. "Twenty years next Thursday."

Deb dried her hands. "I know. I've been thinking about it."

They'd talked, vaguely, about a trip. Something big. Deb's sister kept sending links to resorts in Tulum with infinity pools and swim-up bars, and Marisol had dutifully clicked through them, imagining herself in a linen dress she didn't own.

"What were you thinking?" Marisol asked.

"Honestly?" Deb leaned against the counter. "I want to go back to the diner."

Marisol laughed, then realized she wasn't joking. "It's a four-hour drive."

"So we drive four hours. We get pancakes. We stay at that motel with the terrible landscape paintings."

"The one with the ice machine that screamed."

"It probably still screams."

Marisol turned the corsage over in her fingers. She thought about the resort photos, all that turquoise, and how neither of them had ever been the kind of people who lay still on a beach. Deb got restless. Marisol got sunburned.

"We should invite people," Marisol said slowly. "Not to the diner. After. A cookout, when we get back. Your sister, the Feldmans, Junie and her kids."

Deb considered it. "Cheaper than Tulum."

"That's not why."

"I know it's not why." Deb kissed her temple on the way to the fridge. "Pancakes Thursday. Cookout Saturday. Somebody's going to make me talk about how we met."

"You love telling that story."

"I love your version," Deb said. "Mine's boring."

Marisol put the corsage back in the box, and left the box on the table where they'd both see it.


Ellen found the box of Christmas lights in the garage while looking for something else entirely, and by the time Marcus came home from the clinic, she had strung half of them along the porch railing.

"It's April," he said, setting down his bag.

"I know what month it is." She didn't turn around. "Twenty years ago tomorrow, you drove me to Bar Harbor in that terrible Corolla."

He remembered. The heater had only worked on the passenger side, so she'd spent four hours with her feet on the dashboard while he shivered. They'd eaten lobster rolls in the parking lot because the restaurant had a two-hour wait and neither of them had wanted to spend the money anyway.

"I thought we said no fuss this year," Marcus said, but he was already reaching for the tangle of lights she'd abandoned on the steps.

"This isn't fuss. This is ambiance."

They worked in the blue evening light, arguing mildly about whether the lights should drape or hang straight. Ellen won, as she generally did in matters of aesthetics. Marcus won the argument about dinner—he wanted to cook, she wanted to go out—by pointing out that the Thai place was closed Mondays.

Over pad see ew that Marcus made too spicy on purpose, because that was how she liked it, they talked about whether to drive up to Maine again that summer. The Corolla was long gone. So was the apartment on Fifth Street, and the cat, and Ellen's mother, and the version of themselves who'd thought four hours was a long way to go for a sandwich.

"We could just stay here," Ellen said. "Sit on the porch. Look at your lights."

"They're your lights."

"They're our lights, Marcus." She topped off his wine. "That's the whole point."

He conceded it. Outside, the porch glowed, faintly ridiculous, entirely theirs.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer — two faded rectangles from a 2009 minor league game in Toledo, the night she and Dev had gotten caught in a downpour and stayed anyway, soaked and laughing, until the seventh inning.

"Fifteen years," she said, holding them up when he came in from the garage.

Dev wiped his hands on a rag. "Since we watched the Mud Hens lose in the rain?"

"Since our first date. Which was that. Which you almost canceled."

"I had a midterm."

"You had cold feet."

He took the stubs from her and turned them over, thumbing the perforated edges. They were standing in the kitchen of the house they'd bought four years ago, a squat ranch outside Columbus with a mortgage that still made Marisol's stomach tighten every February. The anniversary was three weeks out.

"We could do the steakhouse," Dev said. "The one Priya's always going on about."

"We could." Marisol pulled out a chair and sat. "Or we could drive up to Toledo."

He looked at her.

"Game's on a Saturday. I checked. Twenty-two dollars a seat."

"That's four hours round trip."

"Three and a half. And there's that Hungarian place on the way, the one with the stuffed cabbage."

Dev sat down across from her. He was quiet for a moment, doing the arithmetic he always did — the dog, the neighbor's kid who'd watch her, whether his back would survive the bleachers.

"We'd have to leave by ten," he said finally.

"Nine-thirty."

"Nine-thirty." He set the ticket stubs on the table between them, squaring them with two fingers. "If it rains, we're not staying."

Marisol smiled. "We're absolutely staying."

He didn't argue. He got up to put the coffee on, and she watched him standing at the counter, and neither of them said anything else about it, because it was settled.


Marisol found the shoebox first, wedged behind the winter coats in the hall closet. Inside were the receipts from that first apartment on Delaware Street—the one with the radiator that clanged like someone trapped in the walls.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Ellen was slicing peppers for dinner. "Twenty years since we signed that lease."

Ellen set down the knife. "We were so broke. Remember eating rice for a week because we'd spent everything on the deposit?"

"I remember you telling the landlord we were sisters."

"He didn't believe me for a second." Ellen wiped her hands on a dish towel. "So. What do you want to do? Something big?"

They'd talked about Portugal. About a weekend in Chicago, tickets to the symphony, a proper hotel with room service and thick towels. Marisol turned the receipts over in her hands, the ink faded to almost nothing.

"I want to drive out there," she said. "Delaware Street. See if it's still standing."

Ellen laughed, then realized she wasn't joking. "That's four hours."

"Four hours each way. We'd get sandwiches. I'd make you listen to that terrible mixtape—the one you pretended to like."

"I did like it. Two songs on it."

They left on a Saturday in October, the maples along the highway burning orange. The building was still there, though someone had painted the trim an unfortunate teal. They stood on the sidewalk a long time, not saying much. A young man came out with a laundry basket and gave them a curious nod.

"Second floor," Ellen said finally, pointing. "That window."

On the drive home they stopped at a diner neither of them remembered, ate pie, and argued cheerfully about whether the radiator had clanged or hissed. Marisol paid the bill and kept the receipt.


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner where she and Theo had eaten pancakes at two in the morning the night they got engaged.

"Ten years," she said, holding up the receipt when he came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag. "Four dollars and eighty cents. You tipped a dollar."

"I was broke."

"You were cheap."

He took the receipt, squinted at the faded ink, and set it on the counter like it was something breakable. "So what do you want to do? Marco keeps saying we should go to Napa. He and Deb went for their fifteenth."

Marisol made a face. "We'd spend the whole time worrying about the dog. And you'd complain about the drive."

"I would complain about the drive," Theo admitted.

They ended up sitting at the kitchen table with a legal pad, which was how they made most decisions. Theo wrote *Napa* and crossed it out. He wrote *Chicago—weekend?* and left it. Marisol suggested the cabin in Wisconsin where they'd spent their second anniversary, before Theo's back went bad and before her mother moved in downstairs for those eighteen months.

"I liked that place," he said. "The stove that didn't work."

"You fixed the stove."

"I fixed it badly."

She wrote *cabin* underneath *Chicago* and drew a box around it. Then, after a moment, she wrote *diner* and underlined it twice.

Theo looked at her.

"It's still there," she said. "I drove past it in March. Same sign."

So that was it: pancakes at two in the morning, if they could stay awake that long, and the cabin the following weekend if the rental was free. Theo tore off the page and stuck it to the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like Wisconsin.

"Ten years," he said.

"Tip better this time."


Marisol found the shoebox while clearing the closet, and inside it was the receipt from the diner on Route 9, folded soft as cloth. Ten years. She brought it to the kitchen where Daniel was scraping burnt edges off the toast.

"We could go back," she said, holding it up.

He squinted at the faded ink. "That place closed in 2019. It's a vape shop now."

"Right." She set the receipt on the counter between them like a card played in a game neither of them had agreed to yet.

They'd talked about a trip—Charleston, maybe, or the cabin in the Poconos that Daniel's coworker kept recommending. But the transmission had gone out in March, and Marisol's mother needed the driveway shoveled every other week now, and somehow the whole spring had passed in a series of small necessary things.

"What if we just did the drive?" Daniel said. "Not the diner. The drive. Route 9 down to the water, that stretch with the antique places."

"We'd get there by noon."

"So we get there by noon."

They left on a Saturday with coffee in travel mugs and no reservations. Marisol read aloud from a paperback she'd found at a yard sale, badly, doing voices, until Daniel laughed hard enough to miss the turn for Freehold. They stopped at a farm stand and bought peaches they didn't need. At the shore they walked out on the pier and Daniel took a photograph of her that came out blurry, her hair across her face, and she said keep it, that's the one.

Coming home the traffic knotted up outside Old Bridge. Marisol put her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he let her.

"Ten years," she said.

"Ten years."

Neither of them said anything else for a while. It seemed like enough.


Miriam found the calendar note on a Tuesday, though she hadn't needed the reminder. Twenty-five years since the closing on the house—not their wedding anniversary, which fell in June, but the day they'd signed the papers on the crooked little bungalow in Dayton with the sycamore out front.

"We could do the restaurant," Dev said that evening, rinsing lentils at the sink. He'd made dal every Thursday for two decades, a habit that outlasted his mother, who taught it to him over the phone the first year they lived here.

"We always do the restaurant."

He turned. "You have something in mind."

She did. She'd been thinking about the sycamore, which had dropped a limb in March and now leaned in a way the arborist called "a decision you'll want to make." Miriam had been avoiding the decision for six months.

"I want to plant something," she said. "Before we take the old one down. So there's overlap. So it isn't just a stump for ten years."

Dev dried his hands. He thought about the tax refund, the roof they'd been saving toward, the fact that they'd be seventy-two and seventy-four when a new tree amounted to anything.

"A red maple," he said. "They come in fast."

They spent the anniversary Saturday at a nursery outside Springfield, arguing gently about caliper size while a teenager loaded the balled root into their trunk. Back home they took turns with the shovel—Dev's knees, her shoulder—and got it in the ground by four, mulched badly, watered too much.

That night they ate on the porch. The new maple stood twelve feet and looked absurd beside the sycamore's ruined crown.

"Ridiculous," Miriam said.

"Give it a year."

She leaned into him. Above them, the old tree let go of a leaf, and then another, the way it did every fall, without ceremony.


Marisol found the folder in the filing cabinet while looking for the water bill: twenty-five years of receipts from the same diner in Wheeling, one for every March 14th, curling and faded, the ink on the oldest ones gone brown.

"You kept these," she said, carrying the folder into the kitchen where Dennis was scraping burnt cheese off a pan.

"I keep everything. You've seen the garage."

"Twenty-five." She spread them on the counter like a hand of cards. "The Alpine's closed now. Has been since the pandemic."

Dennis dried his hands. He was quiet in the way she'd learned to read over two and a half decades—not absent, just working something over. "We could drive out anyway. Look at the building."

"That's morbid."

"It's a little morbid." He picked up the oldest receipt, 1999, $14.62, two coffees and the special. He'd been twenty-six, she'd been twenty-eight, and they'd argued the whole way there about whether her mother would come to the wedding. She had, eventually, in a mint-green dress, crying.

Marisol filled the kettle. "What if we cooked it ourselves? The special. What was it—"

"Chicken fried steak. Green beans out of a can."

"God, it was terrible food."

"It was terrible food," he agreed. "That was the point. We were broke."

They settled on it over tea: they'd make the whole miserable meal at home, canned beans and all, and eat it on the good plates her aunt had left them. Dennis wanted to invite the kids. Marisol said no, just them, and he didn't push, which she appreciated.

On the fourteenth he burned the steak slightly, which felt correct. Marisol lined the twenty-five receipts down the center of the table like a runner. They ate the bad food slowly, and afterward Dennis washed and she dried, and neither of them said anything much, and that was fine.


Marguerite found the receipt in a shoebox of tax documents, faded to near-illegibility: dinner for two at a Cuban place in Tampa, October 12th, twenty-five years ago. Sixteen dollars and forty cents, including the flan they'd split because neither could commit to a whole one.

"We should go back," she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage.

He wiped his hands on a rag and squinted at it. "That place closed. Sylvia told me. It's a vape shop now."

"Then not that." She set the receipt on the counter and smoothed it flat, the way she did with everything. "But something. Twenty-five feels like it wants acknowledging."

Desmond leaned against the doorframe. He was thinking about the money—the water heater had gone in August, and Nadia's tuition was due in January. He didn't say it. Marguerite knew anyway; she'd been reading his silences for a quarter century.

"We could drive down," he said. "Not stay anywhere fancy. Get a motel by the water, walk around, eat somewhere that isn't a vape shop."

"Two nights?"

"Two nights."

She considered. "I want to see the apartment building. On Bayshore. If it's still there."

"It's still there. I looked once, on the computer."

That surprised her—that he'd looked, that he hadn't mentioned it. She turned to hide her face and busied herself with the kettle.

They went in the second week of October. The building was still there, painted a different color, a beige that Desmond called an insult. They stood across the street and Marguerite pointed out which balcony had been theirs, and they argued mildly about whether it was the third or the fourth, and settled on the third.

At dinner they ordered flan, one, two spoons.

"Some things hold," she said.

Desmond touched her hand across the table.


Marcus found the shoebox while looking for the good extension cord. Inside: ticket stubs, a receipt from the diner on Fifth, and the napkin where Priya had written her number in 2009, the ink gone brown.

"You kept this," he said, holding it up in the kitchen doorway.

Priya looked over from the counter, where she was rinsing rice. "I kept all of it. Fifteen years is a lot of paper."

They'd been going back and forth about the anniversary for weeks. Her sister had offered to take the kids for a weekend, which felt like a gift too large to waste on something ordinary. Marcus had floated a cabin in the Poconos. Priya had countered with a hotel downtown, somewhere with room service and a bathtub that didn't have a rubber duck stuck to it.

"What if we don't go anywhere," she said now, shaking water off her hands.

"You want to stay here? With the dishwasher that sounds like a helicopter?"

"I want to cook the thing we couldn't afford to make. Remember? That braised lamb from the Zuni cookbook, and we did the math and it was thirty-eight dollars for the meat alone."

Marcus laughed. "We ate spaghetti for a week after Christmas that year."

"So we make it. We open the wine your brother gave us that's been in the closet since the wedding. We put on the terrible playlist." She paused. "And nobody's here. That's the part that's worth something."

He thought about the cabin, the drive, the checking in and out. Then he thought about their own table, the one they'd sanded and stained badly the first summer in the house, and the two of them at it with no one else in the building.

"Thirty-eight dollars," he said. "In this economy, probably ninety."

"We'll survive it."

He put the napkin back in the box. "Saturday, then."


Marisol found the wedding album under a stack of tax documents, which felt about right for how the last year had gone. She carried it to the kitchen, where Deb was scraping the last of the oatmeal from the pot.

"Twenty years," Marisol said. "In eleven days."

Deb set the pot down. "I know. I've been thinking about it."

They had thought about Paris. They had thought about the coast, the cabin in Wisconsin they'd rented the year Deb's mother died. But the roof needed work, and Marisol's hours at the clinic had been cut back in March, and neither of them said the word *money* out loud because they'd been married long enough not to have to.

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

Marisol raised an eyebrow.

"Not like—not nothing. I mean something here. The backyard. We string up the lights we never took down after Nora's graduation. I'll cook. You pick the music."

"That's a Tuesday night."

"It's a Tuesday night with a brisket."

Marisol laughed, and something in her chest loosened. She thought about the courthouse in Chicago in 2005, the flimsy paper certificate that hadn't been worth anything in half the country, the way Deb's hands had shaken. She thought about how many times since then they'd rebuilt this life out of whatever was on hand.

"Invite people?" she asked.

"God, no."

"Good."

So they did that. Deb made the brisket and burned the first batch of rolls and made a second. Marisol found the record player in the basement and put on Nina Simone, then Etta James, then something ridiculous from 1998 that made them both wince. They ate at the picnic table Deb's father built. The lights held. Around ten, Marisol reached across the table and held her wife's wrist, and neither of them said anything for a while, and that was the whole gift.


Marcus found the calendar note first — a small penciled circle around March eleventh, drawn in Dana's handwriting sometime last autumn.

"Twelve years," he said, tapping it. "You planned ahead."

Dana looked up from the sink, hands soapy. "I planned to *remember*. That's different."

They had done the restaurant thing before, the one with the tasting menu and the waiter who described each course like a eulogy. They had done the weekend in Asheville, which had been lovely, except Dana got a migraine on Saturday and spent it in a dark hotel room while Marcus wandered a bookstore alone, buying novels neither of them read.

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

Marcus set the calendar down. "Say more."

"The kitchen table wobbles. It's wobbled for four years. Every time we eat, I put my elbow down and the water glasses shake, and I think, *someday*."

He laughed. "You want to fix a table for our anniversary."

"I want to fix the table, and I want to eat at it. Something ridiculous. Whatever we want, no reservation."

So on the eleventh, they cleared the dining room and turned the table upside down on a bedsheet. Marcus tightened the bolts while Dana held the leg steady, and when they discovered one joint had cracked entirely, she drove to the hardware store while he sanded, and came back with wood glue and two ice cream sandwiches that were already melting.

They set the table right side up at seven-thirty. It didn't wobble. They pressed on it, testing, both of them at once, like children.

Dinner was scallops Marcus overcooked slightly and a bottle of wine they'd been saving for no clear reason. Dana put her elbow down hard on the table, deliberately, and watched the water sit perfectly still in the glass.

"Twelve years," she said.

"Thirteen next time," Marcus said. "We'll do the chairs."


Marcus found the calendar on the fridge, the twenty-third circled twice in blue ink.

"You remembered," he said.

Priya was slicing tomatoes at the counter, still in her scrubs from the overnight shift. "I circled it in March. I figured you'd forget."

"Ten years." He leaned against the doorframe. "What do you want to do?"

She set down the knife. "Honestly? Not a restaurant. I don't want to sit across a white tablecloth making conversation while somebody refills our water every four minutes."

"So what, then?"

"I've been thinking about the lake house. The one we rented that first summer, with the terrible mattress."

Marcus laughed. "The one with the raccoon."

"Barbara."

"You named a raccoon Barbara."

"She had a Barbara energy." Priya rinsed her hands. "I looked it up. It's still on the rental site. It's cheaper in September."

He pulled out a chair and sat. "Two days? Or the whole week?"

"I can get four days off if I trade with Dana. But you have the Hendricks deposition."

"Which I can move." He was already doing the math, and she could see it on his face — the tally of favors, the emails he'd have to send Monday morning. "I'll move it."

"You don't have to."

"Priya." He reached over and took the dish towel out of her hands, which was his way of making her stop moving. "I want to move it."

They booked it that afternoon, sitting side by side on the couch with the laptop between them, arguing pleasantly about whether to bring the good coffee or just buy some there. She fell asleep against his shoulder before the confirmation email came through. He read it twice, then closed the laptop and stayed where he was, letting his arm go numb, listening to her breathe.


Marcus found the takeout menus stacked on the counter where Elena had left them, each one with a corner folded down.

"Twelve years," she said, coming in from the garage with her laptop bag still on her shoulder. "I keep thinking we should do something big. Like Charleston again."

"We could." He moved the menus aside. "Or."

"Or what?"

He'd been thinking about it for two weeks, since the calendar reminder popped up. "Or we finally clear out the back bedroom. Put in the shelves. Make it the room we said we'd make in 2019."

Elena set her bag down slowly. "That's the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."

"I know."

"I love it."

They started Saturday at seven in the morning, which was later than Marcus wanted and earlier than Elena had agreed to. The room held everything they hadn't decided about: her mother's sewing machine, a box of his graduate school notebooks, a treadmill neither had touched since the second Obama administration. They sorted into piles. They argued twice, once about the treadmill and once about whether a plastic bin of birthday cards from people they no longer spoke to counted as sentimental or as clutter.

Elena won the treadmill argument. Marcus won the cards, sort of — they kept eleven and recycled the rest.

By four they had the walls bare and the floor swept. He drove to the hardware store for brackets while she painted the trim. When he got back she'd put on the playlist from their wedding, which was mostly embarrassing, and she was singing along badly with a brush in her hand.

They ordered Thai and ate it sitting on the floor of the empty room, backs against the fresh trim, careful not to lean.

"Next year Charleston," Elena said.

"Next year Charleston," Marcus agreed, and neither of them entirely believed it, and neither of them minded.