Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still holding her keys, looking at the counter she'd wiped down that morning, and decided the wine could stay in the fridge a few more minutes.

Ten years. Not the wedding—that was in June. This was the other anniversary, the one only they observed: the night they'd sat in his car outside the diner on Route 9 for two hours because neither of them wanted to be the first to say goodnight.

She pulled out the cutting board and started on the shallots. Dev came through the door at six-forty, tie already loosened, and set a paper bag on the table.

"You bought bread," she said. "I bought bread."

"Then we have two breads." He kissed the back of her neck and looked over her shoulder. "You're doing the mushroom thing."

"I'm doing the mushroom thing."

He changed into a t-shirt and took over the stove while she showered, because that was the arrangement—she started dinner, he finished it, and neither of them ever said so out loud. When she came back down with wet hair, he had the good plates out and had moved the mail off the table, which meant he was taking it seriously.

They ate slowly. He told her about the parking garage attendant who'd been reading Moby-Dick in the booth for three weeks. She told him her sister had called twice and she hadn't picked up. Around nine they carried their glasses to the couch and put on the first thing they agreed on, then didn't watch it.

"Two hours," Dev said. "In that car. My hands were freezing."

"You wouldn't turn the heat on."

"I'd already turned the engine off. It seemed like a commitment."

Marisol laughed and put her feet in his lap, and outside the window the street went quiet.


The rain had started around four, and by six it had settled into the steadiness that meant it would last all night. Dana came in through the garage with her coat over her head, holding a paper bag against her chest.

"You got the bread?" Marcus called from the kitchen.

"I got the bread. I also got the wrong kind, probably." She set the bag down and shook water from her hair. "They were out of the sourdough. I panicked."

Marcus took the loaf out and turned it over in his hands, the way he examined everything, like it might have instructions printed somewhere. "Ciabatta's fine. It's better, actually, for the soup."

Eleven years. Not a round number, not the kind that got parties. But eleven years ago on a Tuesday in March, they'd stood in front of a judge in Sacramento with Dana's sister and Marcus's college roommate as witnesses, and afterward they'd eaten at a diner because everything else was closed.

"Do you want to do the thing?" Dana asked.

"The diner thing?"

"We could drive to that place on Fifth."

Marcus considered it, stirring. "It's raining."

"It's always raining. That's not a reason."

"It's a little bit of a reason." He tasted the soup, added pepper. "I'd rather stay here. Is that terrible? I bought a cake."

"You bought a cake."

"It's in the trunk. I forgot about it entirely until this second."

She laughed and went out into the rain again without a coat, and came back with a white box gone soft at one corner. They ate at the small table by the window with the overhead light off, just the lamp from the living room reaching in.

"Eleven," Marcus said.

"Eleven." Dana reached across and straightened his collar, an old habit. "Ask me again next year."


Marcus got home first, which almost never happened. He set the grocery bag on the counter and started unpacking: two ribeyes, a bag of arugula, the good olive oil, a lemon. Fifteen years ago tonight, he'd burned a pan of scallops so badly the smoke alarm went off in Elena's apartment, and she'd laughed until she had to sit down on the floor.

He was pressing pepper into the steaks when he heard her key.

"You're early," she said, dropping her bag by the door. She'd stopped at the bakery on Chestnut; he could tell by the white box.

"Traffic gods smiled." He wiped his hands. "You got the cake."

"I got a tart. The cake looked sad." Elena kicked off her shoes and came to look over his shoulder. "Those are enormous."

"They're for two people."

"They're for four people and we'll eat all of it."

She poured wine while he worked, then leaned against the counter and told him about the meeting that ran ninety minutes over, the colleague who couldn't stop saying *circle back*. He told her about the kid at the shop who'd tried to fix a fuel pump with a zip tie. She laughed the same way she had fifteen years ago, tipping backward slightly, one hand flat on her chest.

They ate at the kitchen table instead of the dining room, because the dining room table had become a place where mail went to die. The steaks were good. The arugula was too peppery and they both ate it anyway.

"No speech this year," Elena warned.

"Wasn't going to."

"You always say that."

He turned his glass by the stem. "Fifteen years."

"That's a speech."

"That's a number."

She reached over and took a bite of his tart before touching her own. He let her.


The Ellison house smelled like garlic and burnt butter by six o'clock, which meant Ray had gotten distracted again.

"You said you'd watch the pan," Denise said, coming in from the garage with a bag of ice and the good wine glasses she kept out there because there was no room in the kitchen cabinets.

"I did watch it. I watched it turn brown." He scraped the skillet into the trash and started over, this time with the heat lower. "Twenty-two years and you still don't trust me with shrimp scampi."

"Twenty-two years is exactly why I don't trust you with shrimp scampi."

She set the table in the dining room they almost never used, the one with her mother's tablecloth and the chairs that wobbled. Outside, a neighbor's mower droned through the last of the daylight. Denise lit two candles, thought about it, and blew one out. Too much like a restaurant trying too hard.

Ray came in with the plates. He'd changed his shirt, she noticed, the blue one she'd bought him in Charleston.

"Kids called?" he asked.

"Marisol texted. Danny will call tomorrow, he always does."

They ate slowly. The shrimp were fine, a little heavy on the lemon. Ray told the story about the flat tire on their wedding day, which he told every year, and Denise let him tell it, correcting only the part where he claimed he'd changed it himself.

"Your cousin changed it. You held the flashlight."

"I held it very well."

Afterward they carried their glasses to the porch and sat in the metal chairs that had been there since before the porch was screened in. The mower had stopped. Somewhere a dog complained about something.

"We should do something big for twenty-five," Ray said.

Denise put her feet up on the railing. "This is fine," she said, and meant it.


The rain started around four, which Marcus decided was fine. Rain meant no one would expect them anywhere.

He got home first and found the apartment exactly as they'd left it that morning—Elena's reading glasses on the arm of the couch, his coffee cup in the sink. He washed the cup, then washed everything else, then stood in the kitchen wondering what to do with the twenty minutes before she arrived.

Elena came in shaking water from her coat. "Nobody in Chicago knows how to drive in rain," she announced. "Ten years and I still can't get over it."

"Eleven," Marcus said.

She stopped. "Eleven what?"

"Eleven years since you moved here. Ten since the wedding." He handed her a towel. "You always do that."

"I always do that," she agreed, drying her hair. "Did you get the fish?"

He had. Halibut, because that was what they'd eaten at the restaurant in Rogers Park where he'd proposed badly and she'd said yes anyway, laughing at him through the whole speech he'd rehearsed for a week. Neither of them mentioned this, but Elena picked up the package and turned it over and smiled at the label.

She cooked; he handled the rice and the wine and the small unglamorous work of setting a table for two. They talked about her sister's move, about the leak in the bathroom ceiling, about whether they should finally replace the couch. Ordinary things. The rain kept up against the windows.

Later, when the plates were cleared, Elena refilled both glasses and sat back down.

"Ten years," she said.

"You want to say something profound?"

"No." She considered. "I want to say the fish was overcooked."

"It was a little overcooked."

"But I'd do it again." She touched her glass to his. "All of it. Even the proposal."

"It wasn't that bad."

"Marcus. It was terrible."

He laughed, and they finished the wine, and outside it kept raining.


Marcus got home first, which almost never happened. He set the grocery bag on the counter—two ribeyes, a bag of arugula, the expensive butter Priya pretended not to notice on the receipt—and started pulling down pans.

She came in at six-forty, still in her work clothes, hair pinned up in the way that meant she'd been in meetings since noon. She stopped in the doorway.

"You're cooking."

"I'm attempting."

"On our worst anniversary."

"On our most important one," he said, and handed her a glass of wine.

Twelve years ago that night, she'd sat on the edge of a hospital bed in Cleveland and told him she thought she needed to leave. Not him—the marriage as it was, the version of them that had gotten so quiet it stopped being safe. He'd driven home alone. They'd spent fourteen months in separate apartments and a lot of Tuesday evenings in a beige office with a therapist named Doreen who kept a jar of butterscotch candy on the table.

They didn't celebrate the wedding date anymore. They celebrated this one.

Priya took off her shoes and sat on the counter, which she knew he hated, and watched him salt the steaks badly.

"More," she said.

"I know what I'm doing."

"You don't. Give me the salt."

He gave her the salt. She got down, seasoned both steaks properly, and stayed beside him at the stove while the butter foamed. Their arms touched. Outside, someone's dog was losing its mind about a squirrel.

They ate at the kitchen table with the overhead light off, one candle Priya found in the junk drawer, half-burned from some blackout years back.

"To Doreen," Marcus said.

"To Doreen," she agreed. "And her terrible candy."

They stayed there a long time after the plates were empty, talking about nothing, letting the candle burn down to a nub.


The Anniversary

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen still wearing her coat, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning—*Don't eat, I'm cooking*—and realized she had no idea what she was going to cook.

Twenty years. Twenty years since a courthouse in Providence, since her mother had cried in the parking lot for reasons nobody ever clarified.

She was halfway through chopping an onion when Marcus came in, hung his keys on the hook, and set a paper bag on the table.

"You brought food," she said.

"I brought a backup." He pulled out a container of soup from the place on Ellis Street. "In case."

"In case what?"

"In case you got ambitious." He looked at the cutting board. "Which you did."

She threw a piece of onion at him. He caught it, which annoyed her.

They ended up making it together, the way they always did—him doing the parts that required patience, her doing the parts that required heat. He'd bought a bottle of wine that cost more than he'd ever admit. She'd hidden a card in the drawer with the dish towels three days ago and had to dig past four dish towels to find it.

The card said something plain. He read it twice anyway.

They ate at the small table instead of the big one. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and then stopped. Marcus told a story about a coworker's disastrous vacation, and Dana laughed harder than the story deserved, and he noticed that, and didn't say anything about it.

Later, she put on the record they'd danced to at the reception their friends had thrown, the one with the folding chairs and the sheet cake.

"We could dance," he said.

"We could sit," she said.

They sat. The record played through both sides.


Marcus got home first, which was rare. He'd left the office at four thirty, mumbling something about a dentist appointment, and now he stood in the kitchen of their rented duplex trying to remember whether the sauce needed to simmer covered or uncovered.

Dana came in at six, dropping her bag by the door. "It smells like garlic in here."

"That's the smell of effort."

She kissed the back of his neck and looked over his shoulder at the pot. "Is that Mom's recipe?"

"I called her Tuesday. She talked for forty minutes."

"She would." Dana went to change out of her work clothes and came back in sweatpants and one of his old college shirts, the collar stretched out from years of washing. She pulled two wine glasses down from the cabinet, then hesitated. "Do we still have that bottle from Sarah's wedding?"

"Back of the pantry. Behind the rice."

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room had become a place where laundry went to be forgotten. Dana lit a candle she'd found in the junk drawer, a squat green thing that smelled faintly of pine, which was wrong for June but neither of them mentioned it.

"Ten years since the courthouse," she said.

"Eleven since the diner."

"The diner doesn't count as an anniversary."

"It counts to me." He refilled her glass. "You had a milkshake at eleven at night and told me you hated your job."

"I did hate my job."

Afterward they washed dishes together, Dana rinsing, Marcus drying, arguing mildly about whether the pan needed to soak. They took the last of the wine to the couch and watched half of a movie neither of them had chosen carefully. Dana fell asleep before the end. Marcus turned the television off and sat there a while in the dark, listening to her breathe.


Marcus found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. Fifteen years old, faded to the color of weak tea, but he could still read the venue name.

"Hey," he called toward the kitchen. "Remember the Fillmore?"

Denise came out drying her hands on a dish towel. She took the stubs, held them at arm's length the way she did now with everything, and laughed. "You spilled beer on that woman's boots."

"She forgave me."

"She did not. She moved."

They stood in the hallway of the house they'd bought four years ago in Sacramento, the one with the crooked back fence and the lemon tree that produced more than they could give away. Their anniversary was Saturday. Neither had brought it up yet, which was its own kind of conversation.

"I was thinking dinner somewhere," Denise said. "Somewhere with cloth napkins."

"We could." Marcus took the stubs back. "Or."

She waited. He'd always needed the extra beat.

"Or we drive to the coast. Bodega. Get a room, walk out to the rocks, eat clam chowder out of a bread bowl like tourists."

Denise considered this. She thought about the restaurant she'd half-imagined, the good dress hanging in the closet, the way she'd wanted, briefly, to be seen. Then she thought about wind, and the particular quiet of Marcus driving, one hand on the wheel, saying nothing for twenty minutes and it being fine.

"Both," she said. "Coast on Saturday. Dinner the following weekend, when it's cheaper."

"Practical."

"One of us has to be."

He put the stubs on the hall table instead of back in the box. She noticed, and didn't say anything about it, and later that night when she passed by she moved them to the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a lemon.


Marcus found the box in the back of the closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: the receipt from the Walgreens where they'd bought a disposable camera on their first anniversary, back when they were broke and living in the apartment above the laundromat in Providence.

"You kept this," Nadia said from the doorway. She'd come up to see what was taking so long.

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

She sat on the floor beside him. Twenty-five years. Her mother had already called twice this week asking what they were doing to celebrate, and both times Nadia had said they were still figuring it out, which was true.

"Rosalie thinks we should go to Portugal," Marcus said.

"Rosalie thinks everyone should go to Portugal." Nadia turned the receipt over. The ink had gone brown. "What do you want?"

He considered it honestly, which was one of the things she'd always appreciated about him — he didn't reach for the easy answer.

"I want to drive to Providence," he said. "See if the laundromat's still there. Eat somewhere terrible. Come home."

"That's it?"

"That's a lot. That's eight hours in the car with you."

Nadia laughed. She'd been braced for a proposal involving reservations and a dress code, some performance of significance that would leave them both exhausted and vaguely disappointed.

"The laundromat's a vape shop now," she said. "Deshawn sent me a picture last year."

"Then we'll look at the vape shop."

"And eat somewhere terrible."

"Non-negotiable."

She put the receipt back in the box. Downstairs, the dog was barking at something, probably nothing. Marcus stood and offered his hand, and she let him pull her up, and neither of them mentioned that they'd have to leave by six to beat the traffic, because they both already knew.


Marcus found the box of photographs while looking for the extension cord. He carried it to the kitchen table where Dana was grading papers, red pen tucked behind her ear.

"Twenty years," he said, setting it down. "You want to look?"

She capped the pen. "That depends. Are we doing dinner at Bellini's or are we doing something?"

They'd been circling the question for weeks. Their daughter had offered to fly in from Denver, but that felt like turning the anniversary into a performance. Marcus had floated a weekend in Charleston, which Dana pointed out would mean two days of him complaining about parking.

She opened the box. On top was a photo from the courthouse in Ann Arbor—her in a green dress she'd bought at a thrift store, him in a jacket borrowed from his brother, both of them squinting because the February sun had come out unexpectedly. Behind them, a stranger walking a dog.

"We didn't have anything," she said.

"We had eleven hundred dollars and a Corolla."

Dana turned the photo over. Someone, probably her mother, had written the date in ballpoint.

"What if we just went back," she said.

Marcus looked at her.

"Not a big thing. Drive up, find the courthouse, get a hamburger. See if that diner's still there—the one with the terrible coffee."

"That's eight hours in a car."

"We used to do it in nine, with a broken heater."

He was quiet a moment, thumbing through the rest of the pictures. Then he laughed at one—Dana asleep in the passenger seat, mouth open, a road atlas over her chest.

"I'll drive the first half," he said.

"You'll drive the whole thing. You never let me merge."

"You don't merge. You negotiate."

She put the photo in her shirt pocket and went back to grading. He started looking up motels, and found one, and didn't tell her the price.


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from a hardware store in Tucson, dated August 14, eleven years ago. Two gallons of paint, a roller, a drop cloth.

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

Dev looked over from the kitchen table, where he was pretending to do the crossword. "That was the weekend we painted the apartment."

"That was the weekend we *ruined* the apartment. Remember the ceiling?"

"I remember you laughing so hard you sat down in the paint tray."

They had been married two years by then, broke and stubborn, convinced that a coat of terracotta on rental walls would fix something neither of them could name. It hadn't. But they'd stayed, and something had shifted anyway.

Now the anniversary was three weeks out. Thirteen years. Not a milestone anyone made a fuss over.

"We could do the steakhouse," Dev offered. "Wear real clothes. Order the thing with the bone in it."

Marisol considered it. Thirteen years ago she'd have said yes immediately. Now she found herself thinking about the paint.

"What if we did the hallway," she said.

Dev put down his pen. "The hallway."

"It's been beige since we moved in. You hate it. You've said so, roughly nine hundred times."

"I've said so *once*, memorably, and you've never let it go."

But he was already looking down the hall, squinting at it the way he did when he was measuring something in his head.

They went to the paint store that Saturday and argued for forty minutes over two nearly identical greens. Marisol won. Dev bought the more expensive brushes out of spite.

On the fourteenth, they laid down a drop cloth and worked until dark, radio on, dinner forgotten until nine. There was a smear of green on Dev's forearm and one on the back of Marisol's neck, and neither of them mentioned it until much later.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. October 14, 2009. The Fillmore. She sat back on her heels in the hall closet and laughed, because she'd forgotten the band entirely but remembered the rain afterward, and Dev holding his jacket over both their heads while they waited for the bus that never came.

"Fifteen years," she said, carrying them into the kitchen.

Dev was scraping the burnt part off a piece of toast, which he did every morning and refused to acknowledge as a pattern. He took the stubs, held them at arm's length, then closer. "I thought you hated that band."

"I did. I still came."

"We should do something," he said. "Something real. Not just dinner."

They spent the next two weeks negotiating. Dev wanted to fly somewhere — Lisbon, maybe, where neither of them had been. Marguerite pointed out that the water heater was making a sound, and that his mother's surgery was in November, and that she had a deposition on the seventeenth she couldn't move.

"So we do nothing," he said, not bitterly, just tired.

"I didn't say nothing."

What they landed on, eventually, was this: they took the Friday off. Both of them. They drove out to the coast with no reservation, stopped at a diner that turned out to be closed, ate gas station sandwiches on the hood of the car, and walked on a beach that was too cold for walking. Marguerite's hair kept getting in her mouth. Dev found a sand dollar, intact, and gave it to her like it was a ring.

They were home by nine. The water heater still knocked.

"That was good," she said, from the bathroom doorway, toothbrush in hand.

"That was good," he agreed.

He kept the ticket stubs in his wallet after that, though he never mentioned it, and she never asked.


Marisol found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Ten years old, faded to the color of weak tea, from a movie neither of them could remember the plot of — only that Devon had spilled an entire large Coke on her shoe during the previews and apologized for forty minutes afterward.

"We could go back," he said that night, standing at the stove, stirring something that was mostly garlic. "The theater's still there. I drove past it in March."

"It's a vape shop now."

"It is not."

"It absolutely is. There's a neon palm tree in the window."

He turned off the burner. "Well. Then that's out."

They ate at the kitchen island because the dining table had become a place where mail went to die. Marisol proposed a trip — somewhere with a beach, somewhere they'd never been. Devon did the math out loud, gently, the way he always did when he didn't want to say no directly: the transmission, the deductible from his mother's surgery, the fact that neither of them had taken real vacation days in two years.

"So nothing," she said, not angry, just tired.

"I didn't say nothing." He got up and came back with a legal pad. "Ten years. What if we did ten things? Small ones. One a month. Cheap. Stupid, even."

She looked at the blank page for a while. Then she took the pen from him and wrote *1. Drive to the ocean and don't get out of the car.*

He laughed. "Why not get out?"

"Because it's January and we'll be miserable and we'll remember it forever."

He wrote *2. Learn to make my grandmother's rice.* Then handed the pen back.

They filled six lines before bed. The last four they left empty on purpose, and the notepad stayed on the counter for a year, collecting grocery lists in the margins.


Marcus found the shoebox while looking for the Christmas lights. Inside, beneath a tangle of receipts, was the paper napkin from Delgado's, the one Priya had drawn on the night he proposed—a lopsided sketch of a house with too many windows.

"We could go back," he said, bringing it to the kitchen where she was cutting the ends off green beans. "Ten years. Same table if they still have it."

Priya set down the knife and studied the napkin. "That place closed. Two years ago, remember? It's a vape shop now."

"Right." He leaned against the counter. "So a nice restaurant, then. The Italian place downtown."

She wasn't sure. Ten years felt like it deserved something with more weight than a two-hour dinner and a drive home, both of them full and quiet and slightly disappointed by the tiramisu. She said as much, and Marcus nodded, because he'd been thinking it too but hadn't wanted to be the one to complain about a plan he'd made.

They spent that evening not deciding. Priya floated a weekend in Asheville; Marcus pointed out that Grace had a swim meet. Marcus suggested skydiving, which Priya greeted with a look that ended the conversation.

It was Priya who thought of it, three days later, standing in the driveway. "What if we finished the deck?"

Marcus had started it four summers ago. The frame stood, weathered gray, holding up nothing.

"That's not romantic," he said.

"It's a little romantic."

So they spent the anniversary weekend at the lumber yard, then in the backyard with a borrowed miter saw, arguing about joist spacing and drinking beer that got warm too fast. Grace brought them sandwiches. By Sunday evening the deck existed, imperfect, one board slightly proud of the others.

They sat on it as the light went orange. Priya put her feet in his lap.

"Next year," Marcus said, "the railing."


Marcus found the calendar on the refrigerator, the tenth of October circled in blue ink twice, once by him and once, later, by Priya. Fifteen years. He stood there holding the milk until it started to sweat.

"We could go back to the Adriatic Grill," Priya said from the hallway, still in her work clothes, pulling one earring out. "Except it closed. In 2019."

"Everything closes."

"So that's out." She dropped the earring in the dish by the door, the way she had every evening for eleven years in this house. "Roland offered to take the kids. Both nights."

Marcus considered the ceiling. Somewhere above them, their daughter was practicing scales badly on purpose. "We could drive up to that cabin. The one with the woodstove that almost killed us."

"It didn't almost kill us."

"You said the phrase 'carbon monoxide' four times."

"I was being thorough." Priya took the milk from him and put it away herself, because he'd been holding it for a full minute. "I don't want to drive four hours. I want to be here, honestly. I want to make the lamb, and I want you to make the bread that takes all day, and I want to eat at the actual table and not standing at the counter."

He hadn't expected that. He'd braced for a trip, for a plan, for logistics.

"The whole day," he said.

"The whole day. You start the dough in the morning. I'll do the marinade. We put the phones in a drawer."

"Roland will call."

"Roland can leave a message."

Marcus laughed, and then thought about flour on the counter, about the smell of the oven filling the kitchen for hours, about her hands next to his.

"Deal," he said, and she reached past him to write it on the calendar in her narrow careful print: *Home. All day.*


Marcus found the sticky note on the bathroom mirror at six-fifteen, in Dee's handwriting: *Ten years. What are we doing?*

He wrote underneath it: *Something. Coffee first.*

They'd bought the house in Ypsilanti nine years ago, a narrow blue thing with a porch that sagged on one side. The anniversary wasn't of the house, though. It was of a Tuesday in October when they'd stood in front of a judge in Ann Arbor because Dee's mother was sick and they hadn't wanted to wait for spring.

"We could do the restaurant thing," Dee said, pouring the coffee. She was already dressed for work, badge clipped to her collar. "The place with the scallops."

"You didn't like the scallops."

"I liked the bread."

Marcus laughed. He was still in his robe, grading papers he should have finished Sunday. "What do you actually want?"

She sat down across from him and thought about it. Outside, someone's leaf blower started up.

"I want to go back to the courthouse," she said. "Not for anything. Just to stand outside it. And then I want to get sandwiches and sit in the car like we did after, because we didn't have money for a lunch."

"We had eleven dollars."

"We had eleven dollars and you bought me a Coke."

He set the pen down. "That's it? That's the whole plan?"

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

"I hate the scallops."

So on Saturday they drove the fourteen miles, and the courthouse looked smaller than either of them remembered, the way buildings do. They stood on the sidewalk for maybe four minutes. Dee took a picture of the doors on her phone. Then they got turkey sandwiches from a deli on Liberty and ate them in the parked car with the windows down, arguing pleasantly about whether the tree across the street was a maple or an oak.

It was a maple. Marcus was right, and Dee let him say so twice.


Marguerite found the box in the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside were the paper napkins from the reception, still smelling faintly of the church basement, and a photograph of Dev with a smear of frosting on his collar.

"Twenty-five years," she said, when he came in from the garage with sawdust in his eyebrows. "What do you want to do?"

He'd been thinking about it. He always thought about things longer than he admitted. "The Perkinses did a cruise."

"We're not the Perkinses."

"No," he agreed, with relief.

They sat at the kitchen table and made a list, crossing things off almost as fast as they wrote them. Paris was too expensive this year, with the roof needing work. A party meant cooking for forty people, and Marguerite said she'd rather chew glass. Dev suggested renting the cabin at Lake Ouachita where they'd gone the first summer, and she reminded him that the cabin had burned down in 2011.

"I'd forgotten that," he said.

What they settled on was smaller. They would drive to the coast on a Thursday, when the motels were cheap and the beaches were empty, and stay three nights in the same town where Dev's aunt had lived. Marguerite wanted to eat oysters. Dev wanted to walk out on the jetty and not talk to anyone.

"And on Saturday," she said, "we should get our picture taken. A real one. Not a phone."

He looked at her over the top of his glasses. "You want to get dressed up."

"I want us to have one picture where we don't look surprised."

So they went. The oysters were good. The wind on the jetty was brutal and Dev loved it. In the photograph, taken by a bored young man in a strip-mall studio, Marguerite is laughing at something just out of frame, and Dev is looking at her, and neither of them looks surprised at all.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from a Cleveland theater, dated eleven years ago that October.

"Look what survived," she said, holding them up as Desmond came in from the garage, smelling like motor oil and cold air.

He took one and squinted. "That awful play. You cried."

"I did not cry. I had allergies."

"You cried through the whole third act." He set the stub on the counter carefully, the way he handled things he intended to keep. "Twelve years next month."

They'd talked around the anniversary for weeks. Desmond's sister kept suggesting a cruise. Marguerite's mother thought they should renew their vows, which felt to Marguerite like admitting the originals had expired.

"I don't want a party," Marguerite said. She was scrubbing a pan that didn't need scrubbing. "I don't want to explain to people why we're happy."

Desmond leaned against the doorframe. "The Hendersons are selling that canoe. Two hundred dollars."

"You've mentioned that canoe four times."

"Because it's a good canoe."

She laughed and turned around. He had grease on his forearm and gray coming in at the temples and she thought, not for the first time, that she'd chosen well without entirely knowing what she was doing at the time.

"Okay," she said. "The canoe. And that campground by the river where the bathrooms are terrible."

"They renovated the bathrooms."

"They did not."

"They put in a hand dryer."

So they went. They paddled badly for an hour, argued about which side of the river the current favored, and ate sandwiches on a gravel bar while a heron watched them with obvious contempt. Desmond fell in getting out of the boat. Marguerite laughed so hard she had to sit down in the mud.

Driving home, damp and sunburned, neither of them said anything about it being meaningful. It didn't seem necessary.


Marcus found the box of photographs on a Tuesday, while looking for the extension cord. Twenty-five years of them, most from before digital cameras made everything disposable.

"Look at this," he said, carrying a handful into the kitchen where Dee was rinsing lettuce. "Your mother's backyard."

She dried her hands and took the photo. Two people who looked absurdly young, standing under a rented white tent that had sagged in the July heat. Her dress had been her cousin's, altered twice.

"We were babies," she said.

"You were twenty-six."

"Like I said."

They'd been circling the question of the anniversary for a month. Their daughter Nia had offered to book them somewhere—Charleston, maybe, or a cabin in the Blue Ridge. Marcus had liked the idea for about four days. Then his knee started acting up again, and Dee's mother had another fall, and the whole thing began to feel like a chore they were assigning themselves.

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

Marcus looked up.

"What if we just had people here. The way we did then. Your brother, Renee, the Okonkwos. Cook everything ourselves. Put the tent up in the yard if it doesn't rain."

"That's more work than Charleston."

"It is."

He turned the photograph over. Someone had written *July 1999* in ballpoint, in handwriting neither of them recognized anymore.

"I'd want to do the ribs," he said.

"I assumed."

"And no toasts. People stand up and get sentimental and I end up crying in front of Reggie."

"You cried at Nia's graduation."

"Which is my point."

Dee went back to the lettuce. Marcus stayed at the table, sorting photographs into piles that made sense only to him, and after a while she heard him laughing at something, and didn't ask what.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from a 2009 showing of a movie neither of them could remember liking.

"Fifteen years," she said, holding them up as Dev came in from the garage, still smelling like motor oil.

He squinted. "That's not our anniversary. That's the second date."

"The one where you spilled Coke on my shoe."

"You said it was fine."

"It wasn't fine. They were suede."

He laughed and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Their actual anniversary was three weeks out, and they'd been circling the question for days without landing on anything. Her sister kept sending links to resorts in Sedona. Dev's mother had offered to watch the dog, which felt like pressure.

"We could just do dinner," he said. "Somewhere with cloth napkins."

Marguerite sat down at the table and turned the stubs over in her hand. "I don't want dinner. I want—" She stopped, trying to find it. "I want to do something we'll actually remember. We've had a hundred dinners."

Dev dried his hands and sat across from her. Outside, the neighbor's sprinkler ticked against the fence.

"What about the drive," he said. "Up 101. The one we did before we moved here, when we were trying to decide."

She looked up. They'd stopped at every terrible roadside attraction between San Luis Obispo and Eureka. She'd gotten sunburned through the windshield. They'd argued about whether to take the job and then made up somewhere near Leggett, parked at an overlook, eating gas station sandwiches.

"That's four days," she said.

"I have vacation time."

"The dog."

"My mother's been begging."

Marguerite set the stubs on the table between them, side by side. "We'd have to leave Thursday."

"I'll book the first night," Dev said. "You pick the detours."

"All of them?"

"Every single one."


Marcy found the reservation confirmation crumpled in the junk drawer, half-buried under takeout menus and a dead flashlight. Their fifteenth anniversary was six days away, and Tom had apparently booked the Italian place downtown back in February and then forgotten to mention it.

"You made a plan," she said, holding up the paper when he came in from the garage, wiping grease from his hands.

He squinted. "I made a plan in a moment of optimism. Then Danny broke his wrist and we spent March at urgent care."

She set the paper on the counter and smoothed it flat. "I don't want to go downtown."

"No?"

"We'd have to park. And then we'd sit there being polite to each other under a fake grapevine." She looked up. "Fifteen years. That deserves better than a fake grapevine."

Tom pulled a chair out and sat, which he only did when he was actually considering something. "What did we do for the first one?"

"We ate cereal on the floor. We didn't have a table yet."

"Right. And you cried because you thought that was pathetic."

"It was pathetic."

"It was the best one," he said.

They ended up settling on Saturday, the whole day, no plans past breakfast. Danny would go to his grandmother's. They'd drive out to the reservoir where they used to go before the house, before the kid, and walk until they were tired of walking. Tom wanted to bring the good sandwiches from the deli on Lyle Street. Marcy wanted to bring the blanket that was too ratty for guests.

"And then dinner here," she said. "You cook. I'll stay out of it."

"You'll hover."

"I'll hover quietly."

He canceled the reservation Thursday. The hostess said congratulations anyway, and he thanked her, and hung up feeling absurdly, unreasonably pleased.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from the Orpheum, twelve years old, the ink nearly gone.

"Dev," she called. "Look what survived."

He came in from the garage still holding a wrench, squinted at them, and laughed. "You cried at that movie. You said it was allergies."

"It was allergies."

They had been talking around the anniversary for weeks. Fifteen years since the courthouse in Sacramento, since her mother's careful silence and his mother's overcompensating enthusiasm, since the two of them eating burritos on the hood of a car in a parking garage because they hadn't planned anything else.

"We could do the fancy thing," Dev said. "Ilaria keeps telling me about that place downtown with the tasting menu."

Marisol made a face. "Nine courses of foam."

"Nine courses of foam," he agreed. "Or?"

"Or we drive up to Tahoe. That cabin's cheap in September."

He set the wrench on the counter, which she would give him grief about later. "I was thinking something else. What if we did nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Not nothing. I mean—we take the Friday off. Both of us. We don't tell anyone. No phones after noon. I'll make the short ribs. You pick the records."

She considered it. Fifteen years of school pickups and sick days and one very bad autumn when his father was dying and they'd barely spoken except about logistics. A whole day where nothing was required of them felt more extravagant than foam.

"The good bourbon," she said.

"Obviously."

"And you have to dance with me. In the kitchen. That's non-negotiable."

Dev groaned, but he was already smiling. "One song."

"Three."

"Two, and I'll do the dishes."

Marisol slid the ticket stubs into her pocket, where they'd stay until she thought of somewhere better. "Deal," she said.


Marisol found the shoebox first, wedged behind the winter coats. Inside were the ticket stubs — a matinee, September 2009, some forgettable action movie that neither of them had watched much of.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen. "Do you want to do something?"

Daniel was scraping burnt bits off a pan. He looked up. "I thought we agreed we didn't do anniversaries."

"We agreed that when we were broke."

He set the pan down. "Fair."

They started with a restaurant, the way people do. Marisol found a place downtown with a tasting menu, and Daniel looked at the price and made a face that made her laugh, and then he said he'd pay for it if that's what she wanted, which she knew he meant.

"It's not what I want," she admitted. "I just couldn't think of anything else."

They sat with it for a few days. Daniel brought it up again on a Tuesday while they were folding laundry, which was when they talked about most things.

"What about the drive," he said. "The one we did after the wedding. We never made it past Amarillo."

Marisol paused with a towel half-folded. They'd been twenty-four and had a car with a broken air conditioner and a plan to see the Pacific. Her grandmother had gotten sick outside Amarillo and they'd turned around and driven eighteen hours home.

"That's a lot of days off," she said.

"I have days off. I never take them."

She thought about the two-lane roads, the terrible motels. She thought about how it would just be the two of them in a car for a week, which sounded either wonderful or unbearable.

"Okay," she said. "But we're getting a car with air conditioning."

Daniel smiled at the towels. "That was implied."

They left in October, and this time they made it to the ocean.


Marisol found the shoebox on the closet shelf while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the U-Haul they'd rented fifteen years ago to move into the duplex on Whitaker Street.

"Guess what I found," she called down the hall.

Dev came in with a dish towel over his shoulder. He turned the U-Haul receipt over in his hands. "Eighty-nine dollars. And I threw out my back carrying that awful futon."

"You made me carry the boxes of records."

"You volunteered."

They'd been arguing about the anniversary for two weeks, in the low-stakes way of people who have nothing serious to fight about. Dev wanted to go somewhere—Asheville, maybe, a cabin, a weekend of nothing. Marisol kept saying it felt wrong to spend that much when the water heater was making a noise.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. "What if we went back?"

"Back where?"

"Whitaker Street. Drive by the duplex. Then that Greek place we used to go, if it's still there."

Dev sat beside her. "Papou's closed. Like, eight years ago."

"Oh." She looked genuinely disappointed, which surprised him. Marisol was not sentimental. She threw out birthday cards.

"But," he said, "there's that place on Ninth that does the lamb. And we could get the good bottle. The one your sister gave us that we keep not opening."

"We're saving that."

"For what?"

She didn't have an answer. That was the thing about the good bottle.

So on the Saturday, they drove past the duplex—someone had painted the door red, which Marisol declared an improvement and Dev declared a crime—and ate lamb on Ninth, and came home and opened the wine on the back steps while the dog nosed around the fence line.

"Fifteen," Dev said.

"Feels shorter."

"Feels about right," he said, and she let him have it.


Marcus found the calendar page already circled in Diane's handwriting, three weeks out, the number twelve traced over twice in blue ink.

"You could have just told me," he said, holding it up.

She looked over from the sink. "I wanted to see if you'd notice."

"I noticed in March. I've been pretending not to notice since March."

Twelve years. They'd married in a courthouse in Sacramento with two witnesses from the DMV line and a lunch afterward at a diner where Diane had gotten mustard on her dress. Every anniversary since had been a negotiation between her instinct toward ceremony and his toward the practical.

"I was thinking Big Sur," she said. "Four days. The place with the deck."

"The place with the deck is nine hundred dollars a night now. I looked."

"You looked?"

"In March."

She dried her hands and sat down across from him at the kitchen table, which wobbled, which it had wobbled for six years. "Okay. What did you find while you were looking?"

He got out his phone and showed her: a cabin outside Mendocino, not fancy, a wood stove, an hour from anything. Three nights. Half the price.

Diane scrolled the photos slowly. "There's no cell service."

"No."

"You'd hate that."

"I'd survive it."

She kept scrolling. There was a picture of the kitchen, small and yellow, with a window over the sink facing trees.

"We could bring the good coffee," she said.

"I already ordered it."

She set the phone down and looked at him for a while, the particular look she'd been giving him since roughly year four, half exasperation and half something warmer she'd never named.

"Book it," she said. "And bring the mustard-colored dress."

"It's not mustard-colored. It has mustard *on* it."

"It has history on it," she said, and went back to the dishes.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, wedged behind a stack of extension cords. Inside were the ticket stubs, the receipt from the diner on Route 9, the photograph of the two of them squinting into the sun outside the courthouse in Albany.

"Ten years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Deon was scraping burnt cheese off the pan.

He wiped his hands and took the photo from her. "My hair was ridiculous."

"Your hair was aspirational." She sat on the counter, which he'd asked her a hundred times not to do. "So what do we do? Elena keeps sending me links to resorts in Tulum."

Deon leaned against the sink. "Do you want to go to Tulum?"

"I want to want to go to Tulum."

He laughed. "That's a no."

They talked through it over dinner, the way they talked through most things—circling, backtracking, letting the silences do some of the work. A big party felt exhausting; they'd hosted enough of those. A trip meant airports and dog boarding and the vague guilt of spending money they'd earmarked for the roof.

It was Deon who said it first, halfway through the dishes. "What about the diner? On Route 9. Is it still there?"

Marisol pulled out her phone. It was still there, though the reviews mentioned new owners and a remodel.

"We drive up," he said. "We eat bad eggs. We come home. We take a picture outside the courthouse and we look ridiculous again."

She thought about it. It was two hours each way, and the diner would probably disappoint them, and they'd argue about the route because he refused to trust the GPS.

"Yes," she said. "That."

They marked it on the calendar in the kitchen—Saturday the twelfth, *Route 9*—and Deon went back to the dishes, and she stayed sitting on the counter a while longer.


Marcus found the shoebox in the hall closet while looking for the good extension cord. Inside were the paper napkins from the courthouse, still faintly grease-stained from the diner they'd gone to afterward.

"Twenty years," he said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Dana was rinsing lettuce. "You kept these."

She dried her hands and took one, holding it up to the window light. "I kept everything. There's a parking stub in there somewhere."

They'd talked around the anniversary for weeks. Dana's sister had suggested a cruise. Marcus's coworkers kept mentioning a steakhouse downtown with a two-week waiting list. Neither idea had stuck.

"What if we didn't do anything big," Dana said, sitting down at the table. "What if we just went back?"

"To the courthouse?"

"To Feldman's. If it's still there."

He pulled out his phone. It was still there, in the same strip mall in Bellefonte, though the reviews mentioned new owners and a remodel. Three and a half stars.

"It'll be worse than we remember," Marcus said.

"Probably. That's sort of the point."

They made a weekend of it—drove up Saturday morning, stayed at a hotel off the highway that Dana booked with points. Feldman's had booths in a different color now, mint green instead of the cracked orange vinyl she remembered, and the woman behind the counter was maybe twenty-five and had no idea the place had ever been anything else.

They ordered what they'd ordered before: a patty melt for him, French toast for her, coffee for both, at two in the afternoon.

"It's not as good," Marcus admitted.

"No." Dana stole a fry off his plate. "But we're better."

He laughed, a short surprised sound, and she grinned at him across the table, and outside the window a truck backed up beeping in the parking lot where they'd once sat in a borrowed Corolla, married ninety minutes, not knowing what came next.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from the Loew's on Fourth Street, dated eight years back, faded almost past reading.

"Look at these," she said, holding them up as Daniel came in with the grocery bags.

He set the bags on the counter and squinted. "Was that the one where the projector broke?"

"Twice. And you kept apologizing like you'd built the thing yourself."

Their tenth anniversary was three weeks out, and they'd been circling the question for days without landing on anything. Daniel had floated a weekend in Asheville. Marisol had mentioned, twice, that the roof still needed attention before winter.

"We could just do the theater again," Daniel said, unpacking eggs. "See whatever's playing."

"It closed. Turned into a climbing gym."

"Of course it did."

She leaned against the counter. What she wanted, she realized, wasn't a re-creation. It was something they'd both remember in another ten years. "What if we cooked?" she said. "The whole thing. That paella your mother made when we visited Valencia."

Daniel paused with a carton of milk half-lifted. "That took her four hours. And she yelled at me for stirring it."

"So don't stir it."

He laughed. "We'd need the pan. And the good saffron."

"I'll order the saffron. You call your mother and get the actual recipe, not the one she pretends is the recipe."

He considered it, and she watched him warm to the idea the way he always did—slowly, then all at once. "We'd have to start early. Two, maybe."

"I'll clear the afternoon."

"And nobody else. Just us."

"Just us," she agreed.

On the day, the kitchen filled with smoke twice and the rice came out slightly wrong at the edges. They ate it anyway, at the small table by the window, and Daniel admitted that his mother would have had opinions. Marisol said she'd never tasted anything better.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, wedged behind the winter hats. Inside: ticket stubs from a minor league game, a laminated diner menu, and the receipt from the U-Haul they'd driven from Tucson to Cleveland fifteen years ago that October.

"You kept the receipt?" Dana said from the doorway, still in her scrubs, hair flattened from a twelve-hour shift.

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

Dana sat down on the floor beside her, back against the closet door, and took the U-Haul paper. "Ninety-four dollars. We thought that was a fortune."

"It was a fortune."

They'd been circling the anniversary for weeks without landing on anything. Marisol's sister kept suggesting a cruise. Dana's coworker had recommended a resort in Michigan with a wine cellar. Neither of them wanted it. Money was tight since the roof, and besides, neither of them liked the ocean much.

"What if we drove it again," Dana said. "Not the whole way. But out to that turnoff by Zanesville where the tire blew."

Marisol laughed. "You want to celebrate the tire blowing."

"I want to celebrate that we got it changed. In the rain. And you didn't leave me on the side of I-70."

"I considered it."

They settled on a Saturday. Dana traded a shift. Marisol packed sandwiches in wax paper the way her mother used to, and they took the Corolla east with the windows cracked because the AC had a smell. At the turnoff, there was nothing to see—a guardrail, some sumac going red, a gravel shoulder wide enough to pull onto.

They stood there anyway for a while. Dana put her arm around Marisol's shoulders.

"Fifteen years," Marisol said.

"On this exact patch of nothing."

They ate the sandwiches on the hood, watching traffic, and were home before dark.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer, folded into a soft square, the ink so faded she had to hold it under the kitchen light. Eight years old. Two coffees and a slice of lemon cake from a bakery in Providence that had closed during the pandemic.

"You kept this," Dev said, coming in with the mail.

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

They were supposed to be planning. Ten years married in three weeks, and every conversation about it had ended in a shrug and a rerun of something they'd already seen. Dev had floated Lisbon. Marisol had floated a hotel downtown with a bathtub big enough to lie down in. Neither idea had survived the second mention.

"What if we did nothing," Dev said.

"That's depressing."

"No—I mean deliberately nothing. No restaurant. No airport. We take the Friday off, we don't set an alarm." He set the mail down. "We drive out to that orchard your sister mentioned. We come home. I make the thing with the short ribs."

Marisol turned the receipt over. On the back, in her own handwriting from a decade ago: *ask him about his mother's garden*. She'd forgotten writing it. She'd forgotten she'd been nervous.

"The short ribs take five hours," she said.

"I've got five hours."

She thought about the ten years—the apartment with the sloped floors, the year his father was sick, the argument about the car that had somehow lasted eleven months. None of it had happened in Lisbon.

"Okay," she said. "But I'm making the cake. Lemon."

"You don't bake."

"I'll learn. I've got three weeks."

Dev laughed and took the receipt from her, studying it. Then he opened the junk drawer and put it back, folded, exactly where it had been.


The kitchen still smelled like the coffee Ellen had burned that morning. Marcus wiped down the counter while she sat at the table with a legal pad, drawing a line down the middle.

"Okay," she said. "Column A: things we've done before. Column B: things we haven't."

"That's a very lawyerly approach to a twentieth anniversary."

"I am a very lawyerly person." She wrote *dinner at Pignoli's* under A. "We've done that nine years running."

"Ten. You forgot the year the babysitter canceled and we ate in the car."

Ellen laughed and added a tally mark. Marcus dried his hands and sat across from her, pulling the pad closer. Under Column B he wrote *Portugal*, then crossed it out. Their daughter's tuition payment was due in August, and they both knew it.

"What about the cabin?" he said. "The one Ruth and Danny rented on the lake. She said it was cheap in October."

"October's not our anniversary."

"October's when the leaves are good."

Ellen considered this. Twenty years ago she had gotten married in a Presbyterian church in Dayton with rain hammering the roof so loudly the vows were barely audible. They had never been sentimental about the date itself, only about the fact of it — the accumulated ordinary days, the arguments about the thermostat, the summer Marcus's father died and Ellen drove him to Cleveland every weekend for three months.

"We could do both," she said. "Pignoli's on the actual day. Cabin in October."

"That's twice the money."

"It's one nice dinner and a cabin in the off-season. We're not chartering a yacht."

Marcus took the pen from her and wrote *both* at the bottom of the page, underlining it twice.

"Fine," he said. "But I'm not paddling a canoe."

"You'll paddle the canoe."

He didn't argue. He knew he would.


Marcus found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner on Route 9 where he and Delia had eaten pancakes at two in the morning after their courthouse wedding, twenty-five years ago that Saturday.

"You kept this?" he called down the hallway.

Delia came in wiping her hands on a dish towel. She looked at the receipt, then at him, and laughed. "Four dollars and eighty cents. You tipped a dollar."

"I was showing off."

They'd been arguing gently about the anniversary for two weeks. Delia's sister wanted to throw a party — rented hall, a slideshow, her nephews handling the music. Marcus had been quietly dreading it. He was sixty-one and tired in a way that made crowded rooms feel like work.

"I'll tell Renata no," Delia said, sitting down on the closet floor with the box in her lap. "She'll be wounded for a week and then she'll be fine."

"You don't have to. If you want the party—"

"I want pancakes." She held up the receipt. "I want to see if the place is still there."

It wasn't. They found that out Thursday, on the internet, in the kitchen with coffee going cold. A vape shop now. Delia said something unrepeatable about the state of the world.

So Saturday morning Marcus got up at five, which he hadn't done voluntarily in years, and made pancakes badly — too much baking powder, one burned. Delia came down in her robe and ate them anyway, and put four dollars and eighty cents on the table beside her plate, plus a dollar.

"Showing off," she said.

Later they drove out to Route 9 and parked across from the vape shop and sat there a while, not saying much, the heater ticking, the light coming up gray and ordinary over the road they'd driven home on.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from a movie neither of them could name anymore, dated fifteen years ago that March.

"We should do something," she said, holding them up when Diane came in from the garage, sawdust still on her forearms.

Diane took one, squinting at the smeared ink. "Something," she repeated. It had become a joke between them, the way anniversaries kept sneaking up. Last year they'd realized on a Tuesday and eaten takeout pho on the porch steps, which had honestly been fine.

But fifteen felt different. Fifteen years since a courthouse in Boston, before it was legal in half the country, before Diane's mother came around, before the house in Providence with its crooked back door that Diane kept promising to fix.

"We could fly somewhere," Marisol offered, though she was already counting the cost in her head—the school year wasn't out, her students had exams.

Diane sat down at the kitchen table. "What if we didn't go anywhere?"

"Meaning."

"Meaning we finish the back deck. Together. And then we eat dinner on it." She said it a little defensively, as if bracing for disappointment.

Marisol considered. She thought about the pile of cedar boards that had been sitting under a tarp since October, about Diane's persistent belief that a house could be a way of saying things.

"That's the least romantic anniversary plan I've ever heard," she said.

"I know."

"I love it."

They spent that Saturday measuring and cutting, arguing pleasantly about spacing, Marisol getting a splinter that Diane extracted with tweezers on the kitchen counter. By six the deck was done, unstained but solid. They carried out two chairs and a bottle of wine and sat until the mosquitoes drove them in.

"Sixteen," Diane said. "We're doing the bathroom."

Marisol laughed and didn't argue.


Marisol found the shoebox first, tucked behind the winter coats in the hall closet. Inside were the ticket stubs, the receipt from the diner on Route 9, the photograph someone had taken of them at the courthouse in Albany with her hair coming loose from its pins.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt edges off the toast. "Do you realize? Twenty years next Saturday."

He set down the knife. "I was going to bring it up. I keep thinking we should do something — actually do something, not just order Thai and fall asleep during a movie."

"The Thai was good, though."

"The Thai was excellent. I'm saying we could aim higher."

They spent the week floating ideas across the dinner table and through the wall between the bathroom and the bedroom. Dev wanted to fly somewhere — Charleston, maybe, or back to Albany for the sheer sentimentality of it. Marisol pointed out that the roof needed work and their daughter's tuition bill had arrived looking hostile. Dev conceded the point without much fight; he'd been half-hoping she'd talk him out of it.

What they landed on was simpler. Saturday morning they drove ninety minutes north to the state park where they'd hiked on their second date, when Marisol had worn entirely inappropriate shoes and Dev had pretended he knew the trail. This time they brought good boots, a thermos, and sandwiches Dev made badly but with enthusiasm.

At the overlook they sat on the same flat rock, or one close enough. The valley had more houses in it than before. Marisol leaned into his shoulder.

"We got old," she said.

"We got here," Dev said.

They stayed until the coffee ran out, then walked back down, arguing pleasantly about where to stop for dinner.


Marcus found the calendar note first, though he'd known the date for weeks. Twenty years since the closing on the house on Delmar Street, the little bungalow with the sagging porch they'd bought when they were twenty-eight and reckless.

"We could do dinner at Ferraro's," Elena said, standing in the kitchen doorway with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "Or we could not."

"You have an idea."

"I have several. That's the problem."

He wiped his hands on a dish towel. She had that look—the one that meant she'd been thinking about something during her commute and had constructed at least three versions of it.

"Okay," she said. "Option one, we drive up to the lake, stay in that cabin place. Option two, we invite the Hendersons and Kim and just have people here. Option three—" She paused.

"Say option three."

"We finish the porch."

Marcus laughed, but she didn't. Twenty years, and the porch railing was still the temporary version, plywood painted white, replaced twice when it rotted.

"That's not a celebration," he said. "That's a Saturday."

"It's four Saturdays, probably. And then we'd sit out there with a bottle of wine and it would be ours." She shrugged. "But it's not romantic. Forget it."

He thought about the cabin. He thought about the Hendersons, who would stay too late and talk about their kitchen renovation.

"We could do both," he said. "The porch, and then the cabin in October when it's done. Something to look at when we get back."

Elena took her glasses off her head and set them on the counter, which was how he knew she was pleased.

"You'll complain about the miter saw."

"I'll complain the entire time," he agreed. "You'll pick a stain color and then change it."

"Probably twice."

They ordered the lumber that weekend.


The Twentieth

The invitation had been sitting on the refrigerator for three weeks, held by a magnet shaped like Ohio. Someone's daughter was getting married in Cleveland the same weekend.

"We could skip it," Dara said. She was standing at the counter, cutting the tops off strawberries, dropping the green crowns into the compost bin. "It's a second cousin. I've met her twice."

Nia looked up from the laptop. "Twenty years, though. Feels like we should do something that isn't a Marriott ballroom."

They'd been together twenty-three years, actually, but the wedding had waited on the courts, and they'd never quite decided which number to count. This year they'd settled on the license — the tenth of June, 2005, in a Massachusetts town clerk's office with Nia's brother as witness and a photograph nobody had thought to frame until 2011.

"What about the cabin?" Dara asked.

"The one with the mice?"

"They fixed the mice."

Nia typed something, then turned the screen around. A rental listing in the Berkshires: a screened porch, a woodstove, a lake close enough to walk to. Four hundred a night, which was ridiculous, and available.

"Two nights," Dara said, considering. "Not three. Three and we start reorganizing their kitchen."

"We absolutely start reorganizing their kitchen."

They booked it that evening, sitting on the couch with the laptop between them and the strawberries in a bowl, hulled and unrinsed. Dara wanted to bring the good coffee and the French press. Nia wanted to bring nothing, to buy everything there, to be the kind of people who improvised.

They compromised: coffee, and improvisation about everything else.

Later, Dara took the invitation off the refrigerator and slid it into the recycling, and neither of them said anything about it, and the magnet from Ohio stayed where it was, holding nothing at all.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two of them, faded to the color of weak tea, from a movie neither of them could remember the plot of anymore. Fifteen years ago that November.

"We should do something," she said, holding them up when Desmond came in from the garage, sawdust on his forearms. "Not something big. But something."

He took the stubs from her, turned them over. "The theater's a vape shop now."

"I know."

They talked about it over dinner, and then over dishes, and then not at all for three days, which was how most of their decisions got made. Desmond floated a weekend in Asheville. Marguerite pointed out that Asheville in November meant either rain or crowds, possibly both, and that they'd spent their tenth anniversary arguing about parking in a city neither of them particularly liked.

"So what, then. Dinner at Pastore's?"

"We could." She didn't sound convinced, and he didn't push.

It was Desmond who came back to it, on a Tuesday, while she was grading papers at the kitchen table. He'd been thinking about the house—how they'd bought it half-finished and spent the first two years living around ladders and drop cloths.

"The screened porch," he said. "We never finished the screened porch."

Marguerite set down her pen.

"Not the whole thing. But I could get the frame up over a weekend. You pick the color for the trim."

She considered it. There was something unromantic about it, and something exactly right, which she suspected was the same thing.

"Sage green," she said. "And we eat out there in the spring, even if it's cold."

"Even if it's cold."

They spent the anniversary itself at the hardware store, arguing amiably about hinges. It rained the whole drive home. Neither of them minded.


The Anniversary

Marcus found the notebook while cleaning out the hall closet—the one Diane had kept during her mother's illness, back in 2019. Grocery lists, medication schedules, and on one page, in handwriting that shook: *Fifteen years today. Forgot to say it.*

He brought it to the kitchen where she was scrubbing the coffee pot.

"You never told me you wrote that down."

Diane dried her hands and took the notebook. She read it twice, then set it on the counter. "I was embarrassed. You'd made dinner. I ate three bites and fell asleep on the couch."

"You'd been at the hospital for eleven hours."

"Still."

Twenty-one years now. The number felt improbable to both of them, like something reported about strangers. They'd talked vaguely about a trip—Charleston, maybe, or the cabin in the Poconos where they'd honeymooned badly, with a leaking roof and a raccoon problem.

"I don't want to drive anywhere," Diane said.

"No?"

"I want to be here." She gestured at the kitchen, the water-stained ceiling they'd never fixed, the height marks penciled on the doorframe from when their nephews visited. "This is the thing we made. Not Charleston."

Marcus leaned against the counter. "So what, then?"

They settled on it over the next week, in pieces. Saturday, they would cook the meal from their wedding reception—the mediocre chicken marsala, the green beans nobody touched. Diane would make her mother's rolls. They'd eat at the good table, use the china that had been in the box since 2004.

And afterward, they agreed, they would each write something down. Not a card. Something longer. The things they'd forgotten to say during the eleven-hour days.

"That's sentimental," Marcus said.

"It's twenty-one years," Diane said. "We've earned sentimental."

He didn't argue. He went out Thursday and bought two notebooks, plain black, and left one on her side of the bed without a word.


The Anniversary

Dana found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the ticket stubs—thirty-one years of them, from the first movie they'd seen together to last spring's disappointing sequel.

"You kept these," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Marcus was cubing potatoes.

He glanced over. "Of course I kept them. I keep everything. That's why the garage looks like that."

Their thirty-second anniversary fell on a Thursday. They'd already agreed—no big trip this year, not with the roof needing work. But Dana had been quietly worrying that "no big trip" would slide into "nothing at all," the way it had two years ago when they'd both been swamped and only remembered at nine p.m.

"I have an idea," she said.

Marcus set down the knife. He'd learned to give her ideas his full attention; the good ones came fast and left faster.

"We do a tour. All of it. The theater on Lyndale where we saw that terrible French film. The apartment on Hennepin. The courthouse."

"The courthouse is a parking ramp now."

"So we park in it. Reverently."

He laughed, the short surprised one she'd been chasing since 1993. "The diner's still there. On Nicollet."

"Then we end at the diner. Pie."

They did it on Saturday instead, because Thursday was Marcus's late shift and neither of them wanted to rush. It took four hours and cost eleven dollars in parking. The old apartment building had been painted an aggressive yellow. Marcus stood on the sidewalk a long time, hands in his jacket pockets.

"You proposed right there," Dana said, pointing at nothing.

"I proposed badly right there."

"You proposed fine."

At the diner she ordered banana cream and he ordered lemon meringue and they split both, the way they always had, without discussing it.


Marcus found the calendar note first, though Priya had written it three months earlier in her cramped engineer's handwriting: *Ten years — do something.*

"That's helpful," he said, holding it up over breakfast. "Very specific."

She laughed into her coffee. "Past me was optimistic about future me having ideas."

They batted options around for a week. Marcus wanted to go back to the lake house in Michigan where they'd honeymooned, but Priya pointed out that the place had been sold and turned into a wedding venue, which felt like being a tourist at your own history. Priya suggested a real trip — Lisbon, maybe, or Mexico City — but Marcus did the math out loud, factoring in the new roof and Devi's braces, and they both went quiet.

"What did we actually do," Priya said finally, "the year we were happiest?"

Marcus thought about it. The apartment on Ashland with the radiator that clanked. Splitting a sandwich because that was dinner. Driving out to the forest preserve on Sundays with a thermos and a bad map.

"We were broke," he said.

"We were broke and we were fine."

So they took a Saturday. Marcus made the coffee and Priya packed sandwiches — turkey and provolone, the same combination, which struck them both as ridiculous and also correct. They drove ninety minutes to a state park neither had visited, walked four miles on a trail that turned out to be muddier than advertised, and ate on a flat rock overlooking a river neither could name.

"We should have looked up what river this is," Priya said.

"We can look it up in the car."

"That feels like cheating."

They stayed until the light went orange. On the drive home Marcus put on the album they'd worn out in 2014, and Priya fell asleep during track six, and he let her, and thought that this was probably the whole thing, right here.


Marguerite found the receipt in a coat pocket she hadn't worn since March: a diner in Nebraska, two coffees, one slice of pie. October 12, five years ago. The day the transmission gave out on I-80 and they'd sat in a vinyl booth for six hours waiting on a tow, arguing about whether to turn back.

She brought it to the kitchen where David was rinsing beans in a colander.

"Do you remember this?"

He dried his hands and squinted at the faded thermal print. "The pie was terrible."

"It was rhubarb."

"It was terrible rhubarb." He handed it back. "That was the day you said you'd move."

"I said I'd think about it."

"You said it in a way that meant yes."

They'd been talking for weeks about what to do for the tenth of their marriage, which fell in three days. David had floated a hotel downtown. Marguerite had floated nothing at all, which he'd correctly read as a veto.

"What if we drove somewhere," she said.

"Nebraska?"

"God, no. Somewhere with better pie."

He leaned against the counter. "There's that place in Milford. The bakery with the sour cherry."

"That's forty minutes."

"So we make a day of it. Leave early, take the state road instead of the highway. Stop wherever." He shrugged. "You always say we never stop anywhere."

Marguerite considered it. Ten years felt like it should require something with a reservation, a dress code, a photograph worth keeping. But she thought about the six hours in the booth, how they'd stopped arguing around hour three and started talking about her mother, and how by the time the tow truck came she'd known something she hadn't known that morning.

"Okay," she said. "But I'm not sitting in the car for forty minutes without coffee."

"Obviously," David said. "That's the whole point."


The Twentieth

Dana found the shoebox while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten after the courthouse ceremony. Two omelets and a coffee. Eleven dollars and forty cents.

"Marcus," she called down the hall. "Come look at this."

He came in wiping paint from his hands—he'd been touching up the porch railing all afternoon, twenty years of Ohio winters having done their work. He sat on the edge of the bed and turned the receipt over.

"I forgot you kept this."

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

They'd been arguing about the anniversary for a week, though arguing wasn't quite right. Marcus wanted to go somewhere—Chicago, maybe, a real hotel with a concierge and towels that weren't threadbare. Dana wanted to stay home. She hadn't been able to explain why without sounding like she was being difficult.

"The diner's still there," she said now. "Renata's. It's a Vietnamese place now, but same building."

Marcus considered this. He'd learned, over two decades, that when Dana circled something twice she was usually onto it.

"You want to go back."

"I want to eat somewhere cheap and then come home and sit on the porch you just painted." She looked at him. "Is that pathetic?"

"It's a little pathetic."

"Marcus."

"I said a *little*." He handed the receipt back. "Chicago will still be there when we're seventy."

So on Saturday they drove twelve minutes to a strip mall and ordered bún chả and split a Vietnamese coffee because Dana couldn't finish one alone. The waitress, who was maybe nineteen, took their picture in front of the menu board when Marcus asked.

They were home by eight. The paint had cured. They sat on the steps until the mosquitoes found them, saying almost nothing, which was, they'd discovered, the whole trick of it.


Marisol found the shoebox while clearing out the hall closet, and inside it was the receipt from the U-Haul they'd rented eleven years ago. Twenty-two dollars for a dolly they never used.

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

He came in from the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder and took the slip of paper, squinting at the faded thermal print. "God. That was the day it rained."

"That was the day you dropped the box of dishes."

"That was the day the box *fell*, and I have never accepted your version."

They'd been talking for weeks about what to do for their anniversary. Marisol had suggested Charleston, then walked it back when she remembered the transmission was making a sound. Dev had floated a nice dinner downtown, which sounded good until they priced it out. Neither of them said the obvious thing, which was that the year had been thin and tiring, and that a hotel bill would sit in the back of their minds the whole time.

"We could just drive out to the old apartment," Dev said. "Get sandwiches from that place on Ellis, if it's still there."

"Sal's."

"Sal's, right. Sit in the car like teenagers."

Marisol turned the receipt over. There was nothing on the back but she looked anyway. "That's kind of sad."

"Is it? I liked that apartment."

"You hated that apartment. The radiator."

"I liked *you* in that apartment."

She laughed, which he'd been counting on. Outside, someone's dog was barking at the mail carrier, the same argument it had every afternoon.

"Sandwiches," she said. "And then we come back here and you make that pasta."

"The one with the anchovies."

"The one with the anchovies."

He kissed the top of her head on his way back to the sink. She put the receipt in her pocket instead of the trash.


Marisol had been dreading the question all week, so David asked it first, over Sunday coffee.

"Twenty years," he said. "What do you want to do?"

She set down her mug. The kitchen still smelled like the burnt edge of the toast he'd rescued too late. "Honestly? Not a restaurant. I don't want to sit across from you being formal."

"Thank God." He laughed. "Rita keeps telling me to book that place downtown with the tasting menu. Nine courses. I'd fall asleep by course four."

"You fell asleep at your own birthday dinner."

"That was a long day."

They tossed ideas back and forth while the dog nosed at the back door. A weekend in Asheville, but the drive was six hours and David's back had been bad since November. A party, but Marisol hated planning parties and knew she'd end up in the kitchen refilling ice while everyone else talked. A cruise, which they both dismissed within four seconds.

"What did we do on the actual day?" Marisol asked. "Twenty years ago."

"City hall. Then we got sandwiches from that place on Third. You had mustard on your dress and cried about it."

"I did not cry."

"You teared up."

She was quiet for a moment. "That place closed."

"There's a new one. Same block. Terrible name — Bread Winners or something."

So that's what they settled on. They'd take the Friday off, sleep late, drive into the city, get sandwiches, walk the park where they used to walk when the apartment was too small to be in on Sundays. Come home. Maybe watch something bad on TV.

"That's it?" David said, as if testing it.

Marisol shrugged. "That's twenty years. It wasn't nine courses. It was mostly sandwiches."

He reached over and took her hand across the table, thumb moving over her knuckles, and didn't say anything, which was the right answer.


Marcus found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. Ten years old, faded to the color of weak tea, but he could still read *Ryman Auditorium* and the date.

"Renée," he called up the stairs. "Come look at this."

She came down in her work clothes, hair still wrapped, and took the stubs from him. Her face did the thing it did — that slow softening around the mouth.

"You kept these."

"I kept everything." He gestured at the box. Movie tickets, a parking receipt from Gatlinburg, a napkin with her phone number on it in handwriting she'd since abandoned.

Their anniversary was three weeks out. They'd agreed, tentatively, on dinner somewhere with cloth napkins, but neither had made a reservation, which Renée thought said something about how tired they both were. Twelve-hour shifts for her at the hospital. Marcus's shop hemorrhaging money since the second Firestone opened on Dickerson Pike.

"We could go back," she said. "See who's playing."

"Tickets are a hundred and eighty a pop now. I looked."

"Of course you looked."

He shrugged. She sat down on the second stair with the box in her lap and started going through it properly, and after a minute he sat beside her, their shoulders touching in the narrow stairwell.

"What if we just did the rest of it," she said. "The parts that were free. Walked around Centennial Park. Got hot chicken. Came home."

"That's not much of an anniversary."

"That was the whole night, Marcus. The show was an hour and a half."

He thought about it. Outside, a car passed, headlights sweeping the wall.

"Prince's or Hattie B's?"

"Prince's. I'm not driving to Midtown."

"Then it's settled," he said, and put the ticket stubs in his shirt pocket, where he'd forget about them until the wash.


Marcus found the recipe card in the back of the junk drawer, the one his mother had written out in blue ballpoint before the wedding. Fifteen years of grease stains had made the paper translucent in places.

"You still have this," Dana said, looking over his shoulder. She was holding the mail, thumb hooked under the flap of something from the mortgage company.

"I was thinking we make it Saturday. The whole thing, the way she used to."

Dana set the mail down. The kitchen was small, the same kitchen where they'd argued about the backsplash tile in 2011 and where she'd told him about the second miscarriage sitting on the floor with her back against the dishwasher. "That takes six hours."

"We have six hours."

"We could go somewhere. That place in Beacon everybody talks about."

He turned the card over. On the back, his mother had written *tell Marcus not to skimp on the butter.* "We could."

Dana pulled out a chair and sat, and he watched her think it through the way she thought through everything, with her jaw set slightly to one side. Fifteen years. They'd spent the tenth in a hotel in Charleston that neither of them could really remember now, except for a mediocre breakfast.

"Both," she said finally. "We cook Saturday, and we eat at the actual table, not on the couch. And in October, when work slows down, we go to Beacon."

"That's not an anniversary. That's just October."

"It's whatever we decide it is." She reached over and took the card from him, holding it up to the window light, reading his mother's cramped handwriting. "She really underlined *butter* twice."

"She was serious about it."

Dana handed it back. "Then we'll need to go to the store."


The morning of their tenth anniversary, Renata found Beto already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with the good notepad, the one they only used for taxes and grocery lists that mattered.

"I made a list," he said.

"Of course you did."

He turned it toward her. Restaurant downtown. Overnight in Asheville. Concert tickets, though the only band playing was one neither of them liked.

Renata poured coffee and sat across from him in the chair with the wobble they'd been meaning to fix since 2019. "What about the house?"

"What about it?"

"We bought it eight years ago. We've never finished the back bedroom."

Beto laughed, then stopped laughing when he saw she was serious. "You want to spend our anniversary drywalling."

"I want to spend it doing something we'll still see in twenty years." She tapped the notepad. "The restaurant's gone by Tuesday."

He considered this. It was the kind of thing she did — turning a celebration into a project, romance into labor. It had annoyed him early on. Now he understood it as a dialect, one he'd learned to speak.

"Compromise," he said. "We work in the morning. Then I take you somewhere with cloth napkins and I don't tell you how much anything costs."

"Deal."

They drove to the hardware store at eight and argued pleasantly about paint chips in the lighting aisle. Beto wanted a gray so pale it was basically white. Renata wanted a green her mother would have called ugly. They bought the green.

By two, the room smelled like latex and both of them had it in their hair. Beto stood in the doorway with the roller still in his hand.

"It's ugly," he said.

"It's ours."

"Both things can be true."

She kissed him on the jaw, the only clean spot she could find, and went to shower before dinner.


Marcus found the boxes in the garage on a Saturday morning, hunting for the good extension cord. He hadn't meant to open the one labeled WEDDING—MISC in Priya's careful handwriting, but the tape had already given up.

Inside: cocktail napkins printed with their names, a program nobody had kept but her, and the disposable cameras they'd left on tables that had never been developed.

He brought the cameras inside. Priya was at the kitchen table with her laptop and a mug of chai gone cold, arguing with a spreadsheet.

"Twenty years," he said, setting the cameras down. "Any of these still work?"

She picked one up and turned it over. "There's a place in Falls Church that develops them. Sanjay used them for his kid's birthday."

"That's the plan, then."

"That's not a plan, that's an errand." But she was smiling. "I was thinking we'd go back to Chincoteague. The place with the crab shack."

"That closed. Ellen told me."

"Then we find a new crab shack." She closed the laptop. "Or we stay here. Honestly, Marcus, I don't want to drive four hours to eat mediocre seafood and pretend it's romantic."

"So what do you want?"

She thought about it. "I want to develop those. And I want to invite the people who are still around. Not a party. Just—dinner. Whoever can come."

"Your mother will come."

"My mother will absolutely come and she'll bring too much food and complain about the humidity."

"Fine by me."

They made a list that afternoon on the back of an envelope. Twelve names, then nine after the honest edits. Priya dropped the cameras off Monday. Three of the four rolls came back usable—overexposed, thumbs in frames, her uncle mid-laugh at a table they'd forgotten existed.

They printed the best ones and taped them up along the hallway, unframed, in no particular order, and left them there long after everyone went home.


The morning of their tenth anniversary, Priya woke to the smell of burnt toast, which was how she knew Marcus had gotten up early to try something ambitious.

"I was going to bring you breakfast in bed," he said from the doorway, holding a plate with two slices of toast scraped clean of char. "Then I remembered you hate crumbs in the sheets."

"I do hate crumbs in the sheets."

They ate at the kitchen table instead, in the house they'd bought four years ago in Dayton, the one with the crooked porch step they still hadn't fixed. Outside, the maple in the front yard had gone half-yellow.

"So," Priya said. "The plan."

The plan had been debated for weeks. Marcus wanted to drive to Chicago, stay somewhere nice, see the lake. Priya had floated the idea of the restaurant in Yellow Springs where he'd proposed, though she admitted the food hadn't actually been that good.

"I've been thinking," Marcus said. "What if we did neither?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"What if we took the day off and just—drove. No destination. Stop where it looks interesting. We haven't done that since before your mom got sick."

Priya set down her coffee. Her mother had been gone two years now, and there were still whole weekends that vanished into grief without her noticing.

"That's either the laziest anniversary plan I've ever heard," she said, "or the best one."

"I made a backup reservation in Chicago. Just in case you hated it."

"Cancel it."

They left at ten. Somewhere past Springfield they found a farm stand selling cider and pumpkins, and Marcus bought a pumpkin they had no plans for. In Urbana they walked through a cemetery reading headstones aloud, guessing at lives.

They got home after midnight, the pumpkin rolling around the trunk, and Priya said it was the best day she could remember. Marcus said he'd make her toast in the morning. She said please don't.


The Twentieth

Maya found the receipt in a shoebox of tax documents she'd been meaning to shred for six years. Nineteen dollars and change, Golden Dragon, dated the night she and Dev had eaten dinner in a strip mall in Ypsilanti because the fancy place downtown had lost their reservation.

"I was going to propose that night," Dev said, when she showed him. He was at the kitchen island, sleeves rolled, deboning a chicken. "The ring was in my coat. I chickened out because the fluorescent lights made you look like you had the flu."

"I did have the flu."

"See. Wisdom."

Their twentieth was in three weeks. Maya's sister had already sent links—a resort in Tulum, a lodge in the Berkshires with a wood-fired sauna and a two-night minimum. Dev had a competing spreadsheet, because Dev always had a spreadsheet.

"I priced out flights to Lisbon," he said. "It's not insane if we go Tuesday to Tuesday."

Maya sat down on the stool across from him and turned the receipt over in her fingers. The paper had gone soft and yellow, almost cloth.

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

He looked up.

"What if we drove to Ypsilanti."

Dev set down the knife. Their daughter was at college in Ohio now; the house was quiet in a way that still surprised them both at odd hours. He wiped his hands on a towel and considered it—she could see him doing the arithmetic, weighing the romance of a foreign city against something smaller and stranger.

"Golden Dragon closed in 2011," he said.

"Then we find whatever's there now."

"And if it's a vape shop?"

"Then we eat somewhere else and I let you tell the story about the coat again."

He laughed. He came around the island and put his chin on the top of her head, the way he had since they were twenty-six and broke.

"Tuesday to Tuesday," he said. "But we're driving."


Marcus found the box of photographs while looking for the good scissors. He sat down on the closet floor and started sorting through them, and that was how Elena found him twenty minutes later, still in his work clothes, still holding the same picture.

"That's the church basement," she said, crouching beside him.

"Fifteen years." He handed it over. In the photo they were both younger, obviously, but more than that—they looked uncertain, standing slightly apart, as though someone had told them to smile before they'd figured out where to stand.

Elena had been thinking about the anniversary for weeks without saying so. Her sister had suggested a cruise. Her mother had suggested renewing their vows, which had made Elena laugh out loud into the phone.

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

"Thank God."

"I was thinking we drive up to that place in the Berkshires. The one with the bad coffee."

Marcus considered it. The inn had cost too much fifteen years ago and would cost more now, but they'd been broke then and weren't quite as broke anymore. "The coffee was genuinely terrible."

"I'll bring a French press."

He put the photo back in the box, then took it out again and set it on the dresser. "Two nights?"

"Three. I have vacation days I'll lose."

They ended up eating dinner on the floor of the closet, plates balanced on their knees, going through the rest of the photographs. There was one of Marcus's father, gone six years now, wearing a tie he'd borrowed. There was one of Elena's college roommate, who they hadn't spoken to since 2011 for reasons neither could remember.

"We should call her," Elena said.

"We should."

They didn't, that night. But Elena booked the inn from her phone while Marcus washed the plates, and when he came back she read him the description out loud, laughing at the part about the "charming rustic ambiance," which they both knew meant the radiators clanked.


Marguerite found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries — a faded slip from Delmonico's Pizza, dated March 14, 2009. She brought it to the kitchen table where Priya was grading lab reports.

"Fifteen years since our first date next month," Marguerite said. "You kept this?"

"You kept it. I just never throw anything away." Priya set down her red pen. "What do you want to do?"

They had done the big things already. The tenth had been Lisbon, which they'd saved for two years to afford and which Priya still described as the best week of her life, though she'd gotten food poisoning on day five. The twelfth had been a party in the backyard with forty people and a rented tent that leaked.

"Something small," Marguerite said. "I don't want to plan anything."

Priya considered this. "The pizza place closed."

"I know. There's a laundromat there now."

They went back and forth over the next few days, in the fragmentary way of people who live together — a suggestion offered while brushing teeth, rejected at breakfast, revived on a Tuesday drive to the hardware store. Priya wanted to hike the ridge trail where she'd first said she loved Marguerite, standing in the rain like an idiot. Marguerite pointed out that her knee was not what it had been in 2011.

What they settled on: a Saturday with nothing scheduled. They slept until eight. Priya made eggs badly, as she always did, and Marguerite ate them anyway. They drove out to the reservoir and walked the flat loop, twice, arguing amiably about whether to replace the water heater now or wait.

In the afternoon they ordered pizza — a different place, worse pizza — and ate it on the porch while the light went orange over the neighbor's fence.

"Fifteen years," Priya said.

Marguerite reached over and took her hand. "Fifteen years."


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the ticket stubs — the community theater production of *Our Town* where they'd met, both volunteering to paint sets, both terrible at it.

"Twenty years next month," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen.

Dev didn't look up from the stove. "Twenty years since the play, or twenty years since the wedding?"

"The play. The wedding's in October."

"So we get two." He tasted the sauce, frowned, added salt. "I'm not complaining."

They'd talked vaguely about Lisbon. Marisol's sister had gone last spring and wouldn't stop sending photos of tiled buildings. But Dev's mother was in the rehab facility in Toledo now, and neither of them said out loud that a week overseas felt like tempting fate.

"What if we did the thing," Marisol said. "The community theater. They're doing *Our Town* again this fall. Fiftieth anniversary season."

Dev turned around. "You want to be in a play."

"I want to paint sets."

He laughed, then stopped laughing, because she wasn't joking. He wiped his hands on the dish towel and leaned against the counter, considering it — the smell of turpentine, the folding chairs, the terrible coffee in the lobby, the specific quiet of a rehearsal room at ten at night when everyone else has gone home.

"We were so bad at it," he said.

"We were the worst. Gerald said our barn looked like a shipwreck."

"Gerald's dead."

"Gerald is *retired*, in Sarasota."

Dev picked up one of the stubs, held it to the light like it might be counterfeit. Sixteen dollars. He remembered thinking that was steep.

"Okay," he said. "But I'm not doing the barn again."

Marisol was already reaching for her phone, scrolling for the volunteer email, and Dev turned back to the sauce, and neither of them mentioned Lisbon again.


Marcus found the box in the hall closet while looking for the extension cord — the shoebox of ticket stubs Dana had been saving since before they'd bought the house. He carried it to the kitchen table where she was paying bills.

"Twelve years next Saturday," he said.

Dana set down her pen. "I know. I've been thinking about it."

They'd done the restaurant thing for years. The one downtown with the tasting menu and the sommelier who talked too long. Last year they'd both admitted afterward, in the car, that they'd spent most of the meal wishing they were home.

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

Marcus opened the shoebox and started laying stubs across the table like a hand of cards. A minor league game in Toledo. The community theater production of *Our Town* where the lighting failed in the second act. A concert at a bar that no longer existed.

"We could cook," he said. "The thing with the short ribs."

"That takes four hours."

"We have four hours."

Dana picked up a ticket — the Toledo game, the one where it had rained and they'd stayed anyway, sharing a poncho meant for one person. "I want to go through all of these," she said. "Out loud. Every one. And you have to tell me what you remember, and I'll tell you what I remember, and we'll see how much we disagree."

"That could get contentious."

"It will absolutely get contentious."

So that's what they did. Saturday, Marcus browned the short ribs while Dana read stubs aloud from a stool by the counter. They argued about whether the theater lights had failed in act two or act three. They found one neither of them could place at all — a museum in Cleveland, February 2016 — and spent twenty minutes failing to remember, and laughed about it, and put it back in the box.


Marguerite found the calendar page first, though Desmond had circled the date weeks ago in the same blue pen he used for everything—grocery lists, crossword puzzles, the notes he left on the counter when he worked early.

"Twenty-two years," she said, tapping the square. "We should do something."

"We should do something," he agreed, not looking up from the sink, where he was scrubbing a pot she'd already scrubbed. It was an old argument neither of them bothered having anymore.

They considered the restaurant downtown with the tasting menu, but Desmond's stomach had opinions about tasting menus now. They considered a weekend in Asheville, but the dog was fifteen and didn't travel, and neither of them could stomach the thought of a kennel. Marguerite floated the idea of a party—their friends, the neighbors, the good folding chairs from the garage.

"You hate parties," Desmond said.

"I hate other people's parties."

In the end it was Desmond who suggested the drive. Two hours north, to the state park where they'd hiked on their second date, back when Marguerite had worn entirely inappropriate shoes and refused to admit it for four miles. They packed sandwiches. She made the deviled eggs he liked, with too much paprika. He brought a thermos of coffee and the wool blanket from the hall closet, the one that still smelled faintly of their old apartment.

The trail was steeper than either remembered. They stopped twice, once for water and once because Marguerite wanted to look at a stand of birches, or said she did.

At the overlook they ate on the blanket and didn't talk much. Below them the valley went gold, then amber, then something harder to name.

"Same shoes?" Desmond asked.

"Better shoes," she said, and leaned into him, and they stayed until the light was gone.