The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Nadia came through the door, still holding her keys, a canvas bag of groceries hooked over her forearm. Jonah looked up from the cutting board.

"You got the ginger?"

"I got ginger, I got the scallions, I forgot the sesame oil." She set the bag on the counter and started unloading. "I stood in that aisle for a full minute. I even said the words *sesame oil* out loud."

"We might have a little left." He wiped his hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle and crouched to check the cabinet, the one with the door that never quite shut. He came up with a bottle and shook it near his ear. "Enough for tonight. Barely."

She kicked off her shoes by the radiator and washed her hands at the sink, bumping him with her hip so she could reach the soap. "How was the thing with Marcus?"

"Rescheduled. Again." He was slicing carrots on a bias, the way she'd shown him once and he'd adopted like it was doctrine. "Third time. At this point I think he's just going to email me the whole proposal and pretend that was the plan."

"That's better for you anyway."

"It is better for me."

She started on the scallions, cutting them into thin green rings, sweeping them off the knife with her thumb. The kitchen smelled like garlic and hot oil. Somewhere in the apartment the radiator knocked twice and went quiet.

"Did you take the recycling down?"

"I did not take the recycling down."

"I'll get it after."

"You always say that and then it's Thursday."

"And Thursday is when they take it," he said, "so the system works."

She laughed and handed him the bowl of scallions, and he tipped them into the pan, and for a minute neither of them said anything, just the sound of it hissing.


The kitchen light had a buzz in it that neither of them had gotten around to fixing. Dana dropped her bag by the door and toed off her shoes, and Marcus, already at the counter, held up a bell pepper like evidence.

"This was two ninety-nine," he said. "For one pepper."

"So we're rich people now."

"We're pepper people." He set it on the cutting board and started slicing. Behind him the rice cooker clicked over to warm.

Dana washed her hands and pulled the chicken out of the fridge, sniffing it the way her mother always had, which Marcus found funny and had stopped mentioning. She laid the thighs on a sheet pan and shook salt over them without measuring.

"Kayla's mad at me," she said.

"About the thing with her brother?"

"About the thing with her brother. She said I 'made a face.'"

"You did make a face."

"I was chewing."

They worked around each other in the narrow galley, a choreography that had taken about eight months to learn and now happened without thought—he stepped left when she opened the oven, she reached over his shoulder for the olive oil. The peppers hit the pan and hissed.

"Did you call about the water heater?" she asked.

"I called. They said Thursday between eight and noon, which means Thursday at 11:58."

"I have a meeting."

"I'll take the morning."

She kissed his shoulder in passing, more habit than romance, and got two plates down. One was chipped; she kept it for herself out of some private logic he'd never asked about.

They ate at the coffee table because the actual table had mail on it, had had mail on it since March. The television played something neither of them watched. Marcus said the chicken was good. Dana said it needed lemon next time, and made a note on her phone, and forgot about it by morning.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Marisol came through the door, still in her work badge, still smelling faintly of the hospital's antiseptic hand foam.

"You beat me," she said, dropping her bag on the bench they'd bought at a yard sale two summers ago and never gotten around to refinishing.

"Barely." Devin was at the counter with a cutting board, working through a bell pepper with more force than it required. "The 40 was backed up past the exit. Some guy's boat came off a trailer."

"A boat?"

"A whole boat. Just sitting in the left lane like it belonged there."

She washed her hands at the kitchen sink, then leaned over to look in the pan. Chicken thighs, browning unevenly. "You didn't pat them dry."

"I patted them."

"You waved a paper towel at them."

He handed her the tongs without argument, which was his way of conceding, and moved on to the broccoli. They'd fallen into this a long time ago — she finished what he started, he started what she'd never get around to. Neither of them had decided it on purpose.

"Your mom called me," he said.

"Called you? Not me?"

"She said your voicemail's full again. She wants to know if we're coming for Thanksgiving or if she should tell your aunt."

Marisol turned the chicken. "What'd you say?"

"I said I'd ask you and then we'd both forget for three weeks."

"That's accurate." She reached past him for the soy sauce, her shoulder brushing his. "Tell her yes. But not the whole weekend."

The dog scratched at the back door. Devin let her in, wiped her paws with the towel that lived on the hook for that purpose, and got the plates down — the mismatched ones, because the good ones were still in the dishwasher from Sunday.

They ate at the counter, standing, because the table had a laundry basket on it.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Priya came through the door, shaking rain off her jacket. She hung it on the hook by the mail table, where three days of catalogs had accumulated.

"You're early," Danny said from the kitchen. He was standing over a cutting board, working through a red bell pepper with the dull knife again.

"Meeting got canceled. Sharon's kid has strep." Priya set her bag down and came around the counter, peering into the pan. "Is that the chicken from Sunday?"

"It's fine. I smelled it."

"That's not — okay." She opened the fridge anyway, moved the oat milk aside, checked the date on the package. "It's fine."

"Told you."

She washed her hands and took over the pepper, because Danny cut everything into shapes that were technically not slices. He didn't argue. He moved to the stove and turned the burner down under the pan, then went to the sink and started on the bowls in there from breakfast.

"Your mom called me," he said over the water.

"Why does she call you?"

"Because you don't answer. She wants to know if we're coming for Diwali or if she should tell your aunt not to make the extra sweets."

Priya scraped the pepper into the pan. It hissed. "We're coming. Tell her we're coming."

"I did. Then she asked if I'd eaten dinner and I said I was making it and she asked what, and I said chicken and rice, and she went quiet."

"That's her disappointed quiet."

"I know it now."

The window over the sink had fogged. Priya reached past him for the soy sauce and the sesame oil, added both without measuring, and stirred. Danny dried his hands on the dish towel that was already damp and got two plates down, the good ones, for no reason.

"Ten minutes," she said.

"I'll find something to watch."

"Not the one with the submarine."

"It's a good show."

"It's a sad show." She turned the burner off.


The onions had already started to catch when Rosa came through the door, shaking rain off her jacket.

"You started without me," she said, hanging it on the hook that had been loose since March.

"You said seven." Danny scraped the pan with a wooden spoon, lowering the heat. "It's seven-twenty."

"There was a wreck on Cedar. Two lanes down to one." She kicked off her shoes and left them where they landed, which he'd stopped mentioning around the second year. "Is that the chicken from Sunday?"

"It's fine. I smelled it."

"That's not a scientific test."

"I ate a piece raw once and lived."

She looked at him. "When?"

"College. Different chicken."

Rosa washed her hands at the sink, then reached past him for the cutting board. He shifted left without being asked, an old choreography. She started on the peppers, the red one and half the green one that had been rolling around the crisper drawer since the week before.

"Marisol asked if we're coming to the thing on Saturday," she said.

"What thing?"

"The baby thing. For Chris and Amy."

"I thought that was next month."

"It was next month. Then it became Saturday." She swept the peppers off the board with the flat of the knife. "I told her probably."

"Probably means yes."

"Probably means I wanted to check with you first, which is what I'm doing."

He added the peppers, and the pan hissed. "We'll go. I have to be back by four for the game."

"You have to be back by four."

"I'd like to be back by four."

She got two plates down and the good salt, and they stood there a while not saying anything, the fan over the stove running loud. Outside the rain picked up against the window over the sink.

"It smells okay," she admitted.

"It's fine," he said. "I told you."


Maya got home first, which meant the kitchen radio was already on—some public station doing a segment about municipal composting—when Devon came through the door with his laptop bag and a bag of limes.

"They didn't have the cilantro," he said, setting the limes on the counter. "Or they had it, but it was that sad kind. Yellow at the edges."

"We'll live." Maya was rinsing rice in a mesh strainer, her sleeves shoved up past her elbows. "Can you deal with the chicken? It's been sitting out maybe twenty minutes."

Devon washed his hands and unwrapped the thighs. The paper towel roll was down to its cardboard tube, which he noted out loud, and Maya said she'd put it on the list, and neither of them wrote anything down.

They worked around each other in the way of people who had shared eight hundred square feet for three years. He knew to open the window over the sink before searing anything; she knew he'd forget to preheat the oven, so she turned it on herself while reaching past him for the sheet pan.

"Bianca texted," Maya said. "She wants to know if we're doing anything for the Fourth."

"Are we?"

"I said I'd ask you, which is what I'm doing now."

"Is her boyfriend going to be there?"

"Probably."

Devon considered this while pressing down on the chicken with a spatula. "Then let's say we have plans and figure out what the plans are later."

Maya laughed, tapping the strainer against the sink. The rice went into the pot with a little salt and too much water, the way she liked it.

They ate on the couch at 7:40, plates on their knees, the TV showing something they'd both seen before. Devon put his feet on the coffee table and Maya pushed them off, absently, without looking away from the screen.


Marisol got home first, which meant the kitchen was already warm when Theo came through the door, shaking rain off his jacket. She'd put a pot of water on and was standing at the counter with her phone propped against the sugar canister, scrolling a recipe she'd already made a dozen times.

"It's doing that thing again," Theo said, hanging his jacket on the hook that had been half-pulling out of the wall since March.

"The dryer?"

"The dryer. It ran an hour and everything's still damp."

"So we're calling someone."

"I'm going to look at it this weekend first."

Marisol made a noncommittal sound and handed him a head of garlic. He took it without being asked what to do with it, which was, she'd decided a while ago, one of the better arguments for living with someone. He smashed the cloves with the flat of the knife and peeled them while she browned sausage in the good pan, the one his mother had given them at Christmas with a look that suggested she expected grandchildren in return.

"Sofia texted," Marisol said. "They're doing a thing Saturday. Bea's birthday."

"What kind of thing?"

"Backyard. Bring a side."

"So we bring the pasta salad."

"We always bring the pasta salad."

"Because it's good," Theo said, "and because it holds."

The water came to a boil and she dumped in the rigatoni, stirring it once, then leaving it. Theo set the table without being asked—two plates, the mismatched forks, the salt they'd bought in Vermont two summers ago and hadn't finished. He poured half a glass of wine for each of them from a bottle that had been open since Sunday and was probably past its best.

They ate at the small table by the window, talking about nothing—a coworker's bad haircut, whether they needed a new shower curtain. Outside the rain kept on. Neither of them mentioned the dishes, though both were counting on the other.


The kitchen light flickered once before holding steady, the way it had for three months now.

"I keep meaning to call somebody about that," Marcus said, dropping his messenger bag onto the chair by the door.

Dana was already at the counter, still in her work clothes, sleeves pushed up past her elbows. "You said that in March."

"I said it in April. In March I said I'd fix it myself."

She laughed and handed him a knife. "Onions. And don't do the thing where you cut them into planets."

"They were wedges."

"They were planets."

He took the cutting board to the far end of the counter. The chicken thighs were already out, salted, sitting in a shallow pan. Dana had a habit of doing prep the second she got home, before she'd even changed, like she needed to prove the day was over.

"How was the Kellerman thing?" he asked.

"Postponed. Again." She turned on the burner. "Which means I have nothing to do tomorrow morning and then everything to do Thursday."

"That's how they get you."

"That's how they get me."

The radiator ticked. Outside, someone was parallel parking badly — the same silver sedan that always took four attempts.

"He's never going to learn," Dana said, not looking up.

"It's aspirational, watching him."

She scraped the onions into the pan and they went loud. Marcus reached past her for the wooden spoon and she leaned back slightly to let him, an old choreography, neither of them thinking about it.

"Your mom called me," she said.

"About Thanksgiving."

"About Thanksgiving."

"What'd you tell her?"

"That I'd talk to you." She tasted the sauce, made a face, reached for the vinegar. "So consider yourself talked to."

He nodded slowly. "We should probably decide."

"We should." She handed him the spoon. "After dinner."

"After dinner," he agreed, and stirred.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Dana got her boots off. She left them by the door, next to Marcus's sneakers, which were sitting in the middle of the entryway like they always did.

"I'm home," she called, unnecessarily. The apartment was small enough that he'd already heard the door.

"Hey." Marcus was at the counter with a cutting board and a bell pepper, still in his work polo with the company logo on the chest. "How was the drive?"

"Forty minutes. There was a stalled car by the exit." She dropped her bag on the chair they both pretended wasn't a bag chair. "What are we making?"

"That stir-fry thing. The one with the peanut sauce."

"Do we have peanut butter?"

He paused, knife in the air. "We had peanut butter."

Dana opened the cabinet, moved a box of crackers, and found the jar behind the oatmeal. She held it up without saying anything.

"Okay, so we have peanut butter," Marcus said.

She washed her hands and took over the pepper while he started on the chicken, because he cut things too big and she didn't want to bring it up again. The kitchen was narrow enough that they kept touching—her hip against his arm, his elbow near her shoulder as he reached past for the soy sauce.

"Your mom called me," he said.

"About Thanksgiving?"

"About Thanksgiving."

"What did you say?"

"I said I'd have to check with you, which is what I always say, and she said 'of course,' which is what she always says."

Dana scraped the pepper into the pan. It hissed. "We should probably actually decide."

"We should."

Neither of them said anything else about it. The oil popped. Marcus put on a podcast, the one about old crimes, and they cooked in the loose, half-attentive way of people who had done this several hundred times before.


Marisol got home first, which meant she got to pick the music. She put on something with a lot of horns, kicked off her shoes by the door, and started pulling things out of the fridge: half an onion wrapped in plastic wrap, a bell pepper going soft on one side, the chicken thighs she'd taken out that morning and hoped were still fine.

Dev came in twenty minutes later, still in his work fleece, and set his bag on the chair that had become the bag chair. "It's cold," he said. "Did you feel how cold it got?"

"I felt it. I ran from the car."

He washed his hands and looked over her shoulder. "What's happening here?"

"Whatever this is." She tilted the cutting board so he could see the onion. "Rice? There's rice."

"There's rice." He pulled the pot down from the cabinet over the stove, the one they both had to reach for. "Do we have that green sauce still, the one from your mom?"

"Back of the fridge. Behind the pickles."

He found it, held it up to the light, and shook it. "It looks alive."

"It's supposed to look like that."

"It's supposed to look alive?"

"Just open it."

While the rice went, he chopped the pepper badly, in uneven chunks, and she didn't say anything about it, which she considered generous. He told her about a meeting that went forty minutes over for no reason. She told him the dryer was making the noise again.

"I'll look at it Saturday."

"You said that about the noise last time."

"That was a different noise."

They ate at the counter because the table had mail on it. Halfway through, he got up and got them each a glass of water without being asked, and she noticed, and didn't say anything about that either.


The list was Dana's, written on the back of an envelope from the electric company, but Marcus was the one holding it in the car, reading items aloud in the voice of a game show host.

"Paper towels. Whatever brand is on sale. Eggs — the large ones, not the jumbo, because last time you got jumbo and they didn't fit in the door."

"That was one time," Dana said, turning into the lot behind the hardware store. They had a stop there first: a furnace filter, because the old one had gone gray and fuzzy and Marcus had been sneezing since October. The store smelled like sawdust and rubber. He held two sizes up to the light while she checked the measurement she'd photographed on her phone, and they argued mildly about whether sixteen-by-twenty-five meant the same thing on both boxes.

At the grocery store, they split up. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the middle aisles and the meat counter. They met by accident near the frozen food and compared carts like customs agents.

"You got the crackers," she said. "The list said tortillas."

"They were next to each other."

"Those things are not next to each other in any store."

He put the crackers back. She let him keep the pint of coffee ice cream because it was on sale and because he'd carried the filter without complaining.

The checkout line was long. A woman ahead of them had a coupon that wouldn't scan. Marcus scrolled through his phone; Dana read the tabloid headlines and reported the more absurd ones under her breath. When it was their turn, she bagged while he loaded, an unspoken division they'd never discussed.

In the parking lot, the wind had picked up. He wedged the eggs between two bags so they wouldn't slide.

"Filter first," she said, starting the car, "then lunch."

"Filter first," he agreed.


The list was Dana's handwriting, but Marcus had added things at the bottom in ballpoint: coffee filters, dish soap, the good tortillas. They took his car because hers still had a check-engine light neither of them had dealt with.

At the hardware store first, because Dana insisted the leaking bathroom faucet had gone from annoying to insulting. She held the old cartridge up to a bin of replacements while Marcus wandered off and came back with a package of furnace filters.

"We changed those in March," she said.

"It's June."

"They're every three months."

He looked at the package. "So we're right on time."

She didn't argue. He was usually right about the house, in a way she found mildly irritating and mostly reassuring.

The grocery store was crowded, the way it always was at eleven on a Saturday. Marcus pushed the cart and Dana walked ahead, pulling things off shelves and handing them back to him without looking. They disagreed briefly about yogurt — she wanted the plain kind, he pointed out that neither of them ever actually ate the plain kind — and compromised on vanilla. In the produce section she squeezed avocados with a seriousness he'd learned not to mock out loud.

At checkout, the card reader took three tries. The bagger asked if they wanted help out and Marcus said no thanks, we're fine.

They unloaded in the driveway, carrying everything in two trips instead of the four it would have taken alone. Dana put away the cold things while Marcus flattened the paper bags for the recycling bin. Then he went upstairs with the faucet cartridge and a wrench and she heard him swearing gently through the ceiling.

"Do you need me?" she called.

"No. Maybe. Give it five minutes."

She sat down with the coffee that had gone cold and waited, listening to the water finally stop.


The list on the fridge had been accumulating all week in two different handwritings: Dana's tidy print, Marcus's slanted scrawl that she could only half decipher.

"What's this one?" she asked, holding it up in the car. "Cilantro? Ciabatta?"

"Cinnamon. For the oatmeal."

They stopped at the hardware store first, because the bathroom faucet had been dripping since Tuesday and Marcus had finally watched enough videos to feel confident about it. He compared two washer kits for longer than Dana thought necessary while she wandered to the paint chips and brought back three shades of green she liked for the bedroom.

"That one looks like a hospital," he said.

"It's called Sage Whisper."

"It's called hospital."

At the grocery store, they split up — Marcus took produce and the bakery, Dana took everything down the middle aisles — and met near the dairy case with two carts, which they hadn't meant to do. He'd bought grapes because they were on sale and a rotisserie chicken because he was hungry, which she pointed out was exactly why they'd eaten before leaving. He said he'd been hungry then too.

The self-checkout flagged the wine and they waited for someone to come scan a badge and squint at her license. A kid a few lanes over was having a full-body meltdown about a candy bar, and Dana and Marcus looked at each other and did not say anything, which was its own conversation.

Home, they carried bags in from the driveway in two trips, and Marcus put the frozen things away wrong, and Dana moved them without mentioning it. He went to work on the faucet. Twenty minutes later she heard water hit the floor and a word he didn't usually say, and she brought a towel without being asked, and stood in the doorway laughing at him while he wrung it out.


The list was Dana's, written in pencil on the back of a receipt, but Marcus was the one holding it in the parking lot of the Kroger on Sixth, squinting because he'd left his glasses in the car.

"It says 'the good bread,'" he said. "What does that mean?"

"The seedy one. Not the sandwich bread."

"Those are both bread."

"You'll know it when you see it."

Inside, they split up the way they always did, which never actually saved time because Dana kept texting him questions and he kept forgetting to check his phone. She found him in the cereal aisle comparing two boxes of granola that cost the same and had, as far as she could tell, identical ingredients.

"Just pick one."

"This one has more fiber."

"Then get that one."

"But I like the other one."

She took the other one out of his hand and put it in the cart and kept walking. He caught up near the eggs, opening a carton and checking for cracks, which was a habit he'd gotten from his mother and which Dana had started doing too without ever deciding to.

The bill came to eighty-four dollars, more than they'd planned, mostly because of the coffee they both refused to compromise on. Marcus paid. Dana would get the next one; they had a rough, unspoken system that had never once been discussed out loud and had somehow worked for three years.

At home they carried the bags up in two trips. She put things away while he broke down the box in the recycling bin, standing on it to flatten it. Then he ran the vacuum in the living room while she scrubbed the shower, and by two o'clock the apartment smelled like lemon cleaner and the granola was open on the counter, both of them eating it dry out of the box with their fingers.


The Saturday started slow. Marisol was still in her pajama pants at ten, scraping the last of the peanut butter onto a heel of bread, when Dev came out of the bedroom holding two hangers.

"Which one goes to the dry cleaner?"

"Both. The gray one has that stain from Kevin's wedding."

They made a list on the back of a receipt, the way they always did, arguing mildly about whether they still needed olive oil. Marisol thought they had a backup in the pantry. Dev said the backup was the one they'd been using since March.

They took his car because hers needed an oil change, another thing that had migrated from one week's list to the next since February. The dry cleaner was a ten-minute stop, then the hardware store, where Dev spent longer than expected comparing furnace filters while Marisol wandered the paint chips, holding up cards named Morning Fog and Whispering Oat, imagining the bedroom.

"We're not painting," Dev said behind her.

"I'm not saying we're painting. I'm saying if we painted."

At the grocery store, they split the list. He took produce and the middle aisles; she took dairy and the pharmacy section for her allergy pills. They found each other again near the frozen food, Marisol pushing the cart with one foot on the bar, coasting.

"They were out of the good yogurt," she said.

"I got the store brand."

"That's not the same thing."

The checkout line took twenty minutes because the self-scanners kept freezing. In the parking lot, the wind picked up and a bag tipped, sending three oranges rolling under the car. Dev crouched to get them, knees on the asphalt, while Marisol laughed and then apologized for laughing.

They put the groceries away together, mostly. He handled the freezer. She stacked the cans. Then he started the laundry, and she sat down on the couch and, briefly, did nothing at all.


Saturday started with an argument about whether they actually needed to go to the store at all.

"There's pasta," Nadia said, still in the T-shirt she'd slept in. "There's that jar of sauce your mom sent."

"That jar has been there since March." Marcus was already pulling on jeans. "And we're out of coffee. Actually out. I checked."

That settled it. Nadia went to shower while Marcus stripped the sheets off the bed and got a load started, then stood in the kitchen writing a list on the back of a Con Edison envelope. He wrote *coffee* twice without noticing.

They walked the six blocks to the Stop & Shop because the car needed an inspection sticker and neither of them wanted to think about that yet. Nadia took the cart. She was faster in stores than he was, decisive, while Marcus lingered in aisles reading labels on things he had no intention of buying.

"Are we doing chicken thighs or the breasts," she called from two aisles over.

"Thighs. Thighs are better."

"Thighs are on sale, that's why I'm asking."

At checkout she bagged while he paid, and they discovered they'd both put yogurt in the cart, four containers total, which Marcus insisted was fine because he ate it for breakfast and Nadia pointed out that he had not eaten breakfast since October.

Walking back, the bags cut into their fingers and they had to stop twice to switch hands. At home, Nadia put groceries away while Marcus moved the sheets to the dryer, and then he swept the kitchen while she scrubbed the burner grates, which had needed it for weeks.

By two o'clock the apartment smelled like detergent and lemon cleaner. Nadia made coffee with the new bag. They drank it sitting on the floor by the window because the couch had clean laundry piled on it, and neither of them wanted to fold it yet.


The list was Maya's handwriting, but Ben had added things at the bottom in his cramped block letters: BATTERIES (AA), that hot sauce, coffee filters — the cone ones.

They left the apartment a little after ten, later than they'd meant to. Maya drove because Ben's car was in the shop again, a rattling noise the mechanic had described with a shrug. First stop was the hardware store for a furnace filter, which took twenty minutes because neither of them could remember the size and they'd forgotten to check before leaving.

"Twenty by twenty-five," Ben said, holding one up.

"That's what you said last time and it didn't fit."

He photographed the aisle tag anyway, in case.

The grocery store was crowded in the way Saturday stores are, carts abandoned mid-aisle, a kid crying near the bakery. Maya took the left side and Ben the right, meeting at the endcaps. He put a bag of shredded cheese in the cart; she took it out and replaced it with a block.

"It's four dollars cheaper and it doesn't have the anti-caking stuff."

"You never grate it."

"I'll grate it."

They stood a long time in front of the yogurt while Maya read labels. Ben went to get the coffee filters and came back with the wrong ones, went again. At checkout, the total was higher than they'd expected, as it always was, and Ben tapped his card without comment.

Back home, they carried everything up in two trips, Maya holding the door with her hip. Ben changed the furnace filter — it did fit — while she put things away, standing on a chair to reach the top shelf for the extra paper towels.

At one thirty they ate leftover pad thai out of the container, standing at the counter, and agreed they should probably do the laundry, and didn't, not for another hour.


The list was Marisol's, written on the back of an envelope from the electric company, but Dev was the one who carried it, folded in his palm like a raffle ticket.

They'd started the morning slow. Coffee, the good kind she'd been rationing. Dev had run the dishwasher at seven and unloaded it while she was still asleep, and she noticed, when she came into the kitchen, that he'd put the mixing bowls in the wrong cabinet again. She moved them. She didn't say anything. He saw her move them and didn't say anything either, which felt, after two years, like a small kind of grace.

At the hardware store they bought a furnace filter and a pack of light bulbs, and Marisol talked him out of a fifteen-dollar level he didn't need.

"We have a level," she said.

"We have a level that lies."

"Then it's a *personality*."

The grocery store was crowded in the way Saturdays are crowded, everyone moving with a kind of dazed urgency. Dev took the cart. Marisol took the list back, because he'd been holding it upside down. She did produce; he went for the coffee and the frozen things and came back with an extra bag of pretzels she didn't argue about. They debated the chicken thighs versus the breasts, and thighs won, as they always won. At the register she paid, because he'd covered last time, and neither of them kept a real ledger but both of them kept a loose sense of fairness.

In the parking lot, the sky had gone flat and gray. They loaded the trunk together, cold air rolling out of the bags.

"Laundry when we get back," she said.

"Laundry," he agreed, "then I'm doing nothing."

"You have to change the filter."

"Fine. Filter, then nothing."

She got in and put her cold hands on his neck before he could start the car.


The alarm didn't go off, which was fine, because it was Saturday. Dana woke first anyway, at seven-forty, and lay there listening to Marcus breathing beside her until she gave up and went to make coffee.

By nine they had a list. Marcus wrote it on the back of an envelope from their landlord, holding it against the refrigerator door while Dana called out items.

"Coffee filters. The cone ones, not the flat."

"I know which ones."

"You bought the flat ones last time."

"That was a different store," he said, which was true and also not an answer.

They took her car because his needed an oil change, another errand, one they were not going to do today. First stop was the hardware store on Winslow for a replacement screen for the bathroom window, which had torn sometime in March and let in a mosquito every night since. The man at the counter cut it to size while Marcus held the frame and Dana wandered off to look at houseplants she wasn't going to buy.

The grocery store was crowded. Dana pushed the cart; Marcus went ahead and came back with things, an outrider. He returned with the wrong yogurt twice and the right yogurt on the third attempt. In the cereal aisle they had a brief, low-voiced disagreement about whether they already had rice at home. Marcus was certain. Dana bought rice.

At the register Dana bagged while Marcus paid, and then they carried it all up the two flights, four bags each, one trip.

There was rice at home. A full box, unopened, behind the pasta.

"Don't," Marcus said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're saying it with your face."

She put the new box beside the old one and started on the screen while he made sandwiches.


The list on the fridge had grown all week in two different hands—Dana's tidy print, Marcus's slanted scrawl that turned "paper towels" into something closer to hieroglyphics.

"Did you write 'oat milk' or 'oat mulch'?" Dana asked, squinting at it Saturday morning.

"Milk. Obviously." Marcus was on his knees by the dishwasher, prying at the bottom rack with a butter knife. Something had jammed the sprayer arm two loads ago, and he'd been ignoring it since Thursday. "Got it. It's a bottle cap. Yours, probably."

"I don't drink beer."

"Then it's mine." He held it up like evidence and dropped it in the trash.

They ran the laundry first so it would be done when they got back—Dana loading, Marcus fishing a stray sock out from behind the machine with a hanger. Then the bank, where the ATM ate four minutes of their morning, and then the pharmacy, where Marcus waited in the car with the windows down because the parking lot was full and he hated circling.

The grocery store was crowded in the way Saturdays always were, carts nose to nose in the produce section. They split up. Dana took the perimeter—apples, a bag of spinach, chicken thighs on sale—and Marcus took the aisles, texting her a photo of two different pasta sauces with the caption *which one*. She wrote back *the one that isn't $7*. He bought the seven-dollar one anyway.

At checkout, they bagged their own groceries because the lane was self-serve and the machine kept insisting there was an unexpected item. Marcus dealt with the attendant. Dana loaded the cart.

Back home, they carried everything in two trips. Dana put away the cold things while Marcus flattened the boxes for recycling and moved the laundry to the dryer. It was two-fifteen. They still had the whole afternoon.


Saturday started slow. Dana woke first, made coffee, and stood at the window watching a neighbor drag a recycling bin to the curb. When Marcus came out of the bedroom, hair flattened on one side, she handed him the second mug without a word.

"We should hit the store before it gets crazy," he said.

"After the laundry's in."

He carried the basket down to the building's basement while she sorted the darks, and they lost eleven minutes searching the apartment for quarters. Marcus finally found a roll in the junk drawer, behind a tangle of phone chargers and a screwdriver neither of them remembered buying.

At the grocery store, they split the list. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the aisles. She squeezed avocados with what she considered expertise and picked out three that would ripen at staggered intervals. He came back with a box of cereal that wasn't on the list.

"It was buy-one-get-one," he said.

"We have two boxes at home."

"Now we'll have four."

She let it go. At the register the total was higher than either expected, which it always was, and Marcus tapped his card while Dana bagged. Outside, the parking lot shimmered a little in the heat, and they loaded the trunk of her Corolla, the eggs riding on the passenger seat like something precious.

Back home, they put things away in the wordless choreography of two people who'd shared a kitchen for three years — he handled the high shelves, she reorganized the fridge around his careless placements. Then the laundry, folded on the bed while a home renovation show played on his laptop.

Around four, Dana said, "I still have to call my mom back."

"Do it after," Marcus said. "There's an hour of daylight left. Walk?"

She thought about it, then found her shoes.


The alarm didn't go off, because it was Saturday, but Dana woke up at 7:40 anyway. She lay there for a while listening to Marcus breathe, then gave up and made coffee.

By ten they had a list, written on the back of a envelope from the electric company. Marcus wanted to hit the hardware store first because the bathroom faucet had been dripping since Tuesday and he'd finally looked up which washer it took.

"You're sure it's a washer," Dana said in the car.

"I'm sure it's probably a washer."

The hardware store took twenty minutes, mostly because Marcus stood in the plumbing aisle comparing two packages that appeared identical. Dana wandered off and came back with a bag of birdseed they didn't need, which she held up without comment. He shrugged. They bought both.

The grocery store was crowded in the way it always was on Saturdays, carts blocking the ends of aisles, someone's kid crying near the bakery. Dana pushed and Marcus read from the envelope. They negotiated over cereal—he wanted the one with the toucan, she pointed out that they had half a box at home. They compromised by buying it anyway. In produce, she picked through the bell peppers while he texted his sister back about Thanksgiving. The line at checkout was six deep. Marcus bagged.

At home they put things away, which mostly meant Dana handing him items and Marcus finding places for them. Then he lay on his back under the bathroom sink with a wrench while she sat on the edge of the tub and read him the instructions off her phone, occasionally scrolling too fast.

It was a washer. The drip stopped. Marcus stood up and hit his head on the underside of the sink, and Dana laughed at him, and then apologized, and then laughed again.

They had sandwiches for lunch.


The list had been on the refrigerator since Wednesday, accumulating items in two different handwritings. Dana added *coffee filters* in blue pen while Marcus loaded the reusable bags into the trunk of the Civic.

"Did you check if we need dish soap?" he called toward the apartment door.

"There's like an inch left." She locked up and jogged down the steps. "That's a week."

"That's three days the way you wash dishes."

The Kroger on Belmont was already crowded at ten thirty. Dana pushed the cart while Marcus went ahead into produce, weighing bananas in his palm the way his mother did, putting back the ones with too much green. They disagreed about apples—she wanted Honeycrisp, he pointed at the price per pound—and settled on Galas, which neither of them really wanted.

In the cereal aisle a kid was crying about something, and Marcus and Dana exchanged the look they always exchanged, the one that meant *not yet, thank God*.

He remembered the dish soap. She remembered they'd used the last of the olive oil making that pasta on Thursday. At checkout the total came to eighty-seven dollars, which was less than usual, and Dana said so, and Marcus said it was because they hadn't bought any beer.

They unloaded the car in two trips. Dana put things away while Marcus took the recycling down to the bins behind the building, then came back up with the mail—a credit card offer, a wedding invitation from his cousin, a water bill.

"Your cousin's getting married in October," he said, holding it up.

"In Cleveland?"

"In Cleveland."

She was folding the bags into the drawer where they kept the bags. "We should probably go."

"Yeah," he said. "We probably should."

Then he changed the sheets while she vacuumed, and by one o'clock the apartment smelled like clean laundry and the afternoon was still ahead of them.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus held it, because he had the better handwriting and had added three items in the car: coffee filters, batteries, something for Tuesday.

They'd started the morning with laundry. Dana had sorted while Marcus carried the basket down two flights to the machines in the basement, and by ten they were out the door, the dryer still running, the timer set on Dana's phone so they wouldn't forget and leave their sheets to wrinkle into a knot.

At the hardware store they bought a plunger, which felt like an admission of something, and a package of furnace filters. Marcus wanted to look at paint chips for the bedroom. Dana let him take two, then steered him toward the register.

The grocery store was crowded in the way Saturdays always were, carts nosing each other in the produce aisle. Dana pushed. Marcus read the list aloud and disappeared periodically down side aisles, returning with things not on it: a jar of pickled onions, a bag of pretzel thins.

"We have pretzels."

"We have stale pretzels."

She let it go. In the meat case they debated chicken thighs versus breasts for four full minutes, a conversation they'd had probably fifty times, and landed where they always landed. Marcus put back the more expensive olive oil when Dana raised an eyebrow at the shelf tag.

At checkout, the card reader asked for a PIN and Marcus blanked, standing there with his hand hovering, until Dana said the number quietly over his shoulder. The bagger asked if they wanted help out. They said no.

In the parking lot the cart wobbled. Marcus loaded the trunk while Dana returned it to the corral, jogging the last few steps against the wind. On the way home they stopped for gas, and Dana ran in for a lottery ticket, which she did sometimes, for no reason she could explain.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus held it, because Dana always lost paper in her coat pockets.

"Eggs," he read. "We have eggs."

"We have three eggs. That's not eggs, that's a rumor of eggs."

They had already been to the hardware store, where Marcus stood in front of a wall of furnace filters for six full minutes trying to remember whether their unit took a 16x25 or a 20x25. Dana had photographed the old one before they left, which she mentioned twice on the drive to the grocery store, and would probably mention again at dinner.

The store was crowded in the way Saturday mornings always were, carts logjammed at the entrance where the flowers were. Dana peeled off toward produce. Marcus took the cart and went for coffee and the paper towels, and they met again near the deli counter, where Dana was holding two blocks of cheddar and frowning.

"The store brand is four dollars less."

"Then get the store brand."

"But the other one is the good one."

"Then get the good one."

She put the store brand in the cart. Marcus didn't say anything, which was its own kind of comment, and she elbowed him lightly in the ribs.

At checkout they bagged their own to speed things up, Dana handing, Marcus packing, a system refined over three years and two apartments. In the parking lot the cart wanted to pull left. A woman's dog barked at them from an open car window and Dana said hello to it seriously, like a person.

At home they carried everything in two trips. Marcus changed the furnace filter — 16x25, as it turned out, which Dana let go — while Dana started a load of towels and put the milk away.

Later she found the receipt on the counter and did the math on the cheddar. Four dollars and eleven cents.


The list on the fridge had grown all week in two different hands—Dana's tidy print, Marcus's slanted scrawl that only he could read. Saturday morning, he pulled it down and squinted.

"What does this say? 'Cardboard'?"

"Cardamom," Dana said, pouring the last of the coffee. "For the rice thing you liked."

They ran the dishwasher first, then Marcus hauled the recycling bin down two flights while Dana stripped the bed. She found one of his socks under the mattress and left it on his pillow without comment.

The Kroger on Fairview was already crowded. Marcus took the cart because he pushed too fast otherwise and she'd rather control it. They split the list. Dana handled produce, squeezing avocados with a skepticism she'd learned from her mother, while Marcus wandered off toward the cereal and came back with a box of something neon.

"No."

"It's on sale."

"It's ninety percent sugar."

"So is your coffee creamer."

She let him keep it. In the meat department they debated chicken thighs versus breasts for four minutes, longer than the decision deserved. A woman with a toddler edged around them, and Dana apologized. Marcus got the thighs.

At checkout, the total made them both wince. Dana tapped her card; last time had been his. In the parking lot they loaded the trunk, the eggs riding in the front seat like a passenger.

Back home, they carried everything up in two trips. Marcus put away the cold things wrong—yogurt in the door again—and Dana rearranged it after he'd wandered off to deal with the burnt-out bulb in the hallway. She heard him swearing at the ladder.

"You need help?"

"I need a taller apartment."

By one o'clock the groceries were in, the laundry was churning, and the hallway was bright again. They ate leftover pizza standing at the counter, and then Marcus asked whether the oil change could wait until next weekend. Dana said it could.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus had added three things to it in his cramped handwriting: coffee filters, batteries, "the good kind of hot sauce."

They left the apartment at ten, later than they'd meant to. Dana drove because Marcus's car was in the shop again, some issue with the alternator that the mechanic had explained twice and neither of them fully understood. First stop was the hardware store, where Marcus stood in the plumbing aisle comparing two nearly identical rubber gaskets while Dana wandered off and came back with a small pot of basil.

"We don't need that," Marcus said.

"It was four dollars."

"You killed the last one."

"That was July. It was ninety-eight degrees in there."

He didn't argue. He'd forgotten to change the AC filter that month, and they both knew it.

At the grocery store, they split up—Dana taking produce and dairy, Marcus taking the middle aisles—and reconvened near the freezer section, where Marcus was holding two brands of frozen dumplings.

"Get both," Dana said. "They're on sale."

They disagreed briefly about whether they already had enough olive oil at home. Marcus was sure they did; Dana was sure the bottle was nearly empty. They bought it. In the checkout line, Dana scrolled through her phone and read out loud a text from her sister about Thanksgiving plans, and Marcus said they should decide soon, and Dana said she knew, and neither of them decided anything.

The bags took two trips up to the second floor. Marcus put the cold things away while Dana broke down the cardboard for recycling. The basil went on the windowsill above the sink, where the light was best.

Afterward Marcus lay on the couch with his forearm over his eyes, and Dana sat on the floor beside him, sorting a pile of mail into two stacks: things to keep, and everything else.


The list started as a joke on the refrigerator door — Dana had written "BREAD (real bread, not the sad white kind)" in green marker, and Micah had added "sad white kind" underneath with an arrow.

By ten on Saturday they'd worked through most of it. The laundry was churning in the basement of their building, the sheets stripped and bundled. Micah had spent forty minutes on the phone with the internet company, pacing the length of the living room while Dana mouthed *ask about the promotional rate* at him and he waved her off, then asked about the promotional rate.

At the grocery store, Dana pushed the cart and Micah walked ahead, doubling back with things. He brought her a jar of pickled onions.

"We have pickled onions."

"We have half a jar of pickled onions."

"Which is more than zero."

He put them in the cart anyway. She let it go. In the cereal aisle she caught him reading the back of a box of granola with real concentration, and something about it — the seriousness of him, in his old flannel, doing math on grams of sugar — made her want to lean into his shoulder, so she did, briefly, and he said "hm" without looking up.

They disagreed about the chicken. Dana wanted the thighs; Micah said breasts were healthier and Dana said thighs actually taste like something. They bought both. At checkout Micah bagged while Dana paid, and he loaded everything into the trunk in the fine gray drizzle that had started while they were inside.

Back home they carried it all up in two trips. Micah put away the cold things; Dana found space in the cabinet by consolidating three boxes of pasta into two.

"We forgot the bread," she said.

Micah looked at the list on the counter, then at her. "There's a place on Ninth."

They put their shoes back on.


The list was Dana's handwriting, but Marcus had added things in the margins: coffee filters, the good pretzels, a question mark next to "dish soap?" because he wasn't sure if they'd run out or if the bottle was just hiding behind the sink.

They left the apartment at nine-forty, which was later than they'd meant to. Dana drove. Marcus rode with his knees against the glovebox, scrolling through a podcast queue and settling on nothing.

First the hardware store, for a furnace filter and a replacement bulb for the closet light that had burned out on Tuesday and been living as a small inconvenience ever since. Marcus stood in the lighting aisle holding two boxes, comparing wattages with genuine seriousness, while Dana wandered off and came back with a bag of tulip bulbs she said were on clearance and would probably get planted eventually.

The grocery store was crowded the way it always was on Saturdays. They split up near the produce — Dana took the left side of the store, Marcus the right — and reconvened at the dairy case, where Dana pointed out that he'd grabbed the wrong yogurt again, the plain instead of the vanilla.

"It's fine," he said. "I'll eat it."

"You won't. It'll sit there until April."

He put it back. In the cereal aisle they had a brief, low-stakes disagreement about whether they needed another box of granola, which Marcus won by pointing at the cart and saying, "You already put one in."

At the register the total was more than either of them expected. Dana tapped her card. Marcus bagged, badly, putting the bread underneath a carton of orange juice, and she let it go.

Back home they carried everything up in two trips. Marcus changed the closet bulb while Dana put the cold things away. The tulip bulbs went on top of the refrigerator, where they stayed.


The list was Maya's handwriting, but Dev had added things at the bottom in his cramped scrawl: paper towels, that yogurt you like, batteries?? He wasn't sure what the batteries were for anymore. Something had been beeping in the apartment on Wednesday night, and then it had stopped, and neither of them had found it.

They took her car because his had the check-engine light on again. At the Kroger on Baxter, the parking lot was already full at ten in the morning, and Dev circled twice before Maya said, "Just take the far one, it's fine, we're not in a hurry."

Inside, they split up the way they always did. Maya took produce and dairy; Dev took the middle aisles and the frozen section. She texted him a photo of two brands of pasta sauce with the message *which one did your mom use?* and he wrote back *neither, but the left one is $1.20 cheaper.* They met up again near the bread, and she put a bag of pita in the cart without asking, and he didn't object.

At checkout, the total was $137, more than they'd meant to spend, and Maya made a face. "The cheese was eleven dollars," Dev said. "For a small piece of cheese."

"You put it in the cart."

"I'm aware."

They loaded the trunk in the sun, and then drove to the hardware store for a furnace filter and a plunger, because the guest bathroom had been running slow. Dev stood in front of a wall of filter sizes with his phone flashlight on, reading the old one's dimensions off a photo he'd taken.

Home by noon. Maya put the cold things away while Dev carried the rest in from the car, and the ice cream was soft at the edges but not ruined.


The list was written on the back of a receipt, in Dani's handwriting, with three items added later in Marcus's blockier print.

"You put down 'cheese,'" she said in the car. "What kind of cheese?"

"The orange kind. For the pasta thing."

"Cheddar." She wrote it in. "Just say cheddar."

They'd already dropped two bags at the donation bin behind the church on Ellsworth, mostly Marcus's old work shirts and a lamp neither of them liked but had felt obligated to keep because his aunt gave it to them. The trunk still smelled faintly of cardboard.

At the store, Dani took the cart and Marcus took the produce, which was their usual arrangement. He came back with bananas that were too green and a bag of apples she hadn't asked for.

"They were on sale."

"We have apples."

"We have two apples."

She let it go. In the cereal aisle a kid was screaming about something and both of them pretended not to notice, though Marcus caught her eye and made a small face and she pressed her lips together.

At checkout she remembered the coffee filters, and he jogged back for them while she loaded the belt. He returned with the filters and also a bag of pretzels, which she looked at and did not comment on.

Home took eleven minutes. He carried four bags in one trip, which he did every time despite the plastic cutting into his fingers, and she carried the eggs and the bread separately because he'd crushed a loaf in September and she hadn't forgotten.

While she put things away he started the laundry, and then found the sink still full from breakfast and did that too. She came in and stood beside him and dried while he washed, and neither of them said anything for a while, and it was fine.

Around two, he asked if she wanted to go get the oil changed. She said tomorrow.


The list was Nadia's, written on the back of a receipt in her cramped handwriting, but Julian was the one holding it in the cart's little wire basket, squinting.

"You wrote 'cheese,'" he said. "That's it. Just cheese."

"The kind we always get."

"We've bought four kinds of cheese in the last month."

She leaned past him and put a block of sharp cheddar in the cart without breaking stride. They'd been in the store twenty minutes and had already done the loop wrong, starting in produce and doubling back for the yogurt she liked, the one with the fruit on the bottom that Julian claimed tasted like medicine.

They'd gotten up late. Saturdays had a shape by now: coffee, the slow negotiation over who was going to deal with the laundry, a run to the hardware store because the toilet handle in the second bathroom had been rattling since August. Julian had bought a replacement flapper and a new chain, and had spent eleven minutes in the plumbing aisle comparing two nearly identical packages while Nadia read the labels on drain cleaner out of boredom.

In the checkout line she unloaded the cart while he bagged, an arrangement neither of them had discussed. Bread on top. Eggs on top. The cashier asked if they'd found everything.

"Mostly," Nadia said.

In the parking lot the wind was cold enough that they both hurried. Julian loaded the trunk while she sat in the passenger seat with the heat on, holding the receipt.

"Ninety-four dollars," she said when he got in.

"That's not bad."

"That's terrible. We didn't even buy meat."

He backed out carefully. At home there was still the laundry, and the toilet, and a bag of clementines to put in the bowl on the counter. She reached over and turned the radio down, and he let her.


The list was Maya's, but Deshawn held it, because Maya's handwriting only made sense to Maya.

"Almond milk or oat?" he asked, squinting at the third line down.

"Both. The oat's for coffee." She was three feet away, weighing a cantaloupe in each hand like she was deciding which one had wronged her. "This one sounds hollow. Is that good or bad?"

"I have no idea what that means."

"Neither do I." She put one back and set the other in the cart.

They'd started the morning with the intention of being efficient. At eight-thirty they'd stripped the bed and gotten a load going, and Deshawn had scrubbed the shower while Maya carried four months of Amazon boxes down to the recycling bins. Then they'd sat on the couch for forty minutes doing nothing at all, which was how it always went.

At the store, they split up near the deli. Maya took produce and dairy; Deshawn took the middle aisles and the stupid errand of finding the specific brand of black beans her mother insisted were the only acceptable ones. He found them behind a display of tortillas, three cans left, and took all three.

At checkout, Maya remembered eggs. She jogged back and returned slightly winded, holding the carton open to check for cracks.

The bags were heavy on the walk to the car, and the parking lot was hot in that early-June way that felt like a promise. Deshawn loaded the trunk while Maya returned the cart, and on the drive home she read the receipt out loud, appalled.

"Eighty-nine dollars. For that."

"For a week."

"For four days, realistically."

Back at the apartment, they put everything away in the wrong places, moved the laundry to the dryer, and agreed—firmly, out loud—that they were not going to the hardware store today.

They went at four.


The list was Maya's, written in pencil on the back of an envelope, but Dev was the one holding it in the parking lot because she'd asked him to check whether they still needed coffee filters.

"We have like forty," he said. "You bought the big box in February."

"Then cross it off. Don't just tell me, cross it off."

Inside, the store had that Saturday-morning crowd, carts nosing each other in the produce aisle. Maya squeezed avocados with the seriousness of someone defusing something. Dev drifted toward the bakery and came back with a loaf of sourdough she hadn't asked for.

"It's four dollars," he said, preemptively.

"I didn't say anything."

"You made the face."

"That's just my face."

They split up for efficiency, which never worked. Dev texted her a photo of two brands of pasta sauce and she wrote back *the one on the left, obviously*, though she couldn't see the price tags. He got the one on the right. By the time they met at the dairy case, the cart had accumulated things neither remembered adding: a bag of limes, a candle, a rotisserie chicken that was warming a corner of the produce.

The self-checkout scanner refused the limes twice. An employee came over, tapped something, and left without saying anything.

At home, they carried everything up in one trip because Dev insisted, and he dropped the eggs on the landing, and only two broke. Maya wiped the stairs while he put things away in the wrong places on purpose, or not on purpose, she'd stopped being able to tell.

Then the laundry, which was hers, and the trash, which was his, and the recycling bin they dragged to the curb together because one wheel had cracked in December and neither had fixed it.

By two o'clock the apartment smelled like the chicken. They ate it standing up, out of the plastic tray, with their fingers.


The list on the fridge had been accumulating since Tuesday. Dana pulled it down while Marcus dug through the junk drawer for the reusable bags they always forgot.

"Did you write 'cheese' or 'chives'?" she asked, squinting.

"Cheese. My handwriting's not that bad."

"It's exactly that bad."

They stopped at the hardware store first, because the bathroom faucet had developed a drip that woke Marcus at three in the morning and that Dana claimed she'd never once heard. He spent ten minutes comparing washer kits while she wandered off and came back with a pack of furnace filters they actually did need.

At the grocery store, they split up. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the interior aisles, where he texted her a photo of three different pasta sauces with the caption *pick*. She sent back a thumbs-up, which helped no one. He bought the middle one.

They reconvened near the frozen section and argued mildly about whether they still had olive oil at home. Neither could remember. They bought it, which meant they'd get home and find two unopened bottles in the pantry, as had happened with soy sauce, and before that, cumin.

The self-checkout gave Marcus trouble over the bag of loose apples. Dana stood beside him with the receipt-length patience of someone who'd rather be doing this than waiting in the human line.

Back home, they carried everything in two trips. Dana put away the cold things while Marcus started the laundry, which had been sitting in the machine damp since the night before and now needed rewashing. He didn't mention this. She noticed anyway and said nothing, which he appreciated.

By two o'clock the faucet was fixed, mostly. It still dripped, but slower. Marcus declared victory. Dana made a sandwich and let him have it.


The list was Maya's, written on the back of a receipt while she waited for the coffee to finish. Dan had added two things in his cramped handwriting at the bottom: batteries, and something illegible that turned out, after some debate in the car, to be "bagels."

They hit the hardware store first because it opened at eight and the parking lot on Saturday mornings turned brutal by ten. Dan wanted a specific kind of drywall anchor for the shelf that had been leaning against the bedroom wall since March. Maya wandered off to look at houseplants and came back with a pothos in a plastic pot, which Dan looked at without comment.

"It's eight dollars," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You did the face."

At the grocery store they split up. Maya took the produce and dairy; Dan took the middle aisles and the meat counter. They met near the frozen foods, comparing carts like customs officials. He'd gotten the wrong yogurt, the vanilla instead of plain, and she sent him back while she stood in line at the deli counter holding a number.

The self-checkout was down to two working machines, so they waited behind a man buying what appeared to be forty cans of cat food. Dan bagged while Maya scanned. Total came to $148, more than either of them expected, and Maya said something about how it used to be a hundred, and Dan said it hadn't been a hundred since 2019.

At home, the eggs went in first, then the cold things, then the rest in whatever cabinet had room. Dan started on the shelf. Maya could hear the drill through the wall while she broke down the cardboard for recycling, and at some point the sound stopped and he said, from the bedroom, "Come look at this," and she went.


The list was Dana's, written on the back of a Comcast envelope, but Marcus was the one who carried it, folded twice, in his shirt pocket. They'd gotten a late start. It was almost eleven by the time they left the apartment, and the parking lot at the Kroger on Belmont was already full of people who'd had the sense to come at nine.

"Circle around," Dana said. "Someone's leaving by the cart return."

"That's a Buick. Buicks never leave."

But it did, eventually, and Marcus took the spot while an older man in a Titans hat waited two rows over, resigned.

Inside, they split up, which they always agreed was more efficient and which never was. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the middle aisles, where he stood a long time comparing two brands of black beans that cost the same. She found him there.

"They're identical," she said.

"One's organic."

"For four cents. Just get it."

At checkout the coupon on her phone wouldn't scan, and the cashier, a teenager named Britt, tried three times before typing the code in manually. Dana apologized. Britt said it happened constantly. Marcus bagged, badly — eggs in with the cans — and Dana rearranged them in the trunk without comment.

Then the hardware store for a furnace filter and a package of felt pads for the kitchen chairs, because the downstairs neighbor had said something. Then the dry cleaner, closed, which neither of them had thought to check.

Home, they carried everything up in two trips. Marcus put away the cold things while Dana wiped down a shelf that had gotten sticky. He found a jar of capers behind the vinegar, unopened, from some recipe neither could remember.

"Do we keep this?"

"Keep it," she said. "We'll use it."

He put it back where it had been. It was one-thirty. They still had the whole afternoon.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus had added things to it in his cramped handwriting: batteries, the good coffee, something about a shower curtain liner. They'd been putting off the liner for three weeks, ever since it went gray at the bottom.

They took his car because hers was low on gas and neither of them wanted to deal with that yet. Saturday morning traffic on Colfax was slow, and Dana read the list out loud while Marcus drove, both of them trying to remember whether they still had rice.

"We have rice," he said. "We have four kinds of rice. We have a rice problem."

At the hardware store, they spent eleven minutes in the bathroom aisle debating liner thickness. Marcus wanted the cheap one, arguing that they'd just replace it again in six months anyway. Dana pointed out that the cheap one was why they were standing there. He conceded, mostly because a man with a flatbed cart was waiting to get past them.

The grocery store was crowded. Dana took the cart and the left side of the list; Marcus took produce and the deli counter, where he stood behind a woman ordering a quarter pound each of six different things. They found each other again in the cereal aisle. He'd forgotten the lemons. She'd gotten two half gallons of milk instead of one, which he said was optimistic.

At checkout, the card reader asked for a PIN and Dana blanked on it, then remembered. Marcus bagged. They loaded the trunk in the parking lot, and he returned the cart while she scrolled through her phone in the passenger seat.

At home they put things away without talking much, moving around each other in the small kitchen. Marcus installed the liner. Dana started a load of towels. It was a little after one.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus held it, because Dana had a habit of losing paper.

They started with the recycling, which had been accumulating on the back porch for three weeks. Marcus carried the bin down the apartment stairs while Dana propped the door with her foot, and they drove to the depot behind the hardware store, where an attendant in a reflective vest waved them toward the glass bins. The bottles made a satisfying racket.

"That's the sound of every Tuesday since March," Dana said.

At the dry cleaner, they picked up Marcus's suit for his cousin's wedding and dropped off a comforter that had suffered a coffee incident. The woman behind the counter squinted at the stain and said, hopefully, "We'll see."

The grocery store was crowded, the way it always was on Saturdays around eleven. Dana pushed the cart. Marcus read the list aloud, item by item, and they argued mildly in the produce section about whether they actually needed two bunches of cilantro or whether the first bunch would rot in the crisper drawer like the last one had. They compromised on one. In the cereal aisle, Marcus put a box of the sugary kind in the cart, and Dana looked at him, and he left it there anyway.

They split up near the deli to save time. Dana got the sandwich meat and the cheese; Marcus got laundry detergent, paper towels, and, unprompted, the good coffee. They found each other again by the frozen foods.

"Chicken or the pasta thing tonight?" Dana asked.

"The pasta thing. We have the sauce."

At checkout, the total was more than either expected. It always was. Marcus paid; Dana would get the next one, or wouldn't, and neither of them would keep track.

They carried the bags up in two trips, and Dana put the milk away first, and then they sat down.


The list was Maya's, written on the back of a receipt in her cramped handwriting, but Dev was the one holding it in the parking lot of the Kroger on Fifty-Third, squinting because he'd left his glasses in the car.

"It says 'the good bread,'" he read. "What is the good bread?"

"You'll know it when you see it."

"That's not how information works."

They split up at the produce section, which was their system and had been since the second month they lived together. Maya took the perimeter — vegetables, dairy, the deli counter where she always got two pounds of turkey and always regretted not getting three. Dev took the aisles. He came back with the bread, which was correct, and also with a jar of pickled banana peppers nobody had asked for.

"For sandwiches," he said.

"We don't eat those."

"We could."

She let it go. In the checkout line he read her the rest of the list while she looked at the tabloids, and they discovered they'd both grabbed sour cream, so one went back on the shelf by the gum.

At home the groceries went in fast because the ice cream was already sweating. Maya put things away wrong on purpose — cereal above the stove — to see if he'd notice, and he did, and moved it, and said nothing, which was its own kind of comment.

Then there was the rest of it: a load of towels, the bathroom sink that had been draining slow for a week. Dev knelt with a coat hanger and a flashlight and pulled out something gray and terrible, and Maya, from the doorway, said she was going to be sick, and did not leave.

By two they were done. He made sandwiches. He put banana peppers on hers without asking.

She ate the whole thing.


The list was Maya's, but Dev held it, because Maya's hands were full of the reusable bags they kept forgetting in the trunk.

"Eggs," she said. "The good ones or the regular ones?"

"Regular. We're already over budget from the thing with the tires."

They'd been up since eight, which on a Saturday felt like a small betrayal. Dev had run the dishwasher and put away the clean load from Thursday that had been sitting there judging them. Maya had stripped the bed, started the sheets, and discovered that the laundry detergent was down to a scrape at the bottom of the jug, which meant it went on the list too, in her small block letters.

The store was crowded. A woman with a double stroller had blocked the yogurt entirely, and they waited, not impatiently, Dev reading the ingredients on a granola bar box he had no intention of buying.

"Do we need coffee?"

"We have half a bag."

"That's like four days."

"Fine, get coffee."

At the register, the total was thirty dollars more than either of them expected, which was normal. Maya tapped her card. Dev bagged, arranging the eggs on top, the way he always did, the way she'd taught him after the incident two years ago.

In the parking lot the cart wheel shuddered and pulled left. Dev fought it to the car and Maya laughed at him.

At home they put things away in a rhythm they hadn't decided on and couldn't remember forming: he took the cold things, she took the pantry. Then the sheets went in the dryer, and Maya vacuumed the hallway while Dev took out the recycling, and by one o'clock the apartment smelled like laundry and the coffee they'd opened early, just to try it, and Saturday still had most of itself left.


The list on the fridge had been accumulating since Tuesday, written in two different hands. Dana added *coffee filters* in her small block letters, then pulled the paper free of its magnet.

"Ready?" she called.

Marcus came out of the bedroom still working his arm into a jacket sleeve. "We should hit the hardware store first. If we go to Kroger last, the ice cream won't melt."

"There's ice cream on the list?"

"There is now."

The hardware store took eleven minutes. They needed a furnace filter, and Marcus stood in the aisle comparing MERV ratings while Dana checked her phone and then wandered two aisles over to look at drawer pulls they didn't need. She came back with a package of picture hooks, since the framed print from her mother had been leaning against the hallway wall since August.

At the grocery store, they split the list without discussing it — she took produce and dairy, he took the middle aisles and the meat counter. They met near the bread. Marcus had put two boxes of the store-brand crackers in the cart.

"Those are the ones that taste like nothing," Dana said.

"They're for soup. They're supposed to taste like nothing."

She let it go and added a bag of clementines. At the register, the total came to eighty-seven dollars, which was less than either of them expected, and Marcus paid because Dana had paid last time and they kept a loose, unspoken ledger.

Home, they carried everything in two trips. Dana put the cold things away while Marcus went down to the basement to change the filter, and she heard him swearing mildly at the latch. Later, after the groceries were shelved, she found the hammer and hung the print in the hallway, a little low, and neither of them ever moved it.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus held it, because Dana always lost lists between the car and the store.

They'd started the morning at the laundromat on Peachtree, since the washer in their building had eaten someone's quarters and never recovered. Marcus folded fitted sheets badly and Dana redid them, which was a routine so old it had stopped being annoying and become a kind of joke. They ate gas station donuts in the car with the windows down because the air conditioning made a noise nobody wanted to pay to diagnose.

At Kroger, they split up. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the middle aisles and the meat counter. She texted him a photo of two brands of tortillas with the message *which one*, and he wrote back *the one you always get*, which was unhelpful and true. He found her by the yogurt eight minutes later, comparing expiration dates like it was a serious science.

"They're out of the coffee," he said.

"The good one?"

"The cheap one."

She made a face. They bought the good one. In the checkout line she scrolled through the calendar on her phone and reminded him about his sister's birthday, and he said he knew, and she said he didn't, and he admitted he didn't.

At home they carried everything up in one trip, badly, and Dana dropped a lemon in the stairwell. Marcus put things away in the wrong places and Dana moved half of them. He broke down the boxes for recycling while she wiped the counters and started a load of towels in the building's other washer, which worked most of the time.

It was two-fifteen. The couch was open. Neither of them said anything about it, but they both sat down, and the afternoon went quiet and unremarkable, the way good ones do.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus was the one who kept it in his coat pocket, and by the time they reached the grocery store parking lot he'd already lost track of whether they needed eggs or just remembered thinking about eggs.

"Two dozen," Dana said, pulling the cart free from the corral. "You ate four yesterday."

"Three."

"Four. I counted the shells."

Inside, they split up the way they always did—him for produce and bread, her for everything with a coupon attached. He came back with a bag of clementines that weren't on the list and a loaf of the seeded rye she liked, and she pretended not to notice the clementines while quietly moving them to the front of the cart so they wouldn't get crushed.

The line at checkout moved slowly. A woman ahead of them was arguing about a rain check for canned corn. Marcus leaned on the cart handle and read the tabloid headlines out loud in a newscaster voice until Dana elbowed him, laughing, and told him to stop.

At home they carried everything in two trips. Dana put the cold things away while Marcus broke down the paper bags for recycling and stacked them by the back door, where they'd sit for a week before anyone did anything about them.

Then it was laundry. He sorted; she started the first load and swore at the machine, which had a habit of stopping mid-cycle if the load was unbalanced. He came down and redistributed the towels without saying anything, and it ran fine.

By two o'clock the kitchen smelled like the coffee she'd made too late in the day, and there was still the bathroom to clean and a light bulb out in the hall closet. Marcus asked if they could do the bulb tomorrow. Dana said yes, knowing neither of them would.


The list was Dana's, written on the back of an envelope from the electric company, but Marcus was the one who carried it, folded into his jacket pocket like something official.

They started at the hardware store because it opened at seven and the parking lot was still mostly empty. Dana wanted the right furnace filter this time, not the cheap one that let dust through, and Marcus stood in the aisle comparing MERV ratings while she went to look at drawer pulls she had no intention of buying. He found her three aisles over holding a brushed nickel knob against her palm.

"We're not redoing the kitchen," he said.

"I know. I'm just looking."

At the grocery store she took the cart and he took the list, which was how they'd always done it without ever deciding to. She read out what they needed from memory anyway—coffee, eggs, the yogurt he liked, chicken thighs because they were on sale. He argued mildly for the ground beef instead. They compromised by getting both and then had to reconsider the produce because the cart was filling faster than expected.

In the cereal aisle Dana ran into a woman she used to work with and stood talking for six or seven minutes while Marcus drifted ahead to look at the bread. When she caught up he had already bagged four apples and put back the sourdough after checking the price.

"Sorry," she said.

"It's fine. Who was that?"

"Renée. From the Fairfield office."

The checkout line was slow. They loaded the car in the drizzle that had started while they were inside, and Marcus took the cart back to the corral because Dana had done it last time. On the way home she opened the yogurt in the passenger seat and ate it with a spoon she'd remembered to bring.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus was the one who kept it in his jacket pocket, folded into quarters, checking it at the end of every aisle like a man consulting a map.

They'd started the morning slowly. Coffee, then the laundry Dana had left in the washer overnight, which smelled faintly sour and had to be run again. Marcus took the recycling out to the bin at the curb while she matched socks on the living room floor, the television on but ignored. By eleven they had the car keys and a canvas bag from a bank neither of them used anymore.

The hardware store came first, for a furnace filter and two light bulbs for the hallway fixture. Dana wanted the warm-toned ones. Marcus said all bulbs were the same and then bought the warm-toned ones anyway.

The grocery store was crowded in the way Saturdays always are. Dana pushed the cart; Marcus went ahead for produce, coming back with a bag of apples she squinted at.

"These are mealy. Look at the bruising."

"They were on sale."

"They're on sale because they're mealy."

He swapped them without complaint. In the middle aisles they disagreed twice — about whether they still had rice at home (they did, she was right) and about buying the more expensive coffee (he won, mostly by putting it in the cart while she was reading a soup label). At checkout the total came to eighty-seven dollars and change. Marcus paid; Dana would cover the internet bill on Tuesday.

Unloading took two trips up the apartment stairs. Dana put things away while Marcus fought with the plastic wrap on the filter, then knelt at the furnace closet with the old one in his hands, gray with dust.

"How long has it been in there?" she asked.

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to."

She laughed and handed him the new one.


The list had been magneted to the fridge since Wednesday, accumulating additions in two different hands—Dara's tidy print, Marcus's slanted scrawl that had turned "cilantro" into something closer to "cilantro?" because he was never sure if she meant the leafy kind or the seeds.

They left the apartment at nine-forty, later than planned. Marcus had insisted on running the dishwasher first, and Dara had spent ten minutes hunting for her sunglasses before finding them on the bookshelf, where she'd set them down while watering the pothos.

The first stop was the hardware store for a furnace filter and a replacement handle for the bathroom cabinet, the old one having come off in Marcus's hand two weeks ago. He held the broken piece up against the display of knobs while Dara wandered toward the paint chips, drifting back with three greens fanned in her fingers.

"For what?" he said.

"Nothing. Someday."

At the grocery store, they split the list the way they always did—she took produce and dairy, he took the center aisles and whatever was on sale in the meat case. They met near the bread and negotiated. He'd gotten the wrong yogurt again, the vanilla instead of plain, and she made a face but put it in the cart anyway because it wasn't worth walking back. He'd also gotten a bag of pretzels that wasn't on the list, and she pretended not to see it.

The self-checkout scanner wouldn't read the barcode on the coffee. Marcus tried four times, then flagged down the attendant, a teenager who fixed it in three seconds by turning the bag sideways.

In the parking lot, loading bags into the trunk, Dara said the filter needed changing before it got cold. Marcus said he'd do it after lunch. He mostly meant it.


The list was Dana's, written on the back of a receipt in her cramped, slanted handwriting, but Eli was the one who kept it in his jacket pocket. They left the apartment a little after ten, when the sun had finally burned the frost off the windshield.

First was the hardware store, because Dana insisted the leaking showerhead had gone from annoying to intolerable. Eli held up two washers under the fluorescent lights while she squinted at the packaging.

"That one," she said. "The bigger one. Trust me, I watched a video."

"You watched half a video."

"I watched enough."

They bought both, plus a roll of plumber's tape, because Eli said it was a dollar-fifty for peace of mind.

At the grocery store, they split up the way they always did, Dana taking produce and dairy while Eli went for the pantry aisles. She texted him a photo of two brands of yogurt with a question mark. He texted back *the one you actually eat*. They found each other again near the frozen section, cart mostly full, and argued mildly about whether they needed more coffee. Eli won by pointing out they had used the last of it that morning.

In the checkout line, Dana remembered they were out of trash bags and went back for them while Eli started unloading. The cashier, a teenager with a name tag reading NOAH, asked if they had a rewards number. Eli recited Dana's phone number from memory, which he was quietly proud of.

At home they carried everything up in two trips. Dana put things away while Eli attacked the showerhead with a wrench and a stubbornness that lasted twenty minutes.

"Try it now," he called.

She turned the handle. The spray came out even, no dribble down the wall.

"Huh," she said. "Look at that."

He shrugged, pleased, and went to find the receipt so they could throw it away.


The list was Dana's, written on the back of a receipt in her cramped handwriting, but Marcus held it because his coat had better pockets.

They started at the hardware store, where the furnace filter took nine minutes to find and forty seconds to buy. Marcus insisted on the more expensive one. Dana pointed out that they'd changed the last filter in February and it was now October, so clearly they were not the kind of people who deserved a premium filter. He bought it anyway. In the parking lot she took a picture of a bumper sticker that said MY OTHER CAR IS ALSO THIS CAR and sent it to her brother.

At the grocery store they split up, which they'd agreed years ago was the only way. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the middle aisles and whatever meat was on sale. She found him twenty minutes later comparing two brands of tortilla chips with an intensity she associated with tax season.

"They're the same," she said.

"These have lime."

"Get the lime ones, then."

He put both in the cart. At checkout the total came to eighty-seven dollars, which was less than Dana had braced for, and she said so, and Marcus said that's because you forgot the coffee, and she said no I didn't, and then they both looked in the bags and she had, in fact, forgotten the coffee. He went back for it. She waited by the cart and read the ingredients on a granola bar without absorbing any of them.

Home took eleven minutes. They carried everything in two trips instead of the heroic one trip Marcus always proposed. Dana put the cold things away while he wrestled the old furnace filter out, coughing at the gray felt of it, and then it was one-thirty on a Saturday and the whole afternoon was still there, unspent.


The list was Dana's, written on the back of a takeout receipt, but Marcus was the one who insisted they leave before ten.

"Saturday after eleven is a war zone," he said, pulling on his jacket. "Everyone with a toddler is in that store."

They stopped at the hardware place first, because the bathroom faucet had been dripping since Tuesday and Marcus had watched enough videos to believe he could fix it. Dana wandered the paint chips while he compared washers, holding two nearly identical cards—Alabaster and Chantilly Lace—up to the fluorescent light as if they might reveal themselves.

"They're the same," Marcus said, appearing behind her.

"They're not."

"They're the same white."

She put them back and took one anyway, folding it into her pocket.

The grocery store was already filling up. Marcus pushed the cart while Dana worked the list, and they fell into the routine they'd built over two years: she picked produce, he handled the aisles with the boxes and cans. She squeezed avocados and found three that would ripen by Wednesday. He stood too long in front of the pasta sauces before texting her a photo of two jars, and she wrote back *the cheaper one*.

They disagreed about the chicken. Dana wanted thighs; Marcus wanted breasts, and lost, because she was the one who'd be cooking on Tuesday. At the register she bagged while he loaded, and they both winced at the total.

Back home, the groceries went away in ten minutes—cold things first, Marcus's rule. Then he lay on his back under the sink with a wrench while Dana held the flashlight and read the video's instructions aloud, one step behind him.

The drip stopped around one-thirty. They stood looking at the faucet for a moment, oddly pleased, and then Dana said she was starving, and they went to make sandwiches with the bread they'd just bought.


The alarm went off at eight, which Dani thought was criminal for a Saturday, but Marcus had already been up for twenty minutes, standing in the kitchen in his sweatpants, scraping burnt egg off the pan they kept meaning to replace.

"We need to leave by nine-thirty," he said when she shuffled in. "The thing at the dry cleaner closes at noon."

"The thing." She poured coffee. "It's a suit, Marcus. Say suit."

They made a list on the back of a receipt. Dani wrote in her looping hand while Marcus opened cabinets and reported inventory: no rice, half a jar of peanut butter, four rolls of paper towels because he'd panic-bought at the warehouse store in March.

The dry cleaner first, then the hardware store for a furnace filter, where Marcus stood in the aisle holding two sizes and squinting until Dani took a picture of the old one's dimensions off her phone. The right one was 16x25. They bought two.

The grocery store was crowded with people who had also decided to go at eleven on a Saturday. Dani drove the cart. Marcus went off for produce and came back with a bag of clementines and an argument about whether they actually eat clementines or just let them go soft in the bowl.

"We eat some of them," Dani said.

"We eat four of them. Out of twenty."

They bought them anyway. In the cereal aisle they disagreed about oat milk versus regular and settled it by getting both. Marcus put back the fancy olives. Dani put them back in the cart when he wasn't looking.

At the register a woman ahead of them had a coupon issue that took six minutes. Marcus read the tabloid headlines out loud. Dani laughed at the one about the alien senator.

They unloaded the car in two trips. The clementines went in the bowl.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus held it, because Dana had a habit of losing paper.

They'd started the morning slow — coffee, the dishwasher unloaded in shifts, a fight over whether the smell in the fridge was the scallions or something worse. It was the scallions. Marcus bagged them and took the trash out while Dana stripped the bed, and by ten-thirty they were in the Civic with a reusable bag folded in the back seat and one they'd forgotten at home.

Hardware store first. The bathroom faucet had been dripping for three weeks, long enough that Dana had stopped hearing it and Marcus had started dreaming about it. He found the cartridge aisle and read part numbers with his phone flashlight while Dana wandered to the paint chips and came back with four grays she liked, fanned out like cards.

"We're not painting anything," Marcus said.

"I'm keeping my options open."

At the grocery store they split up, which they'd agreed made them faster and which had never once made them faster. Dana took produce and dairy; Marcus took the middle aisles and the meat counter. They texted each other. *Do we need rice.* *We have four rices.* *Ok but do we need the good rice.* They met near the frozen section and argued mildly about whether two boxes of the ice cream sandwiches counted as stocking up or as a problem. They bought two.

The line was long. Dana leafed through a magazine she wasn't going to buy. Marcus loaded the belt in his particular order — cold things together, bread last — and Dana teased him about it the way she did every week, without meaning it.

In the parking lot the cart wobbled. Dana wrestled it while Marcus opened the hatch, and they got everything in, and drove home with the windows down.


The list was Dana's, but Marcus held it, because Dana had a habit of losing paper.

"We need eggs," she said, steering the cart around a woman blocking the dairy case with a phone call.

"It's on here. Twice, actually. You wrote eggs, then you wrote eggs again."

"Then we need a lot of eggs."

They'd started the morning with laundry, which had been Marcus's idea, and which had gone badly when the machine downstairs ate two of his quarters without running. He'd stood there arguing with it while Dana went back up for the rest of the whites. Eventually a neighbor showed them the trick — a hard slap on the coin return — and now three loads were tumbling in the basement while they shopped.

"Cereal," Dana said. "The good one, not the cardboard one."

"The good one is nine dollars."

"The cardboard one is a punishment."

He put the nine-dollar cereal in the cart. She noticed, and didn't say anything, which was how she said thank you.

At the deli counter they waited eleven minutes for a half pound of turkey. Marcus checked his phone. Dana read the ingredients on a jar of pickles she wasn't going to buy. When their number was called, the man behind the counter asked if they wanted it thin, and they said yes at the same time, in the same tone, and looked at each other.

Outside, the parking lot was hot. Dana loaded bags while Marcus returned the cart, and then he came back and took the heavy one from her hands without being asked.

"Bank," she said. "Then the dry cleaner. Then we're done."

"Then the laundry."

"God. Right. The laundry."

He started the car. She rolled down her window, because the air conditioning took a minute, and put her feet up on the dash.


By ten on Saturday the apartment smelled like burnt toast, which was Dana's fault, and neither of them mentioned it.

"Do we need paper towels?" Marcus asked, standing in front of the open pantry with a pen behind his ear.

Dana was on the floor pulling recycling out from under the sink. "We need paper towels, and we need those coffee filters, the number four ones, not the cone ones you got last time."

"The cone ones fit."

"They fit if you fold them. That's not the same as fitting."

He wrote *filters (#4)* on the back of an envelope and added *paper towels*, then *eggs*, then *something for Tuesday*, because Tuesday was when her sister was coming and neither of them had thought about it yet.

They dropped the recycling at the bins behind the building, and Dana ran the vacuum over the living room rug while Marcus took the sheets out of the dryer downstairs. He folded the fitted sheet badly, the way he always did, and she took it from him without a word and folded it again into a neat square.

The grocery store was crowded. They split the list — she took produce and dairy, he took the middle aisles — and met near the deli counter, where he was holding two boxes of pasta and looking uncertain.

"Get the rigatoni," she said. "Did you get the filters?"

"Number four."

At checkout, the total was more than either of them expected, and Dana tapped her card and made a face. In the parking lot, Marcus loaded the trunk while she pushed the cart back to the corral, and on the drive home they argued mildly about whether they'd remembered garlic.

They had not remembered garlic. Marcus said he'd go back later. He didn't, and it turned out not to matter.


The list was Maya's, written on the back of a receipt in handwriting that Deon claimed was a form of code. He drove because she'd driven all week, and she read aloud from the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard until he told her, mildly, that airbags broke ankles.

First stop was the hardware store, for a furnace filter and a can of the paint they'd used in the hallway two years ago, so Deon could cover the scuff where the couch had gouged the wall during the move. He stood in the paint aisle holding the color chip up to the fluorescent light, unconvinced. Maya said it looked fine. He said it looked like a different beige entirely, and bought it anyway.

At the grocery store, they split up—she took produce and dairy, he took the middle aisles—which they'd learned was faster but riskier. They ended up with two bags of coffee. Neither would admit fault. In the checkout line, Maya remembered they needed dish soap and jogged back for it while Deon unloaded the cart, and the cashier, a teenager with a nose ring, waited patiently while Maya returned slightly out of breath.

The car was hot. They rolled the windows down. Halfway home Maya said they should have gotten the good bread from the bakery instead of the sandwich bread, and Deon said they could go back, and she said no, forget it, not worth it, and then was quiet in a way that suggested it might be.

They carried everything in two trips. Maya put groceries away while Deon changed the furnace filter, which took four minutes and involved one bruised knuckle. Afterward he opened the paint and dabbed a small test patch by the baseboard. They both looked at it.

"It's close," Maya said.

"It's not the same."

"Nobody's going to see it."

He painted the whole scuff anyway.


The list on the fridge had been accumulating all week in two handwritings—Dana's tidy print, Marcus's slanted scrawl that she could only half decipher. She pulled it down Saturday morning while he was still finding his shoes.

"Does this say 'brown rice' or 'brown ice'?"

"Rice," he said. "Also we need lightbulbs. The one in the hallway went out Tuesday and I keep forgetting."

They took his car because hers was low on gas and neither of them wanted to deal with that yet. At the hardware store they spent eleven minutes in the lighting aisle while Marcus compared wattages and Dana read the backs of packages, and they ended up buying a four-pack that was probably too bright.

The grocery store was crowded the way it always was at eleven on a Saturday. Dana pushed the cart. Marcus went ahead to the deli counter to take a number and came back with turkey and a container of olives nobody had put on the list.

"We don't need those."

"We don't need most things."

She let it go. In produce he squeezed avocados and she stopped him, said they'd be mush by Wednesday, so he put back the soft ones and kept two hard. They disagreed briefly about cereal—she wanted the store brand, he said the store brand tasted like cardboard—and compromised by buying both. In the pasta aisle she remembered they were out of dish soap and doubled back while he stood with the cart, texting his sister.

The self-checkout ate a coupon. Marcus flagged down an employee who fixed it with a key card and a bored efficiency.

At home they carried the bags in two trips. Dana put things away while Marcus changed the hallway bulb, standing on a kitchen chair, and when the light came on she called from the pantry that it was way too bright.

"Told you," he said, pleased.


The rain had stopped by the time Maya finished sorting the laundry, though the sky over Sacramento stayed the color of dishwater. She hauled the first basket down to the building's laundry room while Devon wrestled with the vacuum cleaner, which had developed a rattle he was convinced meant something had gotten lodged in the brush roll.

"It's a hair tie," he called up the hallway. "Two hair ties."

"They're probably yours," Maya said, not turning around.

By eleven they had a list going on the back of an envelope, half in her handwriting and half in his. Devon wanted to try making the braised short ribs his mother had described over the phone, which meant a detour to the good butcher counter, which meant the Raley's on Freeport instead of the closer Safeway. Maya agreed on the condition they also stop at the hardware store for the light bulbs they'd been meaning to buy since February.

The store was crowded. They split up—she took produce and dairy, he took the meat counter and the coffee aisle—and reconvened near the frozen foods, where Devon had picked up a pint of ice cream that wasn't on the list.

"It was on sale," he said.

"It's always on sale."

She put it in the cart anyway. At checkout she bagged while he loaded, and they argued mildly about whether the eggs should go on top or in their own bag, an argument they had approximately every two weeks and had never resolved.

At home, Devon carried in the heavy bags and Maya put things away, calling out when she couldn't find room. The apartment smelled faintly of the vacuumed carpet. She found the light bulbs still in the car, went down for them, and came back to find Devon standing on a kitchen chair, unscrewing the dead one in the hallway fixture, waiting.