Marisol found the good tablecloth folded in the linen closet, still creased from Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev stood at the stove, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon.

"More salt," he said, then added it before she could answer.

They'd bought the house eleven months ago, a 1962 ranch in a neighborhood full of retirees who waved from their driveways. Tonight was the first time they'd had more than two people over. Marisol had spent Saturday morning bleaching the grout in the guest bathroom, which Dev thought was excessive and did not say so.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she called.

"Five at the table, two folding in the garage. That's seven."

"There's six of us."

"Then we have enough chairs."

She counted anyway. She always counted anyway.

Dev put the bread in to warm and went to change his shirt, and Marisol heard the closet door slide and then the small sound of him swearing at a hanger. She lit the candles on the counter, the ones that smelled like nothing much, and turned the overhead lights down to the setting that made the kitchen look like a magazine.

At 6:40 he came out in the green shirt she liked, hair still damp at the temples.

"You should wear that more," she said.

"You say that and then I wear it and you don't notice."

"I notice."

He kissed the side of her head on his way to the fridge, where he stood with the door open too long, looking for the beer he'd already put in the cooler outside. Marisol didn't tell him. She was straightening the napkins, then unstraightening them, so it wouldn't look like she'd tried.

Headlights swung across the front window at 6:52. Somebody early, which was worse than late.

"They're here," she said.

"Okay," Dev said, and wiped his hands on the dish towel, and went to open the door.


The invitations had said seven, which meant Marisol had been cleaning since four.

"You washed the good glasses," Dana said from the kitchen doorway, still in her work clothes, tie loosened. "I was going to do that."

"You were going to do it at 6:55."

"I was going to do it *efficiently*." Dana kissed the back of her head and went to change, calling over her shoulder, "Did Priya say if she's still off dairy?"

"She said she's off dairy in the way people are off dairy. Which means she'll eat the gratin and complain later."

Marisol wiped down the counter for the third time. The apartment was small — a two-bedroom in a Sacramento fourplex with a radiator that clanked like someone trapped in the walls — but it cleaned up well under warm light. She lit the candle Dana's mother had given them, the one that smelled aggressively of fig.

Dana came back in jeans and bare feet and started slicing bread. "The Hendersons are bringing that wine again."

"The bad wine."

"The bad wine." Dana grinned. "I bought a backup."

They worked around each other without talking much, the way they had for eleven years — Marisol pulling the chicken, Dana finding the trivet, one of them reaching past the other for the salt without needing to ask. At 6:40 Marisol looked at the table and said, "Six chairs. We have five."

"Desk chair."

"It's ugly."

"Put a coat over it."

She laughed. Dana turned on music, something low and jazzy, and poured them each a glass of the good wine — the backup — because the first ten minutes before guests arrived were the best part, and they both knew it.

At 6:58 the buzzer went off. Marisol smoothed her shirt. Dana squeezed her hand.

"Ready?"

"No."

Dana buzzed them up anyway.


Marguerite found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev crouched at the oven, peering through the smudged glass at a chicken that had another twenty minutes in it, minimum.

"Did we ever get napkins?" she called.

"We have napkins."

"Cloth napkins."

Dev straightened up. "We have paper napkins with little turkeys on them from Thanksgiving."

"It's April."

"They're seasonally ambiguous."

She laughed and went to look anyway, and found six mismatched cloth ones in a drawer, which was fine, which was more than fine. Six was enough. Their friends were coming — the Ostrowskis, Yasmin, Tomas and his new boyfriend whose name Marguerite had written on a sticky note and stuck inside a cabinet door. Kyle. She checked. Kyle.

Dev put on a record because he believed strongly in music before guests arrived, and then he stood in front of the open refrigerator holding a lemon he didn't have a plan for. There was a green bean situation happening on the stove that he had inherited from Marguerite twenty minutes ago and did not fully understand. He added butter, which was usually correct.

"You should change your shirt," Marguerite said, passing behind him with a stack of plates.

"This is a good shirt."

"You cooked in it."

He looked down. There was a small oil stain over the left ribs, in the shape of Ohio. He went upstairs.

When he came back down, she had lit the candles too early — they'd be stubs by dessert — and she was standing in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, doing the last survey. He stood beside her and looked at the same things she was looking at.

"It's nice," he said.

"It's okay."

"It's nice."

The doorbell rang. She squeezed his wrist and went to answer it.


The lasagna had twenty minutes left, which meant Dana had twenty minutes to make the living room look like the kind of place adults lived.

"The blanket goes where?" Marcus called from the hallway, holding the ratty green throw at arm's length like evidence.

"Linen closet. Not the couch. Not draped artfully. In the closet."

He put it in the closet, then came back and started collecting the mail that had colonized the coffee table over the past three weeks—catalogs for garden equipment they didn't need, a jury summons he'd already responded to, four separate offers for the same credit card. He shoved it all in a drawer in the kitchen and felt the drawer resist, then relent.

Dana was lighting the candle her sister had given them, the one that smelled vaguely like a cabin neither of them had ever visited. "Did you text Priya about the parking?"

"I told her the street's fine after six."

"It's not fine after six. That's the whole thing about our street."

"Then I'll move the car and she can have the driveway." He was already looking for his keys, patting the pockets of a jacket that wasn't the jacket.

"Hook by the door."

"Right."

While he was outside she wiped down the bathroom sink, put out the good hand towel, and stood for a second in the doorway of the guest room where the folded laundry lived permanently now. She closed that door. Some things you just close the door on.

He came back in with the cold still on his coat and said the salad needed dressing, and she said she knew, and he made it anyway, whisking mustard and vinegar in the chipped white bowl while she pulled the foil off the lasagna to let the top brown.

The doorbell went at seven-oh-four. They looked at each other—that quick, unglamorous check-in of two people who had done this a hundred times—and Marcus went to answer it.


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it hadn't gotten dirty since the second.

"You're going to sand a groove into the granite," Dev said, coming down the stairs in a shirt that was almost but not quite ironed.

"The Hendersons notice things."

"The Hendersons brought a store-bought pie last time and called it homemade. They notice nothing."

She laughed despite herself and handed him the corkscrew. He got to work on the Malbec while she checked the oven. The chicken had another twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five — she'd never trusted their oven, which ran cold in a way that had defeated four different thermometers.

"Did you put the extra chairs out?"

"Doing it now." He carried the folding chairs from the hall closet, then paused. "Do we have six of everything? Plates, I mean. Actual matching ones."

"Five matching, one from the old set. Whoever gets it gets it."

"Give it to Paul. He won't say anything."

"Paul will absolutely say something. Give it to me."

Dev set the table while Marisol shredded cabbage for the slaw, and for a few minutes neither of them talked, which was its own kind of comfortable. Somewhere around six-fifteen he found the playlist he'd made in October and put it on low. She turned it down further. He turned it up a notch, meeting in the middle, and she let it go.

"Your mother called," she said. "She wants to know if we're coming at Christmas."

"I'll call her tomorrow."

"That's what you said Thursday."

"And tomorrow I'll say it again, and then eventually I'll do it."

The doorbell rang at 6:31, which meant it was Paul, who was always early and always apologized for it. Marisol pulled off her apron, checked her reflection in the microwave door, and looked at Dev.

"Ready?"

"No," he said, and opened the door anyway.


The house smelled like garlic and rosemary by five-thirty, which meant Dana had started the chicken too early again.

"It'll be dry," Marcus said, peering into the oven.

"It'll be fine. I'm tenting it with foil." She was already moving past him, a stack of cloth napkins under her arm, the ones her mother had given them and they only used four times a year. "Can you deal with the bathroom? Cynthia notices things."

Marcus took the hint and the sponge. Their house in the older part of Grand Rapids had good bones and bad grout, and he'd learned that the difference between a clean bathroom and an acceptable one was about eleven minutes of scrubbing. He wiped the mirror, hid the prescription bottles in the drawer, put out the folded hand towel nobody would ever actually use.

In the dining room, Dana was arguing with the table. Six chairs into a space meant for five. She dragged the desk chair in from the office, decided it looked wrong, dragged it back out.

"Just use it," Marcus called.

"It's got wheels."

"Nobody's going to roll away."

She used it. He came out and found her standing in the doorway, hands on hips, doing the survey she always did — the one where she saw the house as a stranger would. He put a hand on the small of her back.

"It looks good," he said.

"The rug's crooked."

"Then straighten the rug."

She did. Then she went to change, and he opened a bottle of red so it could breathe, and poured himself a small glass that wasn't for breathing at all. At 6:40 the Hendersons' headlights swung across the front window, ten minutes early, as always.

Dana came down the stairs in the green sweater. "They're here?"

"They're here."

She exhaled. "Okay. Get the door."


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar and the last time they'd used it, two Thanksgivings ago.

"It's wrinkled," she called toward the kitchen.

"Iron's under the sink," Dev called back. "Behind the dish soap. Don't ask why."

She didn't ask. They'd lived in the house on Bellwood for six years now, and the geography of its illogic was familiar as a fingerprint. She set up the ironing board in the dining room and worked the creases out while Dev stood at the stove, tasting the dal, adding salt, tasting again.

"Too much cumin?"

"You always think that. You've never once been right."

He laughed. Outside, a car door slammed—not theirs, the neighbors'—and Marisol glanced at the clock. Forty minutes. She'd promised herself she'd shower.

Dev came out with a stack of plates, counting under his breath. "Seven, right? Priya's bringing that guy?"

"Colin."

"Colin." He said it like a word in a foreign language. "Do we like him?"

"We're neutral on Colin. We're gathering data."

She spread the tablecloth while he set the plates down at each place, and for a minute they moved around each other in the small room without touching or speaking, the way people do after enough years—an old choreography, unremarkable, reliable.

"You should shower," he said.

"I know."

"I'll do the salad."

Upstairs, she heard him drop something—a lid, probably—and swear, and then the radio came on, some classic rock station he only ever put on when he was cooking. She stood under the water a minute longer than she meant to.

When she came down, hair damp, the candles were lit and the dal was off the heat and Dev was standing at the window with a dish towel over his shoulder, watching the street for headlights.


The Renkos' Dinner Party

Marcus wedged the leaf into the dining table while Dana chased down the second set of place mats, the good ones, which had migrated to the linen closet sometime around Thanksgiving.

"Six or seven?" he called.

"Seven. Priya's bringing her sister." Dana came back with the mats and a dish towel over her shoulder. "The one who just moved to Cleveland."

Marcus counted chairs and came up one short. He went to the office and dragged in the desk chair, spinning the height knob until it roughly matched the others. Dana looked at it, shrugged, and set a plate in front of it anyway.

The kitchen smelled like garlic and scorched sugar. Dana had started the braise at two, which had been optimistic, and now the liquid had reduced further than she wanted. She added a splash of stock and tasted it off a wooden spoon.

"Salty?" Marcus asked, coming up behind her.

"Little." She handed him the spoon. He tasted, made a face that meant *not really*, and put it in the sink.

"Wine?"

"There's the Malbec from Jeff. And I got two whites."

He found the corkscrew in the drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus nobody had thrown away since 2019. While the bottles breathed, he went around the living room collecting evidence of ordinary life: a hoodie on the armchair, a half-finished crossword, three separate coffee mugs. He shoved most of it into the bedroom and shut the door.

Dana ran a lint roller over the couch where the cat slept.

At 6:48 she went upstairs and changed out of the shirt with the splash of braising liquid on the cuff. Marcus lit the two candles on the table, blew out the match, and stood there a second listening to the house go quiet.

Headlights swung across the front window.

"They're early," Dana said, coming down the stairs.

"They're always early."

He got the door.


The doorbell would ring at seven, and it was already 6:15.

Marcus stood at the kitchen island with a chef's knife, working through a pile of shallots with more confidence than skill. "How thin is thin?" he called.

Elena came in from the dining room holding two candles, one cream, one burnt orange. "Thinner than that. But it's fine. It's a braise, it'll all fall apart anyway." She set the candles on the counter and studied them. "Which one says 'we're adults who own matching napkins'?"

"We don't own matching napkins."

"We own four that are close enough." She picked the cream ones and went back out.

He heard her moving chairs, then the small clatter of silverware being laid. The apartment smelled like bay leaf and browned meat. Outside, a bus hissed at the corner of Delancey.

"Did you text Priya about the peanut thing?" Elena called.

"I did. She said the sauce is fine as long as it's not in the sauce."

"That's — Marcus, that's the opposite of fine."

"It's not in the sauce." He wiped his hands on the dish towel over his shoulder. "It's a garnish. I'll leave hers plain."

Elena appeared in the doorway with a wine bottle in each hand, holding them up like a question. He pointed at the one on the left. She nodded and set the other back in the rack.

At 6:40 she went to change. He heard the closet door, the hangers, and then her voice, muffled: "Is it a sweater night or a shirt night?"

"Sweater. It's forty-one degrees."

She came out in the green one, sleeves pushed up, and stood behind him at the stove. She tasted the braise off his spoon, thought about it, and reached past him for the salt.

"More?" he said.

"A little more." She kissed his shoulder and went to find the corkscrew.


The oven timer had eleven minutes left when Dana realized she'd forgotten the bread.

"Marcus," she called from the kitchen, "did you pick up a baguette?"

He appeared in the doorway holding two shirts on hangers, one blue, one striped. "I picked up wine, ice, and those little cheese things you like. Bread was not on the list you texted me."

"It was implied."

"Nothing is implied at Kroger." He held up the shirts. "Which one?"

"Blue. The striped one makes you look like a referee."

He disappeared down the hall. Dana wiped the counter for the third time, then stood back and looked at the table—six place settings, the good napkins her mother had given them, a jar of grocery-store tulips because they'd run out of time for anything fancier. It looked fine. It looked like people lived here.

Marcus came back in the blue shirt, still buttoning the cuffs. "I can run out. Nine minutes to the store, nine back."

"Rachel's always late. We'd be fine." She hesitated. "But no. Sit down for a second."

They sat at the table together, which they almost never did before guests arrived. The house smelled like garlic and roasted chicken. Somewhere in the walls the furnace kicked on.

"I hate this part," Marcus said. "The waiting."

"I know."

"Everything's done and there's nothing to do."

"There's the bread."

"You said we were fine."

"We are." She reached over and fixed his collar, which was folded under on one side. "There. Now you look like you tried."

The doorbell rang. Marcus checked his watch—Rachel, eight minutes early, for the first time in the history of their friendship.

"Unbelievable," he said, and went to answer it.

Dana pulled the chicken out and set it on the stove to rest, listening to the voices in the entryway getting louder, the door closing against the cold.


At six-fifteen, Marcus stood in the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder, arguing with a chicken. It had been in the oven forty minutes and still refused to brown.

"Give it time," Dana called from the dining room, where she was wrestling with a tablecloth that had come out of the linen closet with a crease down the middle like a scar. "You always panic at the forty-minute mark."

"I don't panic. I assess."

"You assessed the lasagna into the trash last spring."

He let that one go, because she was right, and because the potatoes needed turning. Outside, the November dark had come early, and the kitchen window held their reflection: two people in their forties moving around each other in a space too small for the number of pots they owned.

Dana found the good napkins, counted them, found five, and swore quietly. Six people were coming. She folded a paper towel into a triangle and put it at her own place, figuring she'd sit on it before anyone noticed.

"Did you text Ellis about the peanut thing?" Marcus asked.

"His wife's allergic, not him. And yes. No peanuts. The dressing is oil and vinegar and my own tears."

He laughed. She came into the kitchen and stole a slice of cucumber off the cutting board, and he swatted at her hand without any real conviction.

By six-forty the chicken had finally turned gold. Marcus pulled it out and set it on the stovetop to rest. Dana lit the two candles she'd bought at the grocery store, then blew one out because it smelled like cinnamon and vanilla and clashed with dinner.

"You look nice," he said.

"I look like I've been folding napkins."

"That's what I said."

The doorbell rang at six-fifty-two, which meant somebody had arrived early, which meant it was Ellis. Dana wiped her hands on her jeans. Marcus went to answer it.


Marcus checked the oven timer for the third time in five minutes. The roast had another forty, which meant the potatoes should go in now, or maybe in ten, and this uncertainty was the exact reason he'd wanted to order Thai food.

"You're hovering," Priya said, coming through the kitchen with an armload of folding chairs from the garage. "Sit down and let it cook."

"I'm not hovering. I'm monitoring."

She set the chairs down and counted them against the table. Six, plus the two dining chairs, made eight. Ben was bringing his sister, which they'd learned that morning via text, so eight was right, assuming nobody sat on the piano bench.

"Did you text Dana about the nut thing?" Marcus asked.

"I texted her. It's the dressing that has walnuts, and I made a second bowl without."

"You did?"

"An hour ago. You were showering." Priya wiped down the table, then stood back and frowned at it. The wood had that dull look it got in winter. She decided she didn't care.

Marcus put the potatoes in. In the living room he cleared the mail pile off the coffee table into a canvas bag and stashed the bag in the hall closet, which was where things went to be forgotten until spring. He straightened the throw pillows, then unstraightened one because Priya said it looked staged.

At 6:40 she changed out of her work clothes and put on the green sweater. He found her in the bedroom putting on earrings and stood behind her a second, both of them in the mirror.

"House looks good," he said.

"House looks fine."

The doorbell rang at 6:52 — Ben always came early — and they looked at each other with the same small resigned expression they'd been sharing for eleven years.

"I'll get it," Marcus said. "Bring the wine glasses?"

She was already reaching for them.


The dinner was set for seven, and by five-thirty the kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter.

Nadia stood at the stove, sleeves pushed to her elbows, coaxing onions toward gold. She'd been planning this menu for a week—braised short ribs, a farro salad, the lemon tart she'd made twice before with mixed results. The tart was cooling on the counter now, its surface slightly cracked, which she'd decided to call rustic.

"Do we own a serving spoon that isn't from IKEA?" Peter called from the dining room. He was setting the table for six, counting out forks, discovering they had five matching ones and a sixth that didn't match at all.

"Bottom drawer, left side. The wooden one."

He found it. He also found a candle stub, two rubber bands, and a receipt from 2019, which he threw away with the small satisfaction of a man accomplishing something adjacent to his task.

They moved around each other in the narrow galley kitchen with the choreography of eleven years. Peter reached past her for the corkscrew; she leaned back without looking. He'd been assigned drinks and music, which he took seriously—two bottles of Côtes du Rhône breathing on the counter, a playlist he'd spent forty minutes assembling and would apologize for later.

"Did you text Marcus about the shellfish thing?" Nadia asked.

"Allergy's his wife. And yes. No shellfish. There's no shellfish anywhere near this meal."

"There's fish sauce in the dressing."

Peter paused. "Is fish sauce shellfish?"

"It's anchovies."

"Then we're fine." He topped off her wine and set it beside the cutting board where she'd find it.

At six-fifty she changed out of the flour-dusted shirt. At six-fifty-five Peter lit the candles. At seven-oh-four the doorbell rang, and they looked at each other for a second—the last quiet second—before he went to answer it.


The Reyes house smelled like garlic and browning butter by five-thirty. Daniel stood at the stove in his socks, one hand on the pan handle, the other holding his phone at arm's length because he refused to admit he needed reading glasses.

"It says twelve minutes," he called toward the hallway.

"It always says twelve minutes." Marisol came out carrying a stack of mismatched plates. She'd changed out of her work clothes into jeans and a sweater with a hole in the cuff she kept meaning to mend. "Twelve minutes is a lie invented by recipe writers."

She set the plates on the table and started counting silverware, then stopped. "Did you tell Ben's wife about the shellfish thing, or did I?"

"You did. In October."

"That was a different dinner."

Daniel wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder. "There's no shellfish in anything. There's chicken and there's rice and there's a salad I haven't made yet."

"I'll do the salad."

They moved around each other in the kitchen the way people do after eleven years, without touching, without apologizing. Marisol pulled romaine from the crisper and started tearing it. Daniel found the good olive oil behind the vinegar.

"The bathroom," she said suddenly.

"I cleaned it Tuesday."

"There's a plunger sitting out."

He went and put the plunger under the sink. When he came back she had the salad tossed and was lighting the candle on the counter, the one that smelled vaguely like a forest and had been half-burned since Thanksgiving.

Headlights swung across the front window at ten after six. Daniel turned down the music he'd forgotten was playing. Marisol glanced at the table, then at him, then reached over and straightened his collar with two fingers.

"Your sleeve's got butter on it," she said.

"They won't notice."

"I noticed."

He rolled the sleeve up past the stain, and she went to open the door.


The doorbell would ring in forty minutes, and Marisol was still hunting for the good tablecloth.

"Second drawer down," Danny called from the kitchen, where he was standing over a pot of beans that had, against all odds, turned out well. He'd been nervous about them. His mother had made them for thirty years without measuring anything, and he'd spent the afternoon on the phone with her, translating her instructions into cups.

Marisol found the tablecloth exactly where he'd said, which annoyed her slightly. She shook it out over the dining table—a hand-me-down from Danny's grandmother, scarred with water rings they'd stopped apologizing for—and started setting places. Six. Eight, if Renee brought the kids, which she'd said she wouldn't and probably would.

"Did you get wine?" she asked.

"Two reds. And that seltzer stuff Kevin likes."

"He's not drinking anymore."

"That's why I got the seltzer."

She stopped and looked at him through the doorway. He had a dish towel over his shoulder and flour on his forearm somehow, though nothing in the meal involved flour. Eleven years, and he still surprised her by paying attention.

At six-fifteen, she changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. Danny put on music, something low and instrumental, and lit the candle on the counter that they only used for company. He turned it off after a minute—too much, they agreed without saying so.

"The bathroom," Marisol said suddenly.

"I did it this morning."

"You did?"

"I hid the laundry basket in our closet, too."

She laughed. Outside, a car door slammed, then another. Danny wiped his hands, and Marisol pushed a chair back into place, and they looked at each other for a second in the small warm room before either of them moved toward the door.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, exactly where she'd stuffed it in March.

"It's wrinkled," she called toward the kitchen.

"Iron's on the shelf above the washer," Dev called back. He was standing over a pot of dal, tasting it with a wooden spoon, adding salt in increments the way his mother had taught him — never all at once, because you can't take it out. The rice cooker clicked over to warm. He glanced at the clock: 5:40. Guests at 6:30, which in practice meant 6:50 for the Kaplans and 6:15 for Toby, who was always early and always apologetic about it.

Marisol set up the ironing board in the dining room and worked the wrinkles out in long passes. Her mind was somewhere else — the meeting she'd had that afternoon, the way her boss had said "let's circle back" and then hadn't.

"You're doing the thing," Dev said, coming in with a stack of plates.

"What thing."

"The jaw thing." He set the plates down and kissed the top of her head as he passed.

She exhaled and let it go. There'd be time to talk about it later, after everyone left, when they were doing dishes and the kitchen radio was on low.

They moved around each other easily. He lit the candles; she found the good napkins. He put on a record — something instrumental, nothing anybody would have opinions about. She swept crumbs off the counter into her cupped hand.

At 6:12 the doorbell rang.

"Toby," they said at the same time.

Marisol looked down at her sweater, decided it was fine, and went to answer the door. Behind her, Dev turned the burner down to low and wiped his hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, wedged behind the beach towels. She shook it out over the dining table, and the smell of cedar drifted up.

"Six or seven?" Danny called from the kitchen.

"Seven. Priya's bringing her sister."

He swore under his breath, not really upset, and pulled another handful of shrimp from the freezer. The colander clattered in the sink as he ran cold water over them. Outside, a lawnmower droned two houses down, and the September light was doing the thing it did in the late afternoon, coming in low and gold through the window over the sink so he had to squint.

Marisol came in with a stack of plates. "The blue ones or the white?"

"Blue. They hide everything."

"That's not a selling point."

"It absolutely is."

She set them down and reached past him for the corkscrew, and he leaned back so she could get at the drawer. Twelve years of this, of stepping around each other in a kitchen barely wide enough for both of them, had made a kind of choreography neither of them noticed anymore.

"Did you vacuum the living room?"

"I vacuumed the part people see."

"Danny."

"There's a couch in front of the rest of it. Nobody's moving the couch."

She let it go. She lit the two candles on the table, then thought better of it and blew them out to save the wicks. Danny put the shrimp on with butter and garlic and the whole house changed.

At six-fifteen a car door slammed. Marisol looked down at her shirt, saw a spot of olive oil near the hem, and pulled a cardigan off the back of a chair.

"You look fine," Danny said, not turning around.

"You didn't look."

"I know what you look like."

She was still rolling her eyes when the doorbell rang.


Marcus heard the oven timer from the hallway and quickened his pace, a stack of cloth napkins tucked under one arm.

"I've got it," Dana called from the kitchen. She pulled the tray of roasted vegetables out, squinting at the carrots. "Ten more minutes, maybe. The oven runs cold."

"It's run cold for six years. We should probably do something about that."

"Add it to the list." She wiped her hands on a dish towel and glanced at the clock on the microwave. 6:12. The Reyeses were always fifteen minutes early, which meant she had about twenty-three minutes to look like someone who hadn't spent the afternoon assembling a lasagna in a Michigan sweatshirt.

Marcus set the napkins on the table and started folding them into rough triangles. He'd tried the fancy fold once, years ago, watching a video on his phone, and Dana had laughed so hard she'd had to sit down. Triangles now. Triangles forever.

"Did you get wine?" she asked.

"Two reds, one white. And the seltzer for Priya."

"You're a good man."

"I'm an adequate man who remembers things." He straightened a fork. "Where's the serving spoon, the big wooden one?"

"Dishwasher. Might still be wet."

He found it, dried it on his shirt when she wasn't looking, and set it beside the salad bowl. Behind him he heard her go up the stairs, then the sound of the bedroom closet.

At 6:29 she came down in a green sweater, earrings in, hair pulled back. Marcus looked up from lighting the candles.

"You clean up okay," he said.

"You're still wearing the shirt you mowed the lawn in."

He looked down. "Huh."

"Go. I'll get the door."

He was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang, and he heard her laugh — that real one, low and surprised — as she opened it.


The Last Twenty Minutes

Dana found the good tablecloth still folded in the linen closet, creased in three places from a year of sitting. She shook it out over the dining table and smoothed the fold lines with her palm, which did nothing, and decided nobody would notice.

In the kitchen, Marcus was arguing with the oven. "It says three-fifty. It's been at three-fifty for forty minutes."

"Did you preheat it?"

"I preheated it."

"You didn't preheat it."

He didn't answer, which meant no. Dana came in and looked at the chicken, which had gone a pale, unpromising color, and turned the dial to four hundred. "It'll be fine. Fern's always late anyway."

Marcus went back to the salad, tearing romaine with more force than the romaine required. He'd gotten home at five-forty, still in his work clothes, and had a smear of olive oil on his shirt cuff already. Dana pointed at it. He looked down, sighed, and kept tearing.

She lit two candles on the table, then blew one out because the smell was too strong together. She moved the mail pile from the counter to the bedroom, closed the bedroom door, and took the dog's toys off the couch. In the bathroom she wiped the sink with a hand towel and hung the towel on the back of the door where nobody would find it.

"Wine's open," Marcus called. "Should I open the second one now or does that look desperate?"

"Open it. It needs to breathe."

"Does it? Or do people just say that?"

"I don't know. Open it anyway."

At six-fifty-eight, headlights swung across the front window. Dana pulled off her apron and stuffed it in a drawer. Marcus turned the oven light on, peered in, and said, "Actually, this looks all right."

She kissed the side of his head on her way to the door.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another forty minutes, but Dana had already changed shirts twice.

"The blue one," Marcus said, not looking up from the cutting board. "You always end up back in the blue one."

"That's because you never tell me when the other one's wrong."

"The other one isn't wrong. It's just not the blue one." He scraped a pile of shallots into the pan, and the kitchen filled with that smell that made their apartment feel like somebody's actual home instead of two people's storage unit.

Dana came back in the blue one and started on the table. Four plates from the good set, two from the everyday set, because they'd never gotten around to replacing the ones that broke in the move. She arranged it so the mismatched ones went to Petra and Ben, who wouldn't notice or would find it charming.

"Did you text Kyle about the shellfish thing?"

"I texted him. He says it's fine as long as it's not in the same pan."

"It's not in the same pan."

"I know it's not. I'm telling you what he said."

Marcus tasted the sauce, made a face, added salt, made a different face. Dana lit the candles too early, the way she always did, and Marcus didn't say anything about it, the way he always didn't.

At 6:50 they stood in the doorway of the living room together, surveying. The couch had a blanket thrown over the stain. The books were stacked in a way that suggested intention. Somewhere under the coffee table there was a dog toy neither of them saw.

"It looks good," Dana said.

"It looks like people live here."

"That's what I said."

He kissed the side of her head and went to get the wine glasses down, and she followed him to catch the one he always nearly dropped, and then the buzzer went off, twelve minutes early, because Petra was constitutionally incapable of being late.


The doorbell would ring at seven, and it was already six-fifteen.

Maya stood at the kitchen island, sleeves pushed to her elbows, coaxing a stubborn head of garlic apart with the flat of a knife. The chicken had been in the oven twenty minutes and the whole house smelled like lemon and thyme, which was the only reason she wasn't panicking.

"The wine's not cold," Daniel said, coming up from the basement with two bottles under his arm. He set them on the counter and looked at them like they'd betrayed him personally.

"Ice bucket. Under the sink, behind the vase."

He crouched, rummaged, found it. "Why is it behind the vase?"

"Because you put it there in April."

He didn't argue, which she appreciated. He filled the bucket at the sink, dumped in a tray of ice, and wedged the bottles in at an angle. Then he started on the table — the good placemats, the cloth napkins his mother had given them, folded badly but folded. Six settings. Their friends the Ortegas were bringing their daughter, who was eleven and would want to sit near the dog.

"Did you vacuum the hallway?" Maya asked.

"I vacuumed the hallway."

"The whole hallway, or up to the closet?"

A pause. "Up to the closet."

She laughed, and he went to get the vacuum again.

By six-fifty the salad was tossed, the bread was warming, and Daniel had changed into a shirt with a collar. Maya rinsed her hands, dried them on a dish towel, and stood a moment in the doorway looking at the table, the flickering candle, the crooked napkins.

"It looks good," she said.

Daniel came and stood beside her, tucking in his shirt. "It looks like people live here."

"That's the idea."

The doorbell rang at six fifty-eight. The dog started barking. Maya went to answer it, and Daniel went to turn down the oven.


The kitchen smelled like garlic and rosemary by four-thirty, which meant Priya had started early, which meant she was nervous.

"They're friends," Danny said, sliding the last of the recycling into the bin. "Not the Michelin people."

"Mark's mother made a beef bourguignon at that Christmas thing. I still think about it." She adjusted the oven rack for the third time, then wiped her hands on a dish towel already damp from earlier wiping.

Danny took the towel from her, hung it on the stove handle, and handed her a glass of the Rioja they'd opened to breathe. "Sit down for five minutes."

She didn't sit. She started slicing bread instead, and he let it go, because he knew from eleven years of this that Priya calmed down by moving. He went to deal with the bathroom, which was his job by long-standing agreement, along with music, ice, and the removal of the enormous pile of mail from the dining table. He found her reading glasses in that pile, and a parking ticket he'd been avoiding.

At five, the dog got shut in the bedroom with a bone, complaining. At five-fifteen, Priya changed out of the shirt she'd cooked in, and Danny said the green one was better, and she wore the green one.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she called.

"Six, plus the piano bench."

"Nobody wants the piano bench."

"Mark wants the piano bench. Mark loves the piano bench."

She laughed, finally, and he heard it from the other room and felt the whole evening settle into something manageable.

The doorbell rang at 5:52 — early, as always, the Rosens — and Priya swore softly and pulled the tray from the oven, and Danny wiped a smear of something off the counter with his sleeve and went to let them in, calling back over his shoulder, "It smells incredible in here, by the way," which it did, and which she needed to hear.


The doorbell would ring in forty minutes, and Marisol was still elbow-deep in the salad bowl.

"Did you get the good olive oil?" she called toward the living room.

"Define good," Dave said. He was on his knees, wrestling the leaf into the dining table, which had refused to expand properly since they'd moved it from the old apartment. "I got the one in the green bottle."

"That's the good one."

The table finally gave, sliding open with a groan. Dave brushed his hands on his jeans and went to find the extra chairs, which lived in the basement behind the Christmas boxes. He came back up with two of them and a cobweb in his hair.

Marisol laughed and reached up to pull it out. "You're a mess."

"I'm ambiance."

She went back to the kitchen, where the chicken had eight more minutes and the rice was doing whatever rice did when you weren't watching it. Dave started setting places, counting under his breath—Priya and Tom, the Callahans, Nadia, who was bringing someone new named Julian.

"Do we have enough wine glasses?" he asked.

"We have six real ones and those two from the gas station."

"Julian gets a gas station glass."

"Be nice."

He set out the mismatched napkins, then lit the candles they only used for company. Marisol came out with the salad and stopped, looking at the table—the leaf finally in, the chairs crowded close, the candlelight softening the water stain on the ceiling they kept meaning to fix.

"It looks good," she said.

"It looks like people are coming over."

She squeezed his arm on the way back to the oven. He put on a record, something instrumental, low. Outside a car door slammed—too early, someone always came early—and they both looked at each other, and Marisol pulled off her apron, and Dave went to get the door.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, still creased from last Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table while Danny hauled the leaf from the garage, dust webbing one corner.

"It's crooked," she said.

"It's a table, not a runway." He wedged the leaf in anyway, then pressed down until the seam disappeared. "There."

The chicken had been in the oven since four-thirty. Danny had done the brining, which he was quietly proud of, and Marisol had made the salad—fennel and orange, a recipe she'd clipped in March and finally had a reason to try. She sliced the fennel too thick and started over, thinner this time, the knife making a wet whisper against the board.

At six she went upstairs to change and came back down in the green blouse. Danny was on a step stool changing the bulb over the sink, which had been out for three weeks.

"Now?"

"They'll see it."

"Nobody looks at the light."

"You look at the light." He climbed down. "Every night you say, 'we should fix that light.'"

She conceded the point by handing him a beer.

Ellen and Rob would be first, they always were. The Kims would text at 6:40 saying they were leaving, which meant seven-fifteen. Marisol lit the candles anyway, then blew one out because the wick was smoking.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

Danny counted with his finger in the air. "Six. Two from the office."

He went to get them. Marisol stood a moment in the doorway looking at the table—the crooked leaf, the tablecloth, the bowl of fennel gone slightly limp already—and thought it looked nice, actually. Better than nice.

The doorbell rang at 6:04. Danny called from the hallway, "That's Ellen," and Marisol wiped her hands and went to open it.


The lasagna had been in the oven for forty minutes when Dana realized she'd forgotten to buy bread.

"I can go," Marcus said from the living room, where he was moving a stack of unopened mail off the coffee table and into a drawer he'd deal with later. "Kroger's five minutes."

"You'll be gone twenty. You always run into someone."

"That happened one time."

"It happened three times." She was wiping down the counter, moving fast, the way she did when she wanted the kitchen to look like nobody cooked in it. "Take the car. And get the good stuff, not the sandwich loaf."

He grabbed his keys off the hook. On the way out he paused, came back, and adjusted the thermostat down two degrees. "It's going to get warm with everybody in here."

"You always say that."

"And I'm always right."

While he was gone she set the table, six places, using the plates from his mother that they never touched. She found a stain on one of the cloth napkins and swapped it out. She poured herself a small glass of wine and drank half of it standing at the sink, looking out at the backyard where the grill sat under its cover, unused since September.

Marcus came back with a baguette, a bag of ice, and a bottle of wine that wasn't on the list.

"I ran into Ellen Boyd," he said.

Dana laughed. "Of course you did."

He set everything down and looked at the table. "You used the good plates."

"Once a year won't kill them."

He put ice in the bucket. She checked the oven. The doorbell rang eight minutes early — the Petersons, always early — and Dana looked down at her socks, then at Marcus.

"Stall them," she said, and went upstairs.

He was still laughing when he opened the door.


Marcus heard the oven timer before Dana did, which was how it usually went. He was pulling the chicken out when she came down the stairs, still working an earring into place.

"It smells done," she said.

"It is done. Or it's about to be." He set the pan on the stove and checked the thighs with a fork. Juice ran clear. "Yeah. Done."

Dana surveyed the dining room, which she had spent twenty minutes on and which now looked, to her eye, exactly like a dining room. She moved the water glasses a half inch and gave up.

"Did you text Ronnie about the parking?" she asked.

"I told him the driveway. He'll park in the street anyway."

"He always does."

Marcus tented the chicken with foil and started on the green beans, dropping them into a pot he'd left simmering. Dana came up behind him, reached past his arm, and pulled a bottle of wine off the counter to check the label.

"This is the one Priya brought last time," she said.

"Then we're returning it to its rightful owner."

"That's tacky."

"That's efficient."

She laughed and got a corkscrew out of the drawer. Outside, a car door shut somewhere down the block, and both of them paused for a second before deciding it wasn't theirs.

"Napkins," Dana said. "The cloth ones or the paper ones."

"Cloth. It's Saturday."

"That's not a real rule."

"It's a rule in this house."

She got the cloth ones out of the sideboard anyway. Marcus wiped the counter, then wiped it again. The green beans came off the heat. He tasted one, added salt, tasted another.

The doorbell rang at 6:52, eight minutes early, which meant it was Priya. Dana pushed her hair back, glanced at Marcus, and went to answer it.


Marcus heard the oven timer before Dana did. He crossed the kitchen in three strides, pulled out the tray of roasted carrots, and swore softly at the ones that had blackened on the edges.

"They're fine," Dana said from the dining room, not looking up. She was folding cloth napkins into shapes that would collapse the moment anyone touched them. "Nobody's inspecting the carrots."

"Priya inspects everything."

"Priya loves you." Dana came in and stole one from the tray, hissing at the heat, chewing anyway. "See? Good."

It was six-fifteen. The Hendersons would be early, because they always were, and Priya and Tom would be forty minutes late, because they always were. Marcus had learned to time the entrée for the middle.

Dana went to change. Marcus set the table, then rearranged it because he'd put the water glasses on the wrong side, then wiped down the counter for the third time. Through the ceiling he could hear their bedroom floor creak, Dana moving between the closet and the mirror.

She came down in the green dress, earrings in one hand.

"Zip?"

He zipped it, and let his hand rest a second on her back. "You look good."

"I look like someone who's been cleaning a bathroom for an hour."

"Then that's a great look on you."

She laughed and swatted him with the earrings.

At six-forty, Dana lit the candles while Marcus opened wine to breathe. He put on a record because she liked the ritual of it, even though the speakers were bad. She turned the overhead lights down. The kitchen smelled like garlic and rosemary and, faintly, like the carrots he'd almost ruined.

The doorbell rang at six-forty-five.

"Henderson," they said at the same time.

Dana went to answer it. Marcus turned the burner down and followed her, drying his hands on a towel he then remembered to throw over his shoulder instead of carrying to the door.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, folded beneath a stack of towels that shouldn't have been there. She shook it out over the dining table, and the creases stood up like a topographical map.

"It's wrinkled," she called.

"It's fine," Dev said from the kitchen. "Nobody's going to iron-inspect it."

"Kanika will notice."

"Kanika won't notice. Kanika once ate a whole dinner off a laundry basket."

Marisol let it go and set the plates down, the ones with the blue rims that had been Dev's grandmother's. They only came out four or five times a year, which felt like a waste, but every time she suggested using them for a Tuesday, Dev got a look on his face like she'd proposed selling them.

In the kitchen, he was salting the chicken thighs for the second time, worrying at them. The rice was already on. The salad sat undressed in a wooden bowl, and he'd forgotten to buy bread, which he wasn't going to mention.

"You forgot bread," Marisol said, walking past.

"I know."

"There's that half loaf in the freezer."

"It's been in there since March."

"So we toast it. Garlic. Butter." She was already opening the freezer. "Nobody's going to bread-inspect it."

He laughed, which was the point.

At six forty she changed her shirt twice and settled on the green one. He put on music, then turned it down, then turned it up two clicks. She lit the candle in the bathroom, the one that made the whole apartment smell like a hotel.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"Five, plus the desk chair."

"The desk chair squeaks."

"Then Marcus gets it. He'll think it's funny."

At seven the buzzer went. Marisol hit the button, and Dev wiped his hands on a dish towel, and neither of them thought about the tablecloth again all night.


The Kellerman house smelled like garlic and browning butter by four-thirty. Dana had started the chicken too early, which she always did, and now she stood over the pan turning the pieces with a fork, watching them go from pale to gold.

"You're going to overcook that," Marcus said, passing behind her with a stack of plates.

"I know how long chicken takes."

"I'm just saying. Last time—"

"Last time the oven was broken." She didn't look up, but she was smiling a little. He set the plates down on the counter and started counting silverware out of the drawer, laying forks in a row like he was dealing cards.

They had bought the house four years ago, a narrow two-story in a neighborhood outside Columbus where the trees were older than the mortgage. The dining room table had come from Marcus's grandmother and wobbled unless you wedged a folded receipt under the left leg. He did that now, on his knees, while Dana called out that Priya was bringing wine, so they didn't need to open the good bottle.

"Then what's the good bottle for?"

"For when Priya doesn't bring wine."

He laughed and stood up, cracking his back. Outside, the light was going amber. Dana untied her apron and hung it on the pantry door, then stopped in front of the hallway mirror to fix her hair, decided it was fine, changed her mind, pinned it up.

"You look good," Marcus said, and she rolled her eyes but touched his arm on her way past.

At six-fifteen the doorbell rang, twenty minutes early, which meant it was Ben, who was always early and always apologetic about it. Dana was still lighting the candles. Marcus went to answer, calling back over his shoulder, "You want me to stall him?"

"Just let him in," she said. "Tell him to open the wine."


The rain had started around four, which meant the patio was out. Dana wiped down the dining table instead, shoving aside a stack of mail and two of Theo's field guides.

"They're going to sit on the good chairs," she said. "The one with the wobble."

"I fixed the wobble." Theo came out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon, tasting something off it. "In March."

"You put a coaster under it."

"A coaster is a fix." He held the spoon toward her. "Too much lemon?"

She tasted. "More salt."

The chili had been simmering since two. Theo had wanted to do something more ambitious — he'd bookmarked a braise that required four hours and a Dutch oven they didn't own — but Dana had talked him down on Wednesday, gently, over the sound of him scrolling.

She lit the two candles on the sideboard, then blew one out because the smell was competing with the food. In the bathroom she found a ring of toothpaste in the sink and cleaned it with a wad of tissue. Theo's shirt was on the doorknob. She hung it up.

"Sam's bringing the girlfriend," she called.

"Since when?"

"Since he texted an hour ago."

Theo appeared in the hallway. "Do we have enough?"

"We have a pot of chili the size of a bathtub."

"Chairs, I meant."

They stood a moment, counting silently. Then Theo went to the garage and came back with the folding chair, the aluminum one, and set it at the end of the table like it belonged there.

Dana put on music, something low. She looked at the room — mismatched, slightly damp-smelling, the good bowls out. It was fine. It was better than fine.

Headlights swung across the front window at 6:52.

"They're early," Theo said, wiping his hands on his jeans.

"They're always early." She was already walking to the door.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, still creased from the last time they'd used it, which had been Thanksgiving, which had been eleven months ago. She shook it out over the dining table and pressed the wrinkles flat with her palms.

"They're not going to notice a tablecloth," Daniel called from the kitchen.

"Bev notices everything." She counted chairs. Six, and they needed seven, so she went to the garage for the folding one with the wobbly leg and put it at the end where their friend Tom, who was tall and never sat still anyway, would probably end up.

In the kitchen Daniel had the chicken out and was arguing with a recipe on his phone. He'd made this dish exactly once, in April, and it had gone well enough that it had become a thing he made, in the way that things became things.

"Do we have paprika?"

"Second shelf. Behind the cinnamon."

He found it, checked the date on the bottom, decided not to mention what he found there.

Marisol came in and pulled wine glasses down, holding each one up to the window light. Two had water spots. She rinsed them and dried them with a dish towel while Daniel worked around her, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything, which was comfortable.

"Did you text Ruth about the parking?"

"I told her the street's fine after six."

At six-fifteen Daniel put the chicken in and Marisol lit the two candles she'd bought at the grocery store, and then she blew one out because it smelled aggressively like vanilla and would fight with the food.

"Better," Daniel said.

She stepped back and looked at the table, and it looked like a table people would sit at. The doorbell rang eight minutes early, which was Bev, who was always early.


The doorbell would ring in forty minutes, and the kitchen still smelled like scorched garlic.

"I can salvage it," Nadia said, scraping the pan into the trash. "I'm starting over. We have time."

Danny didn't argue. He'd learned in eleven years of marriage that when she said *we have time*, she meant *don't help unless I ask*. He set the table instead, laying out the good plates his mother had shipped from Ohio, the ones they used maybe four times a year. He counted forks twice and still came up one short, then remembered the sixth guest was Rob's new girlfriend, whose name they'd both practiced in the car that morning. Priya. Not Prisha.

"Do we have wine glasses that match?" he called.

"We have wine glasses that exist."

Nadia was chopping shallots now, faster than the recipe called for, her ponytail slipping loose. She'd gotten home at five-forty after a meeting that ran long, and the whole drive she'd rehearsed being relaxed about it. Danny had already vacuumed, hidden the mail pile in the bedroom closet, and lit the candle that made the living room smell like someone else's living room.

He came up behind her and reached past for the pepper grinder. "Butter's out. The good stuff."

"Thank you."

"I put a beer in the freezer for you. Set a timer so it doesn't explode this time."

She laughed, which was the point. The tightness in her shoulders dropped a quarter inch.

At 6:52 they stood in the kitchen doorway surveying it: the table set, the salad dressed, the second attempt at the sauce actually tasting better than the first. Danny straightened a napkin. Nadia pulled her hair back up and wiped her hands on his shirt, on purpose.

"Ready?"

"No," he said. The doorbell rang. They went to answer it together.


The kitchen smelled like garlic and rosemary, and Priya was arguing with the oven.

"It says three seventy-five, but I swear this thing runs cold," she said, adjusting the dial for the third time. Flour dusted the front of her sweater in a pale handprint where she'd wiped her palm.

Marcus came in from the garage carrying a folding chair under each arm. "We're two chairs short. I found these behind the Christmas boxes."

"Are they the ugly ones?"

"They're the only ones." He set them down and wiped his hands on his jeans. "Nobody's going to be looking at the chairs, Priya."

"Dana looks at everything." Priya opened the oven and peered in at the chicken, which had gone a promising gold at the edges. "Did you text her about the parking? The street sweeping thing?"

"I texted everyone." He pulled the good tablecloth from the linen closet, shook it out, and let it settle over the table like a sail coming down. "You want the blue napkins or the white ones?"

"White. The blue ones have that stain."

He found the white ones. While he folded them, Priya cranked open a bottle of wine to let it breathe, then stood for a moment with her hands on the counter, looking at the mess she'd made — bowls, a colander, the cutting board with its wreck of onion skins.

"I always forget how much I like this part," she said.

"The part where you're panicking?"

"The part before people come." She started stacking bowls in the sink. "When it's still just us."

Marcus came up behind her and reached past her shoulder for the corkscrew she'd left on the counter, then didn't move for a second, his chin near her hair.

The doorbell rang. Priya laughed and pushed him toward the hallway with her elbow, and he went, still holding a napkin.


The oven timer chirped twice before Marisol reached it, hands still damp from the sink. She pulled out the pan of roasted carrots, tipped them onto a platter, and slid the chicken back in for another fifteen minutes.

"They said seven, right?" Dev called from the dining room. He was wrestling the extra leaf into the table, the one they only used at Thanksgiving and whenever Priya insisted on bringing her new boyfriend around for inspection.

"Seven, but Priya's never on time and Ken is always ten minutes early. Assume six-fifty."

Dev checked his watch. Six-thirty-one. He got the leaf seated, brushed the dust off, and went looking for the tablecloth in the linen closet, which meant moving a stack of beach towels they hadn't touched since August.

Marisol tasted the sauce, added lemon, tasted it again. She'd made this dish maybe forty times and still didn't trust it. In the living room, the dog had settled onto the couch cushion he was theoretically not allowed on, and she decided not to fight that particular battle tonight.

"Napkins," Dev said, appearing in the kitchen. "Cloth or paper?"

"Cloth. They're in the drawer under the—"

"Found them."

He set the table while she plated. They moved around each other the way people do after eleven years, a hand on a back, a small sidestep, no words needed. At six-forty-five Dev put on music, something instrumental and low. At six-forty-eight Marisol changed out of her flour-dusted shirt.

"You look nice," Dev said.

"You have carrot on your sleeve."

He looked down. He did.

The doorbell rang at six-fifty-two. Ken, holding a bottle of wine and apologizing for being early.

"You're right on time," Marisol said, and meant it, mostly.


The rain had stopped by four, which meant the deck was usable again, and Marcus was outside with a towel wiping down the chairs while Priya stood at the kitchen window watching him miss the same puddle on the seat three times.

"You're missing a spot," she called through the screen.

"I'm aware of the spot."

"Are you though?"

He held up the towel in mock surrender and got the puddle. Inside, Priya went back to the chicken, which was doing something she hadn't planned for—the skin browning faster than the inside cooked, so she dropped the oven to 350 and hoped for the best. The recipe was her mother's, more or less, adjusted over fifteen years of making it in this kitchen and the two apartments before it.

Marcus came in with his shoes off, socks damp at the toes. "Do we have enough chairs?"

"Six. Plus the piano bench."

"Nobody wants the piano bench."

"Then Danny gets the piano bench."

He laughed and went to find the good glasses, the ones from their wedding that lived on the high shelf and came down maybe four times a year. He rinsed the dust off each one and set them upside down on a dish towel. Priya was tasting the sauce and adding salt, then tasting again and adding more.

"Too much?"

He took the spoon. "No. Maybe a little. It's fine."

"That's three different answers."

"It's fine," he said, and meant it, and went to change his shirt.

At six-fifteen the doorbell rang, ten minutes early, which was Danny, who was always ten minutes early and always apologized for it. Priya wiped her hands on a towel. Marcus came down the stairs still buttoning his cuff. They looked at each other in the hallway for a second—the house warm, the food nearly ready—and then he opened the door.


The Second Try at Bolognese

Marcus had the sauce simmering by four, which meant he'd have to guard it against himself for three hours. He kept lifting the lid, adding a pinch of salt, stirring, until Priya finally slid the wooden spoon out of his hand.

"You're going to reduce it into paste," she said. "Go do the bathroom."

He went. The guest bathroom had accumulated the usual sediment of a household that only used it for guests: a dried-out candle, three half-empty bottles of hand soap, a hair tie of unknown origin. He wiped the mirror with a paper towel and it left streaks, so he did it again with the good cloth from under the sink.

Priya was setting the table when he came out, counting silverware. "Did Dev say if Renee's coming?"

"He said probably. She's been working weekends."

"So five or six."

"Set for six. If she doesn't come we look generous."

She laughed and went back for another fork. They'd been in the house eleven months and this was only the fourth time they'd had people over, mostly because Marcus had a theory about how the dining room chairs didn't match and Priya had a theory that nobody looks at chairs. Tonight the chairs still didn't match.

At six-fifteen she was upstairs changing and he heard her call down about whether the green shirt or the blue one, and he said the green without knowing which was which, and she came down in the blue anyway. He'd changed too, into a shirt she'd bought him and he'd never worn.

"It's fine," she said, tasting the sauce. "It's actually really good."

"You sound surprised."

"I'm surprised it's not paste."

The doorbell rang at six-forty, early, which was Dev's whole personality. Marcus reached for the door and Priya reached for the wine opener, and neither of them said anything, because they didn't have to.


The lasagna had been in the oven for forty minutes, and Priya could tell by the smell that the top was already browning. She pulled the door open, let the heat wash over her glasses, and decided it needed five more.

"Do we have wine?" Marcus called from the bedroom.

"You bought wine. Tuesday. It's on the counter."

"That's one bottle."

"There are four people coming, Marcus."

He came out buttoning a shirt she liked, the gray one with the small collar. "Five. Diane's bringing her sister. She texted this morning, I forgot to tell you."

Priya set the oven mitt down and looked at him. Not angry, exactly—more the look of someone recalculating. "Okay. So the salad's small."

"I'll cut more cucumber."

He did, badly, in uneven half-moons, while she wiped down the counter around him. They'd lived in the house eleven years and had a rhythm to the small kitchen, the way she stepped back without looking when he opened the fridge, the way he handed her the trash bag knot-first.

"Napkins," she said.

"Cloth or paper?"

"Cloth. The blue ones. They're in the—"

"Sideboard, I know."

The dog got shut in the back bedroom, protesting. Marcus lit the two candles on the table and then blew one out because the smell competed with the food. Priya changed out of her work pants into jeans, came back, and found he'd put on a record, something low and old.

"Is that too much?" he asked.

"It's fine. It's nice."

At 6:52 the lasagna came out and sat resting under foil. At 6:58 headlights swung across the front window. Priya smoothed her hair; Marcus turned the porch light on and stood there a second with his hand on the knob, waiting for the knock, the way he always did.


The kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt butter, which Rosa insisted was intentional.

"It's called browning," she said, tilting the pan so David could see the flecks going amber. "The recipe says nutty."

"It says nutty, not scorched." He was setting the table, counting forks twice because he'd lost track. Six people. Seven, if Marcus brought the new girlfriend, which he probably would, without warning, the way he always did.

Rosa turned down the burner. Outside, the November dark had come early, and the window over the sink threw back the two of them—her in an apron over the dress she'd changed into an hour ago, him barefoot in jeans, still holding the silverware like a fan of cards.

"Did you put out the good napkins?" she asked.

"We have good napkins?"

She laughed and pointed with a wooden spoon toward the hutch her mother had given them when they bought the house, a heavy ugly thing they both secretly loved. He found the napkins, cloth, still creased from the packaging, and shook them out.

At six-forty the doorbell hadn't rung yet and the salad wasn't dressed and David was vacuuming the living room rug even though nobody would notice. Rosa slid the bread into the oven and stood for a second with her hands on the counter, listening to the vacuum whine in the next room, feeling the small satisfying panic of hosting.

"Your parents called," David shouted over the noise. "I told them we'd call back Sunday."

"Did you say it nicely?"

"I said it in my nicest voice."

She kissed the back of his neck when he came in to put the vacuum away, and he made a face, because he was sweating and knew it. Then the doorbell rang, and Rosa untied the apron, and David went to answer it, and the evening started the way it always did—too early, unready, fine.


The doorbell wasn't due to ring for another forty minutes, but Dana had already changed her shirt twice.

"The blue one," Marcus said from the kitchen, not looking up. He was mincing garlic with the focused inefficiency of a man who had watched three YouTube videos on knife technique and absorbed none of them.

"You didn't even see the other one."

"I saw it. It was fine. The blue one's better."

She came in and leaned against the counter, watching him. Their house in Cedar Rapids was small enough that every room heard every other room, which after eleven years of marriage had stopped being a problem and started being a convenience.

"Did you get the wine?"

"Two reds, one white. And that seltzer stuff for Priya."

"You remembered."

"I write things down now," he said. "It's my whole personality."

Dana pulled the good plates from the top shelf, the ones from his mother, and started counting. Six. Then seven, because Todd was bringing whoever he was seeing this month. She set them on the table and stepped back to look, then moved the candle two inches left.

"It was fine where it was," Marcus said.

"It was not."

He came over with a dish towel over his shoulder and looked at the table like he was appraising a car. "You're right. It was not."

The oven timer went off. The chicken needed another ten minutes, which meant the potatoes needed to come out now, which meant somebody had to deal with the salad, and for a few minutes they moved around each other in the narrow galley kitchen without speaking, hips turning, hands passing over shoulders, an old choreography.

At 6:52, Dana straightened a picture frame in the hallway. Marcus put on a record.

"They're going to be late," he said.

"I know," she said, and sat down to wait with him anyway.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Priya heard the garage door groan.

"You're late," she called, not unkindly, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

Dev came in carrying two paper bags and a bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane, still wearing his work badge. "The store was a war zone. Somebody bought all the cilantro. All of it." He set the bags on the counter and kissed the side of her head. "I got parsley. We'll lie about it."

"Marcus will know."

"Marcus will be on his third beer and will not know."

She laughed and went back to the stove, where the dal had been simmering long enough that the kitchen smelled like her mother's house. Dev found a vase under the sink, cut the stems too short the way he always did, and set the flowers on the dining table next to the stack of mismatched plates.

"Napkins?" he asked.

"Linen ones. Second drawer. The good ones, not the ones with the stain."

He held one up to the light, squinting, and she said, "That's the stain one," without turning around.

They moved around each other in the small kitchen with the choreography of eleven years — he reached over her shoulder for the salt, she stepped left without looking. He put on a record, something with horns, then turned it down when she made a face.

At 6:40 he vacuumed the living room while she showered. At 6:52 she came out in a green sweater and asked if it was too much, and he said it was exactly enough. He was still in his work clothes.

"Go change," she said. "You smell like the office."

"I smell like ambition."

"Go."

He went. At 7:04, the doorbell rang, and Priya heard the shower shut off upstairs, and she opened the door alone, laughing, holding a towel.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another forty minutes, but Marisol was already convinced they were behind.

"Did you get the good glasses down?" she called from the kitchen, where she was scraping roasted garlic out of its skin with the back of a spoon.

"Getting them now." Diego stood on a step stool in the dining room, easing the wine glasses off the top shelf two at a time. One of them had a water spot he could see even in the dim light, so he carried the whole set to the sink and started polishing them with a dish towel while Marisol worked around him. They'd lived in the house eleven years and had developed a kind of choreography in that kitchen — she reached, he leaned back; he pivoted, she ducked.

"Teresa's bringing her sister," Marisol said. "That's seven."

"We have seven chairs."

"We have six chairs and that thing from the garage."

Diego sighed and went out to get the folding chair, which had a cobweb across its seat and had to be hosed off in the driveway in the November cold. When he came back in, Marisol had put on music, something with horns, and had changed out of her work clothes into a sweater the color of oatmeal. She was tasting the soup, frowning, adding salt.

"Too much cumin?"

He tried it. "No. Maybe more lime."

She squeezed half a lime in and tried again, and her face relaxed. "You're right."

He set the table while she pulled the bread out. At 6:52 they both stopped and looked at the room — candles lit, coats cleared off the bench by the door, the cat shut in the bedroom — and Marisol reached over and straightened his collar without saying anything.

Headlights swept the front window. Diego went to open the door.


Marcus heard the garage door rumble at 4:40, right on schedule, and called out, "Did you get the bread?"

"Two loaves," Daniel answered, shouldering through the kitchen door with grocery bags hanging from both arms. "And they were out of the good olives, so I got the ones you hate."

"I don't hate them. I have standards."

Daniel set the bags on the counter and surveyed the situation. Marcus had been cooking since two — a pot of something red bubbling on the back burner, cutting boards colonizing every surface, a dish towel draped over his shoulder like a badge of office. The kitchen smelled like garlic and browned butter.

"Josh texted," Daniel said, unpacking. "He's bringing his new girlfriend."

"That's four extra minutes on the chicken." Marcus didn't look up. "What's her name?"

"Priya. She's a landscape architect. Josh has mentioned it eleven times."

They fell into the choreography they'd developed over nine years of dinner parties: Marcus at the stove, Daniel wiping counters behind him, reaching around him for the corkscrew, saying "behind you" out of habit even when Marcus knew. Daniel set the table with the plates from Marcus's grandmother, then unset it and started over because he'd forgotten Priya.

At 5:50 Marcus finally turned off the burner and went to change. He came back in the green shirt.

"That one," Daniel said.

"You always say that one."

"Because you always look good in it." Daniel handed him a glass of wine and lit the candles, and for a moment they just stood there in the dining room, the table finally right, the whole house smelling like an occasion.

"Did you sweep the front steps?" Marcus asked.

"Damn it."

He was still out there with the broom when Josh's headlights swung into the driveway, and Marcus watched through the window, laughing, before he went to open the door.


The doorbell would ring at seven, which gave them forty minutes.

Marisol stood at the stove, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon, then adding more oregano than the recipe called for. She'd been cooking since four, and the kitchen smelled like her grandmother's house in San Antonio — garlic, tomatoes, something browning.

"Do we own napkins?" Dev called from the dining room. "Cloth ones. Not the ones from the taco place."

"Second drawer in the hutch. Under the placemats we never use."

He found them, mustard-yellow and slightly wrinkled, and decided nobody would notice. He'd spent the last hour on the parts of hosting he was good at: sweeping the hallway, hiding the laundry basket in the closet, wiping down the bathroom sink, replacing the burnt-out bulb over the table so the room stopped looking like a police interrogation. Now he set out plates, counted forks twice, and got it wrong both times.

"Six," Marisol said without turning around. "Anna's bringing her sister."

"Right. Six."

He put on a record because he thought it made the house feel considered, then went to shower. When he came back down in a clean shirt, still damp at the collar, she handed him a glass of wine and a knife.

"Bread," she said. "Diagonal. Not too thin."

They worked side by side for a while, not talking much. She burned her thumb on the pan and swore quietly, and he ran it under cold water and held it there longer than necessary.

At 6:52 she looked around the kitchen — the flour on the counter, the pot she hadn't washed — and said, "It's not perfect."

"It's a Tuesday," Dev said. "They're bringing pie."

She laughed. The doorbell rang at 6:58, eight minutes early, which was exactly like Anna, and they went to the door together.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another forty minutes, but Maya was already convinced the whole evening was doomed.

"The chicken's going to be dry," she said, opening the oven for the fourth time. Steam fogged her glasses.

"It's been in for twenty minutes." Daniel didn't look up from the cutting board, where he was working through a pile of shallots with the slow, deliberate technique of a man who had once nearly lost a fingertip. "You keep opening it, it'll take an hour."

"That's a myth."

"That is thermodynamics."

She let the oven door swing shut and turned to the counter, where three kinds of cheese sat sweating on a wooden board she'd bought specifically for nights like this and used maybe twice a year. Outside, a March rain had started, tapping at the kitchen window over the sink. Their house in Rochester still had the original 1940s windows, drafty and beautiful, which Daniel had been promising to replace since the Obama administration.

"Did you text Priya about the nut allergy?"

"It's her husband, and yes." He slid the shallots into a pan. "No almonds in anything. I checked the crackers."

Maya stopped, holding a wine bottle by the neck. "You checked the crackers?"

"I'm not a monster."

She kissed the back of his shoulder as she passed him, going for the corkscrew. He smelled like olive oil and the sandalwood soap he'd used for eleven years, since before they were married, since the apartment on Alexander Street with the radiator that clanged all winter.

At 6:52 he changed his shirt. At 6:55 she lit the candles, then blew two out because it felt like too much, then relit one.

Headlights swung across the living room wall.

"Okay," Daniel said, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "Okay."

"It's just Priya."

"I know it's just Priya."

She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, and they went to open the door.


The oven timer had twenty-two minutes left when Marisol finally admitted the dining room table was too small.

"We could put the leaf in," she said, standing in the doorway with a stack of mismatched plates against her hip.

Dennis looked up from the sink, where he was scrubbing the roasting pan he'd meant to soak an hour ago. "The leaf is in the garage. Behind the bikes."

"So it's in the garage behind the bikes."

He dried his hands on the towel hanging from the stove handle and went out through the mudroom. She heard the bikes clatter, then a word he didn't usually say in front of company, then the screen door again. The leaf came in wrapped in an old bedsheet, dusty at the corners, and it took both of them to seat it — Marisol pulling the table halves apart while Dennis fed the panel down into the track.

"It's crooked," she said.

"It's always crooked. Nobody's ever noticed."

"I notice."

They ate a handful of olives standing up, the way they always did before people came, and Dennis put on the playlist he'd made in October and never updated. Marisol folded napkins into rough triangles. Dennis lit the two candles they'd been given as a wedding present eleven years ago and had never quite finished burning.

At 6:52 she went upstairs to change her shirt, and he took the chicken out and covered it with foil to rest. When she came back down he told her she looked nice, and she said the shirt had a stain on the cuff, and he said nobody would notice, and she said she'd notice, and then they stood there a second in the warm kitchen, listening for the sound of a car in the driveway.

The Hendersons were, predictably, seven minutes early.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, still creased from the last time they'd used it, Thanksgiving two years ago. She shook it out over the dining table and pressed the wrinkles flat with her palms while the oven preheated.

"Did you salt the water?" she called.

"Salting it now," Dev answered from the kitchen. He was standing over the pot with the box of kosher salt tilted, and he added a little more than the recipe wanted, because Marisol always said restaurant pasta tasted better and he suspected this was why. The chicken was already in the oven, skin rubbed with lemon and thyme from the pot on the windowsill that had somehow survived the summer.

They had bought this house three years ago in a neighborhood outside Sacramento where the sidewalks buckled from old tree roots. The dining room was the reason. It had a window that faced west and caught the late light, and Marisol had stood in it at the open house and said, *We could have people over*, in a voice that meant she'd already decided.

She counted out six places, then went back for a seventh because Tom was bringing his sister. Dev came through with a stack of bowls, set them down, and put his hand briefly on the back of her neck as he passed.

"Do we have enough wine?"

"There's the two bottles Sarah brought last time. And I got a Chianti."

"Do you think that's enough?"

"For six people?"

"For Sarah," Marisol said, and Dev laughed and admitted she had a point.

At six-forty the light went gold across the table. Dev changed his shirt. Marisol lit the candles even though it wasn't dark yet, because she liked how they looked, and then the doorbell rang and they both moved toward it at once.


Marcus heard the garage door rumble as he pulled the roast from the oven, the kitchen thick with rosemary and browned butter. Dev came in still wearing his work badge, hauling two paper bags.

"They were out of the good bread," Dev said, "so I got the sourdough from the place on Fifth. Traffic was a nightmare."

"You have thirty minutes." Marcus didn't look up from the carving board.

"I have twenty-eight. I'm aware." Dev set the bags down and kissed the back of Marcus's neck as he passed, which was the closest thing to an apology either of them needed.

The house was a 1940s bungalow in Sacramento that they'd been slowly un-ruining for six years. The dining room table still had the water ring from the summer the AC died. Dev threw a cloth over it, then went to change out of his badge and khakis.

Marcus checked the roast's temperature, moved the green beans to the back burner, and realized he'd forgotten to chill the white wine. He shoved two bottles in the freezer and set a timer on his phone so he wouldn't forget them and create a mess later.

"Where's the serving spoon?" Dev called from the hallway. "The big wooden one?"

"Third drawer. Under the tongs."

"It's not—" A pause. "Never mind."

At 6:52 they were both in the kitchen, Dev lighting candles he'd bought and forgotten about in March, Marcus sweeping crumbs off the counter into his hand. Dev straightened a chair, then straightened it back.

"Do we look like people who have their lives together?"

Marcus considered the sink, which was full. "We look like people who cooked."

The doorbell rang at 6:58. Priya was early, as always, holding a pie and apologizing for it. Dev went to let her in, and Marcus untied his apron, folded it over the chair, and followed.


The rain had stopped by four, leaving the driveway slick and the maples dripping onto the porch rail. Inside, Marisol pulled the roasting pan out of the oven and swore softly. The chicken skin had gone pale on one side.

"It's fine," Daniel said from the sink, where he was scrubbing a colander. "Nobody's going to inspect it."

"Ruth inspects it."

"Ruth compliments everything and then goes home and complains to her sister. That's different."

Marisol laughed despite herself and turned the pan around, sliding it back into the heat. She'd been on her feet since noon, and her lower back had that dull ache that meant she'd be asleep by ten no matter how good the conversation got.

Daniel dried his hands and went to deal with the dining room, which had become, over the course of the winter, a place where mail went to die. He gathered the catalogs and unopened bank statements into a stack and stashed them in the office, then found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, the one with the wine stain they'd learned to arrange a serving dish over.

"Six or six-thirty?" he called.

"Peter said six-thirty. Which means seven."

He set out seven places, counted again, and took one away. Kim was bringing her new boyfriend, but the Alvarezes had canceled Tuesday because of their daughter's recital.

In the kitchen, Marisol was tasting the sauce and adding lemon. Daniel came up behind her, took the spoon, tasted it himself, and made a face that meant approval. She elbowed him toward the fridge.

"Open the white so it's not warm."

"It's already cold."

"Open it so it's *breathing*."

"That's red."

"Open it anyway."

He did. Outside, headlights swept the wet driveway, twenty minutes early, and they looked at each other and started laughing.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, wedged behind the beach towels they never used anymore. She shook it out on the dining room table and frowned at the crease running down the center.

"It's fine," Dev said, passing through with a colander of green beans. "Nobody looks at the tablecloth."

"Your mother looks at the tablecloth."

"My mother isn't coming."

Still, Marisol went for the iron. It was four-forty on a Saturday in October, and the Petersons were due at six, the Nguyens a little after, and Ruth whenever Ruth felt like it, which historically meant seven-fifteen with a bottle of something expensive and an apology she didn't mean.

Dev had the chicken thighs going in the cast iron, skin-side down, not touching them the way the internet had taught him. He kept wanting to touch them. He wiped his hands on the dish towel over his shoulder and checked the rice, which was doing nothing yet, and then went to change the bulb in the hallway fixture that had been dead since August.

"Do we have candles?" Marisol called.

"The ones from the power outage."

"Those are emergency candles. They look like emergency candles."

"So it'll look like an emergency dinner party."

She laughed despite herself. She found two tapers in a drawer, mismatched, and decided she didn't care. Then she vacuumed the living room rug, and Dev turned the music up so they could hear it over the noise, and by the time she finished, the kitchen smelled like garlic and thyme and the windows had gone dark blue at the edges.

At five-fifty he asked if his shirt was okay. She straightened his collar and said it was.

The doorbell rang at six-oh-two. The tablecloth still had the crease. Neither of them mentioned it again.


Marcus heard the front door before he heard the car, which meant Dana had parked crooked again and was already halfway up the walk with grocery bags cutting into her forearms.

"They didn't have the good bread," she announced, dropping everything on the counter. "So we're having the mediocre bread and pretending it's rustic."

"Nobody's going to notice." He was on his knees at the oven, squinting at the roast. The meat thermometer had been reading 140 for what felt like twenty minutes.

"Karen notices. Karen notices things about bread." Dana pulled off her coat and started unloading — wine, a bag of salad greens, a wedge of cheese wrapped in butcher paper. "Did you call your mother back?"

"Tomorrow."

"You said that Tuesday."

"And tomorrow it'll be true." He stood, wiped his hands on a dish towel, and kissed the side of her head as he passed. "The dining room's a disaster. There's mail everywhere."

"That's your mail."

"It's *our* mail, technically, in the eyes of the law."

She threw a dish towel at him.

They worked around each other the way people do after eleven years — Dana at the sink rinsing greens, Marcus reaching past her for the colander without asking, both of them doing a small sideways shuffle at the stove that neither noticed anymore. He put on a record. She turned it down four notches. He turned it up two, and she let it go.

At 6:40 the roast came out looking better than it had any right to. Dana lit the candles, then blew one out because it was smoking.

"We forgot dessert," Marcus said.

They stood there a second.

"There's ice cream," she said.

"There's ice cream," he agreed.

The doorbell rang. Dana smoothed her shirt, Marcus turned the music back up, and they went to answer it together.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another hour, but Marcus was already moving like it might.

He wiped down the counter for the third time while Elena stood at the stove, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon. She made a face.

"Too much oregano?" he asked.

"Not enough salt. Which is different." She handed him the spoon. He tasted, nodded, reached for the box of kosher salt without being asked.

They'd lived in the house eleven years, long enough that the kitchen had a choreography to it. Elena occupied the stove and the two feet of counter beside it. Marcus took the sink and the island. When one needed to pass behind the other, a hand went briefly to the small of a back — a signal, not affection, though it functioned as both.

"Did you text Dana about the shellfish thing?" Elena asked.

"I texted her. She said her allergy is fine as long as it's not in the same pan."

"It's not in the same pan."

"I told her that."

Marcus went to the dining room and started setting places. Six of them, which meant the leaf in the table, which meant hunting the mismatched chair from the basement. He came back up with cobwebs on his sleeve and Elena brushed them off without looking up from the salad.

"Your mother called," she said.

"I know. I'll call her Sunday."

At six-forty he changed his shirt. At six-fifty Elena put on earrings and looked at herself in the hallway mirror with the frank, unsentimental assessment of a woman who had stopped expecting surprises there.

"Do we have enough wine?" she said.

"We have enough wine."

"We never have enough wine."

He opened the fridge, counted, and admitted she was right. Then the doorbell rang, ten minutes early, the way it always did with Dana, and Elena said "I'll get it" and Marcus said "I've got the coats," and the evening started.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, which was exactly where she'd shoved it in March.

"Iron's already hot," Danny called from the kitchen. He had the radio on low, some station out of Bloomington that played too many commercials. "I plugged it in when you started swearing at the closet."

"I wasn't swearing."

"You said a word."

She spread the cloth on the dining table and worked the wrinkles out with the iron, watching the steam rise. Through the doorway she could see Danny in his socks, sleeves rolled, scoring the top of a loaf he'd started that morning. He'd been nervous about the bread all week. The Kowalskis were coming, and Peter Kowalski had once, unforgivably, described Danny's focaccia as "interesting."

"Six-thirty?" she asked.

"Kowalskis at six-thirty. Renee said seven but she means seven-twenty."

Marisol laughed and set the iron on its heel. She went upstairs to change, passing the bathroom where she'd hung a fresh towel that nobody would use, and put on the green sweater because it was October and the house got cold near the windows. When she came down Danny had lit the two candles they'd been saving since their anniversary and was standing back from the table with his hands on his hips, evaluating.

"Too much?" he said.

"It's candles, Dan."

"Feels like a lot of candles."

She moved one to the sideboard, and he seemed relieved. Then he opened the oven and the whole first floor filled with the smell of it — rosemary, salt, hot crust — and Marisol put her chin on his shoulder and looked in with him.

"That's a good loaf," she said.

"It's an interesting loaf."

Headlights swung across the front window. Danny straightened, wiped his palms on his jeans, and went to get the door.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another hour, but Marcus was already sweating.

"You're going to burn the shallots," Priya said, not looking up from the dining table, where she was folding napkins into shapes that were supposed to be fans and were coming out more like crumpled birds.

"I'm not going to burn the shallots." He turned the heat down anyway.

Their house in Sacramento was small enough that the kitchen and dining room were really one room with an optimistic archway between them. This meant that every dinner party involved a kind of negotiated choreography, Priya reaching past him for the wine opener, Marcus stepping back without looking because he knew she'd be there.

"Did you text Danielle about the mushrooms?"

"She said she's fine with mushrooms now. Apparently the allergy was a misunderstanding for six years."

"Six years." Priya laughed. "So all those risottos I made without mushrooms—"

"Wasted vigilance."

She set out the good plates, the ones from his mother, with the small chip on the fourth one that they always gave to whoever seemed least likely to notice. Then she went to change, came back in the green shirt, and Marcus made the face he made.

"What."

"Nothing. That's the one."

The salad still needed dressing. The bathroom still needed a hand towel that wasn't the one with a bleach stain. Priya found candles in the drawer with the batteries and takeout menus, and lit them even though it was still light out, because it made the room look intentional.

At 6:52 Marcus stood in the middle of the kitchen and surveyed everything, and it was fine. It was actually fine.

"Hey," he said. "Nice work."

Priya handed him a glass of wine. "Drink some before they get here. You get weird when you're hosting sober."

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. They looked at each other, and Priya went to answer it.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded in the linen closet, still creased from the last time they'd used it—Thanksgiving, when her sister had spilled cranberry sauce and cried about it for twenty minutes.

"Do we own eight matching chairs?" Dev called from the dining room.

"We own six matching chairs and two that are close enough."

"Close enough is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

She snapped the cloth open over the table and let it settle. Outside, the October light was going amber, catching the dust that always seemed to live in the front window no matter how often she wiped it. Dev came through with the two mismatched chairs from the office, one under each arm, and set them at the ends where nobody would look too hard.

The chicken had another forty minutes. Marisol had made the same braise for six years, ever since a coworker gave her the recipe on an index card, and she'd stopped measuring anything in it around year three. Dev was in charge of the salad, which meant he was standing at the counter reading the back of a bottle of vinegar with real intensity.

"Priya's bringing wine," he said. "And Tom's bringing whatever Tom brings."

"Hummus. He always brings hummus."

"He brings very good hummus."

She found the candles in the junk drawer, mostly burned down, and put them out anyway. Dev turned on the little speaker in the corner and put on something without lyrics, then adjusted the volume twice, then a third time.

At six-fifteen he leaned against the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder and looked at the table—the cloth, the stubby candles, the two chairs that didn't match.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like us."

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. Dev went to answer it, and Marisol turned down the oven, and the house filled up with noise.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, folded beneath a stack of towels that had been shoved in there sometime around March. She shook it out, and the smell of the closet came with it—cardboard and cedar.

"It's got a stain," she called toward the kitchen.

"Where?" Dev came out wiping his hands on a dish towel. He was still in the T-shirt he'd worn to Home Depot, a smear of caulk on the hem.

She pointed. He looked at it, then at her, and shrugged. "Put the bread basket there."

That was the whole conversation. Twelve years of marriage had compressed a lot of things down to that size.

He went back to the chicken. She could hear him talking to it, low, the way he did—"okay, okay, you're fine"—the same voice he used with the dog. The oven fan roared. In the dining room, Marisol set out the mismatched plates, five of the blue ones and two white, and decided she didn't care. Anna was bringing wine. Sam and Priya were bringing their four-year-old, who would eat exactly one dinner roll and then ask for the iPad.

At 6:40 she changed out of her work clothes into jeans, and when she came back downstairs Dev had put on a clean shirt and was lighting the candles with a grill lighter, one hand cupped around each flame.

"Do we have ice?" he asked.

"I bought a bag Tuesday."

"That was for the cooler."

"So we have ice."

He laughed, went to check anyway. The dog barked at nothing. Marisol looked at the table—the stain hidden, the candles going, the whole ordinary arrangement of it—and felt the specific pleasure of a house about to be full.

Headlights swung across the front window at 6:58. Dev called, "That's them," and she went to open the door.


Marcus heard the front door before he saw her—the particular rhythm of Priya kicking off her shoes in the entryway, one heel against the other.

"Traffic on the 405 was biblical," she called. "Please tell me you started the rice."

"Rice is resting. Chicken's got twenty minutes." He was standing at the counter with a knife, working through a bunch of cilantro he'd bought that morning because he'd forgotten they still had some in the crisper drawer. Two bunches of cilantro. Their whole marriage in a nutshell.

Priya came in, kissed the back of his neck, and immediately opened the fridge to survey the situation. "You bought more cilantro."

"I bought more cilantro."

"Okay." She pulled out a lime. "Did Dev text? He's bringing his new person, right?"

"Alina. Yes. And Josh said he might be late because of the babysitter."

"Josh is always late because of the babysitter." She started slicing the lime into wedges without being asked, which was one of the small mercies of eleven years together—the way tasks got absorbed. "How's the table?"

"Not set."

She went to do it. He heard the cabinet open, the clink of the good plates that weren't really good, just less chipped. Through the doorway he could see her frowning at the arrangement, moving a chair six inches, moving it back.

"Do we have candles?" she called.

"Junk drawer. Left side."

"That is a lie. That drawer contains chargers and one dead battery."

He wiped his hands and went to look. She was right. They found two candles in the linen closet instead, mismatched, and Priya lit them anyway.

The doorbell rang at 7:04. Marcus turned off the burner. Priya pushed her hair back and looked at him.

"Do I look like a person who has her life together?"

"Completely," he said, and went to answer the door.