The Hendersons had been talking about Galena for three years before Tuesday night, when Rosa finally opened her laptop at the kitchen table and said, "I'm booking it."

Dave looked up from the dishwasher. "Booking what?"

"The bed and breakfast. The one with the porch." She turned the screen toward him: a brick Victorian, hydrangeas, two wicker chairs. "Two nights. We leave Friday after you get off."

He dried his hands and leaned over her shoulder, squinting at the price. "That's more than I thought."

"I know. I've been putting aside a little since March."

He didn't argue. He'd noticed the envelope in the drawer with the takeout menus, had chosen not to count it.

Thursday they packed badly, the way they always did. Rosa laid out a dress she probably wouldn't wear. Dave threw four shirts in a duffel and forgot socks entirely, which he'd discover Saturday morning. She printed the reservation because she didn't trust her phone. He checked the oil in the Corolla, topped off the washer fluid, and made a note to get the front left tire looked at when they got back.

Friday, he came home at 4:40, showered in eleven minutes, and they were on the road by 5:15. Rosa had made sandwiches and packed them in the cooler with two cans of the good root beer. Traffic knotted up outside the city and Dave drummed the wheel until Rosa put her hand on his knee and found a station playing songs from before they met.

Somewhere past the interchange the buildings thinned into corn, then into low green hills, and the light went gold across the fields.

"We should have done this sooner," Rosa said.

"We're doing it now," Dave said, and moved into the left lane.

They reached the porch by eight, and the hydrangeas were real.


The Hendersons had been talking about the coast for three years before Denise finally circled a weekend on the kitchen calendar in red marker.

"Two nights," she said. "That's all. We leave Friday after your shift."

Ray studied the calendar the way he studied everything—slowly, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead where they did no good at all. "Motel or that place with the cabins?"

"The cabins were four hundred a night."

"Motel, then."

They packed on Thursday. Denise made a list because she always made a list, and Ray ignored the list because he always ignored the list, and at ten p.m. they had a brief, familiar argument about whether he needed a second pair of shoes. He did not bring the second pair of shoes. He would regret this on Saturday, when the tide came in faster than expected.

Friday afternoon Denise sat in the driveway with the engine running for eleven minutes while Ray went back inside twice—once for his phone charger, once because he couldn't remember whether he'd locked the back door. He had. He always had.

The drive took four hours. They listened to a podcast about a 1970s bank robbery for the first hour, then Denise fell asleep against the window and Ray turned it off and drove in the quiet, one hand on the wheel, occasionally glancing over at her. Twenty-nine years. Her hair was mostly gray now and she'd stopped coloring it two winters ago and he'd never told her how much he liked it that way.

They arrived after dark. The motel smelled like bleach and salt. Denise stood at the window while Ray wrestled the suitcase onto the luggage rack.

"You can hear it," she said. "The water."

Ray came and stood beside her. They didn't say anything else for a while.


The Ortegas had been talking about the lake for three years, and on a Thursday night in October, Marisol finally opened the laptop and booked the cabin.

"Two nights," she said. "Friday to Sunday. The one with the wood stove."

Dave looked up from the sink, hands wet. "The expensive one?"

"It's eighty dollars more than the other one and it has a porch."

He dried his hands and came to look over her shoulder at the photos — pine walls, a red canoe pulled up on gravel. "Okay," he said. "Book it."

Friday afternoon they packed the way they always packed, which is to say badly and in a hurry. Dave threw fishing gear and a sleeping bag in the trunk before Marisol could get the cooler in, and then had to take it all out again. She wrote a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, eggs, the good bread, matches, her book, his allergy pills. He kept adding things to it and she kept crossing them off.

"We're gone forty-eight hours," she said. "You don't need three flannel shirts."

"It gets cold up there."

"It's one shirt colder than here."

They left at four and hit traffic outside the city, and for twenty minutes neither of them said anything, which was fine. Then Dave put on the radio and found a station playing songs from when they were both much younger, and Marisol laughed at him for knowing all the words.

They stopped at a gas station near the county line for coffee and a bag of pretzels. She drove the last hour while he navigated, badly, and they missed the turnoff and had to double back.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures. The stove worked. They stood on the porch in the cold dark, listening to water they couldn't see.


The Ortegas had been talking about the lake for three weeks before they finally wrote it on the calendar.

Marisol got home first on Friday and started pulling things from the hall closet — the cooler with the cracked lid, two folding chairs, the sleeping bag that still smelled faintly of the last trip, four summers ago. She made a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, eggs, bug spray, the good pillow. She crossed out "the good pillow" and wrote it again bigger.

Danny came in at six-fifteen, still in his work boots, and stood in the doorway looking at the pile in the living room. "That's a lot for two nights."

"It's two nights in a cabin with no store for eleven miles," she said. "Ask me again Sunday."

He conceded the point the way he usually did, by picking something up and carrying it to the truck. He checked the tire pressure while she packed the cooler, layering ice and water bottles and the chicken she'd marinated that morning. He came back inside to find her wedging the chairs behind the seats.

"I got the oil changed Tuesday," he said. "Figured."

"You didn't tell me that."

"Wanted it to be a surprise. It's a very romantic surprise."

They ate standing up at the counter — leftover rice, half a tomato — and left the dishes in the sink, which felt like its own small vacation. Marisol locked the back door twice. Danny walked the perimeter once, checking windows, a habit from his father.

By seven-forty they were on the highway heading north, the light going gold and long across the fields. She had her feet on the dash. He had the radio on a station that would fade out in forty miles.

"Two whole days," she said.

"Two whole days," he agreed, and moved into the passing lane.


Marisol and Terrence had been talking about the cabin for three years before they finally booked it. Two nights in October, four hours north, a place with a woodstove and no cell service.

The planning happened at the kitchen table on a Tuesday. Terrence had printed a map, which Marisol found endearing and slightly absurd, since his phone did maps fine when there was signal. He circled a gas station halfway. She made a list on the back of a grocery receipt: coffee, the good coffee, not the stuff from the office; her wool socks; the paperback she'd been failing to finish since August.

"We don't need to bring food for every meal," she said. "There's a diner in town."

"There's a diner in town if the diner is still open." He'd read a review from 2019.

They compromised: eggs, bread, a package of bacon, and the assumption of a diner.

Friday afternoon Marisol left work early, which meant leaving at four-fifteen instead of five-thirty. Terrence had already loaded the car, badly — the duffel bags on top of the cooler, so the cooler had to come out again in the driveway while she held the flashlight and did not say anything about it, which he noticed and appreciated.

They hit traffic on the highway for twenty minutes, then it broke open. The light went long and orange across the fields. Marisol put on a playlist she'd made and Terrence pretended not to know all the words.

Around six they stopped at the gas station he'd circled. She bought a bag of pretzels and a lottery ticket, a thing she did maybe twice a year. He filled the tank and cleaned the windshield with the squeegee, thoroughly, the way his father had taught him.

"Two hours left," he said, getting back in.

"Two and a half," she said, "the way you drive."

He pulled out onto the road. The fields went dark blue.


Marisol and Dave had been talking about the lake for three weeks before they actually opened the calendar. Friday to Sunday, that was all they could manage — Dave had a shift Monday at six, and Marisol's mother needed a ride to her appointment Tuesday.

"Two nights," Marisol said, tapping the counter with a pen. "If we leave right after you get home Friday, we hit the cabin by nine."

Dave looked up from his phone, where he'd been scrolling through photos of the rental. "Nine if the highway cooperates. Nine-forty-five if it doesn't."

They divided things the way they always did, without much discussion. Marisol handled the food — a cooler of sandwich makings, coffee, the good peaches from the stand on Route 9, a bottle of wine she'd been saving without any particular occasion in mind. Dave handled the car, which meant checking the tire pressure Thursday night in the driveway with a flashlight in his teeth, and topping off the washer fluid, and clearing out the trunk that had accumulated a folding chair, three reusable bags, and a bag of mulch from April.

Friday came humid and gray. Dave got home at 5:40, showered in eight minutes, and found Marisol already loading the cooler into the back seat.

"Did you lock the side door?"

"Twice," she said.

They pulled out at 6:15. For the first forty minutes neither of them said much. Marisol watched the strip malls thin out into fields, and Dave drove with one wrist over the top of the wheel, the way he'd driven since he was nineteen.

Somewhere past the county line she found a radio station playing songs from the year they met, and she turned it up without asking, and he laughed and didn't ask her to turn it down.

They stopped once for gas. The peaches, it turned out, were perfect.


The Ramirez house smelled like burnt coffee at six on Friday morning, which was Dolores's fault and she knew it. She'd been staring at the calendar taped inside the cabinet door instead of watching the pot.

"Two nights," she said when Arturo came in, still in his work shirt from the night shift. "The place in Galveston. My cousin says it's clean and it's ninety a night."

He poured the burnt coffee anyway and drank it. "Saturday and Sunday?"

"Friday and Saturday. You're off Sunday, so you can sleep in your own bed before Monday."

He did the arithmetic he always did — gas, the room, eating out four times, the twenty dollars they'd inevitably spend on something they didn't need. He'd been doing that arithmetic for thirty-one years, and Dolores had been watching him do it for thirty-one years, waiting.

"Okay," he said.

She packed while he slept. Two pairs of shorts for him because he'd spill something on the first pair. Her blue swimsuit, which still fit if she didn't think about it too hard. The good towels, because the rental's towels were never good. Sunscreen from last summer, half-empty, probably expired.

At three o'clock he loaded the trunk and checked the tire pressure with the gauge he kept in the glove box. She brought the cooler out — sandwiches, two apples, a thermos of iced tea — and set it behind her seat where she could reach it.

Traffic on I-45 was already thickening. He drove. She read the directions off her phone even though he'd driven to Galveston a hundred times, and he didn't tell her to stop.

Somewhere past League City the buildings thinned and the sky opened up flat and white over the coastal plain. Dolores rolled her window down two inches and let the air in.

"Smell that?" she said.

"Not yet," Arturo said. "Soon."


The Reyes household ran on lists, and Friday's was taped to the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a chili pepper.

"Two nights," Daniel said, reading it aloud. "Which means you don't need four pairs of shoes."

Marisol didn't look up from the duffel bag. "The hiking ones, the walking ones, the nice ones for dinner, and these." She wiggled her sock feet. "That's math, not vanity."

They had settled on the lake because it was ninety minutes away and because Daniel's cousin had a cabin standing empty in October. Marisol had booked nothing, which was the point. They'd spent the summer coordinating around her mother's hip surgery and the water heater and a work trip that got canceled twice, and the whole appeal of the cabin was that nobody expected anything of them there.

Daniel loaded the car in the dark, headlights of the neighbor's truck sweeping the driveway. He put the cooler behind the passenger seat where Marisol could reach the sandwiches, because she always got hungry at exactly the halfway point, a fact so reliable he'd stopped teasing her about it years ago.

She came out with a thermos in each hand and her hair still damp. "I turned the thermostat down. And I texted Renata about the mail."

"Then we're free."

"Don't jinx it."

The first fifteen minutes were mostly quiet, the town thinning into fields, the radio playing something neither of them chose. Marisol put her hand on his knee. Daniel took the exit toward the county road, the one that added ten minutes and was worth it for the way the fog sat in the low places.

"We should do this more," she said.

"You say that every time."

"And I'm right every time."

He didn't argue. Ahead, the road curved toward the water, and the sky had begun to go pale at its edges.


The Nguyens had been talking about the coast for three years, and on a Thursday night in October, Thanh finally opened the laptop and booked two nights in a motel in Ocean Shores. Not fancy. The photos showed a bedspread the color of weak coffee, but it was ninety minutes from the water's edge and it had parking.

"We leave at six," she said.

Bao looked up from the sink, where he was scrubbing the rice pot. "Six is optimistic."

"Six is aspirational."

They packed Friday after work. Bao handled the cooler — sandwiches, two thermoses, the plums that had gone slightly too soft to sell at the store but were perfect for eating in a car. Thanh made a list on the back of an envelope: rain jackets, phone chargers, the good binoculars, ibuprofen for Bao's knee. She checked the tire pressure herself because she didn't trust the light on the dashboard, and she was right not to; the rear passenger tire was down eight pounds.

They left at six-forty. Bao drove the first hour while Thanh dozed against the window with her jacket bunched under her ear. When she woke, the sky had gone the pale gray of dishwater and Bao was humming along to a song from a cassette they hadn't owned since 1997.

"You missed the turnoff," she said.

"There's another one."

"There's always another one, with you."

He laughed. They stopped at a gas station outside Elma and split a coffee because the cups were enormous. Thanh took over driving. Bao read the map aloud even though neither of them needed it, just because he liked saying the names — Satsop, Montesano, Aberdeen — and because she liked hearing him.

By ten they could smell salt. Thanh rolled her window down two inches and let the cold come in.


Marisol woke first, as always, and lay listening to the refrigerator hum. Beside her, Dean slept with one arm flung across the space where the dog used to sleep. The trip had been her idea, floated over dinner three weeks earlier: two nights at a cabin outside Hocking Hills, cheaper in November, no cell service to speak of.

She had made a list. Dean thought lists were funny, but he'd added things to it—jumper cables, the good flashlight, the coffee press because motel coffee made him miserable. Between his shifts at the plant and her Saturday hours at the clinic, they'd found one weekend that worked, and she'd circled it on the wall calendar in green marker like a woman claiming territory.

Friday afternoon he came home smelling like solvent and showered fast while she loaded the car. She packed the cooler in layers, the way her mother had taught her: ice, then drinks, then the sandwiches on top so they wouldn't get soggy. Dean carried out the duffel bags and stood in the driveway a moment, checking the tire pressure with a gauge he kept in the glovebox.

"You call your sister?" he asked.

"I texted. She's got the mail."

They left at four-forty, later than planned. Traffic thinned past the outerbelt. Marisol found a radio station playing songs from before they'd met, and Dean drummed the wheel at a red light, and she watched his hands, which were older than she remembered them being.

Around six the sky went orange behind bare trees. They stopped at a gas station for the bathroom and a bag of pretzels, and Dean bought her a coffee she hadn't asked for, three sugars, correct.

"Two hours," he said, pulling back onto the highway.

Marisol propped her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he didn't say anything about it.


The Ortegas had been talking about the lake for three years, and on Thursday night Maribel finally opened the laptop and booked the cabin before Danny could find another reason to wait.

"Two nights," she said. "It's already paid for, so don't start."

Danny leaned over her shoulder at the photo — pine paneling, a dock, a canoe turned belly-up in the grass. "That dock looks structurally questionable."

"You'll survive."

They spent Friday evening packing, which for Maribel meant a list and for Danny meant wandering the garage until he found the cooler. She folded sweatshirts because the forecast said forty-eight degrees at night. He argued that his fishing rod counted as essential and she let him win, because the rod had belonged to his father and she knew he'd wanted an excuse.

They left at six-fifteen Saturday morning, earlier than planned, because neither of them had really slept. Maribel drove the first stretch while Danny held two gas station coffees and read the road signs out loud like a man narrating a documentary. Somewhere past the county line the highway emptied out and the fog lifted off the fields in long white sheets, and they stopped talking for twenty minutes, which was its own kind of conversation.

They arrived before check-in and ate breakfast sandwiches on the hood of the car in the parking lot of a diner that hadn't opened yet. Danny got mustard on his sleeve. Maribel took a picture of him not knowing.

The cabin key was under a ceramic frog, exactly where the email said. Inside it smelled like cedar and old smoke. Danny carried the cooler in and set it down and stood there in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips.

"Two nights," Maribel said again, dropping her bag.

"Two nights," he agreed, and went to check the dock.


Marisol woke before the alarm, which was typical. She lay listening to Dev breathing beside her and thought about the cooler in the garage, the one they hadn't used since last September.

"We should leave by seven," she said when he stirred.

"Eight."

"Seven-thirty."

He made a noise that meant agreement, or at least surrender.

They had picked the cabin because it was two hours away and cost less than a nice dinner in the city. Marisol had found it Thursday night while Dev was still at the shop, scrolling on her phone with the television murmuring. When he came home smelling like solvent, she showed him the pictures: a porch, a metal roof, a lake that was more of a pond.

"Fine," he'd said, which from Dev was enthusiasm.

Saturday morning they moved around each other in the kitchen with the choreography of eleven years. She packed sandwiches. He filled the thermos wrong, too much coffee and not enough room for the milk she liked, and she poured some down the sink without comment. He carried out the duffel bag. She checked the stove twice, then a third time.

The car was hot already. Dev drove. Marisol put her feet on the dashboard, which he hated and tolerated, and read the directions aloud even though the phone was speaking them.

Twenty minutes out, she said, "Did you lock the back door?"

"Yes."

"Did you actually, or are you saying yes?"

He thought about it. "I actually did."

She watched the strip malls thin into fields. Somewhere past the county line, Dev put his hand on her knee and left it there, and she covered it with her own, and neither of them said anything for a long while. The radio found a station playing something from 1987. She turned it up. He didn't ask her to turn it down.


The Reyes household sat quiet on Thursday evening, the dishwasher humming, the kids' rooms empty in that permanent way that had taken Marisol two years to stop noticing.

"Two nights," Daniel said, spreading the road atlas across the kitchen table because he refused to trust his phone in the mountains. "We leave Saturday morning, we're back Sunday before dark."

"You want to leave at six." Marisol didn't look up from her crossword.

"Five-thirty avoids the traffic through the pass."

"We're retired, Danny. We don't avoid traffic anymore. We sit in it and complain."

He laughed and marked the route in pencil anyway, a habit from thirty-one years of dispatching trucks. Marisol got up and started a list on the back of an envelope: her blood pressure pills, his reading glasses, the good coffee because the cabin's would be terrible.

"Do we need the cooler?"

"We need the cooler," she said. "I'm not paying eleven dollars for a sandwich at that place by the reservoir."

Saturday came gray and cold. Daniel loaded the trunk at six-fifteen, which he considered a compromise and Marisol considered a victory. She brought out two travel mugs and a paper bag of the pan dulce she'd bought Friday, and they pulled out of the driveway past the neighbor's sprinkler running for no reason at all.

Twenty minutes in, she turned down the radio.

"Did you lock the back door?"

"I locked the back door."

"You said that in 2019."

"And I was right in 2019."

She let it go. The highway opened up, the sky went from slate to something softer, and the mountains showed themselves in pieces through the windshield. Daniel reached over without looking and put his hand on her knee, and she put hers on top of it, and neither of them said anything for eleven miles.


Marisol and Dev had been talking about the cabin for three years, and on a Tuesday in October, Marisol finally booked it.

"Two nights," she said, turning her laptop toward him at the kitchen table. "Friday to Sunday. It's four hours away."

Dev squinted at the photo—a small A-frame with a woodstove, pine trees crowding close. "There's no cell service up there."

"That's the point."

He didn't argue. He'd been putting in fifty-hour weeks since spring, and Marisol had spent September managing her mother's hip surgery and recovery. They hadn't gone anywhere together since a wedding in Sacramento eighteen months earlier, and that had involved a rental car and a dispute about directions.

Thursday night, Dev packed the cooler while Marisol made a list she immediately lost. He put in coffee, eggs, a package of bacon, two bottles of wine, and the good chocolate she liked but never bought for herself. She found the list under the mail and added *matches*, *ibuprofen*, *the blue blanket*.

"Do we need the blue blanket?"

"It's going to be forty degrees at night."

"There's a woodstove."

"Do you know how to use a woodstove?"

He conceded the blanket.

They left Friday at six in the morning, earlier than either had wanted, because Marisol insisted on beating the traffic. The sky was still the color of wet slate. Dev drove the first two hours while she slept against the window, her jacket bunched under her cheek. When she woke, they stopped at a gas station outside Redding and ate breakfast sandwiches standing beside the car, watching a semi idle.

"This was a good idea," Dev said.

"I have those occasionally."

The road narrowed after that, climbing through switchbacks and stands of ponderosa. Marisol drove the last stretch with the window cracked. Somewhere past the third bend, her phone lost signal, and neither of them said anything about it.


Marisol and Dave Okonkwo had been talking about the cabin for three years before they finally booked it.

It happened on a Tuesday night, after the dishes. Marisol pulled up the listing on her phone and held it out across the kitchen table—two nights, a lake in northern Wisconsin, a wood stove, no cell service according to the reviews. Dave squinted at it, then at the price, then at the calendar magnet on the fridge where their daughter's volleyball tournaments were penciled in through November.

"The fourteenth is open," he said.

"That's what I'm saying."

He took the phone from her, scrolled through the photos twice, and hit reserve before either of them could talk themselves out of it. Marisol laughed at him, the surprised laugh she'd had since she was twenty-three, and he felt pleased with himself for the rest of the evening.

The planning took a week and a half. Marisol made a list on the back of a utility envelope: coffee, the good pillow, rain jackets, the cribbage board. Dave changed the oil in the Honda on Saturday morning and discovered the rear tire was worn down worse than he'd thought, which meant a trip to the tire place and an argument about whether to replace two or all four. They replaced two.

They left Friday at 4:40, later than planned, in traffic. Their daughter was at her grandmother's for the weekend and had texted a photo of the dog wearing a bandana. Marisol read it aloud. Dave drove.

Somewhere past Eau Claire the traffic thinned and the light went low and gold across the fields, and Marisol put her bare feet up on the dash the way she knew he mildly disliked. He didn't say anything. She unwrapped a granola bar, broke it in half, and handed him the bigger piece without looking over.


The Nguyens had been talking about the coast for three years, and on a Thursday night in October, Thu finally opened the laptop at the kitchen table and booked two nights in a motel with a parking lot view of the water. It cost less than she expected. She turned the screen toward David, who was rinsing the rice cooker.

"Saturday and Sunday," she said. "We leave after you get off Friday."

He dried his hands and leaned over her shoulder to look at the photos — a low white building, a strip of gray beach, a diner across the highway advertising chowder. "That's the one with the pier," he said. "My cousin stayed there."

They spent Friday morning texting each other reminders. Thu asked her sister to feed the cat. David got the oil changed on the way to the job site, since the car had eighty-nine thousand miles on it and made a noise on hills that neither of them wanted to think about. At lunch he sent her a photo of the coolant reservoir, filled, as proof.

She packed for both of them, because she always did, and because he'd once brought only one sock. Two sweatshirts, the good rain jacket, a bag of tangerines, the thermos. She left the suitcase by the door.

He came home at four-forty, showered in nine minutes, and they were on the freeway by five-fifteen, which put them squarely in traffic. Thu didn't mind. She had the map on her phone and a playlist she'd made in the spring and never used. David drove with one hand and ate tangerine segments she peeled and handed over.

Somewhere past the last exit with a gas station, the buildings gave out and the hills went dark and open. Thu rolled the window down two inches. The air smelled different already.

"We should have done this sooner," David said.

"We're doing it now," she said.


Marisol Reyes had the cooler packed by six-thirty Friday morning, before the coffee finished dripping. She'd printed the reservation confirmation twice — once for herself, once for the glove compartment — because Danny had a habit of trusting his phone right up until it died somewhere past the county line.

"Two nights," he said, coming into the kitchen with a duffel bag over his shoulder. "You packed like it's two weeks."

"I packed like it might rain, which the forecast says it will, Saturday afternoon." She zipped the cooler. "You can wear the same shirt both days if you want. I'm not stopping you."

They'd chosen the lake cabin because it was three hours away and cost less than a hundred and ten a night, and because Danny's back couldn't take a longer drive anymore, not since the warehouse job. Marisol had traded a shift with Petra at the clinic to make the Friday work. It had taken two weeks of texting to arrange.

Danny loaded the car while she went through the house doing what he called her lap — thermostat, coffee maker, back door, the lamp on a timer in the front room. He'd stopped teasing her about it years ago, mostly.

The car smelled like sunscreen and the sausage biscuits she'd made at five. He backed out of the driveway and she navigated, though the route was one turn onto the highway and then ninety miles of nothing.

Somewhere past the second exit he reached over and put his hand on her knee, and she put her hand on top of his, and neither of them said anything about it.

"We should do this more," he said eventually.

"You say that every time."

"I mean it every time."

She smiled at the windshield. The sun was coming up over the fields on their left, orange and enormous, and the day had barely started.


The Alvarez-Chen Weekend

Miguel had been eyeing the state park brochure on the refrigerator for three weeks, pinned under a magnet shaped like a chili pepper. Saturday morning, he finally pulled it down and set it beside Dana's coffee.

"Two nights," he said. "We leave after you get off Friday."

Dana squinted at the photo of a lake ringed with pines. She was still in her scrubs from the overnight shift, hair flattened on one side. "Who's watching the house?"

"Nobody needs to watch the house. We'll stop the mail."

They spent the following week negotiating logistics in fragments—texts during her lunch break, a conversation shouted between the bathroom and the hallway while he shaved. Dana wanted a cabin with a real kitchen. Miguel wanted to keep it under three hundred dollars. They compromised on a one-room rental with a hot plate and a screened porch, forty dollars over budget, which Dana paid for without mentioning it.

Friday afternoon, Miguel packed the car badly. He wedged the cooler behind the driver's seat where it would slide, forgot the pillows, remembered the pillows, and then couldn't find room for them. Dana came out at five-fifteen, still smelling faintly of hospital soap, and rearranged everything in four minutes without saying a word about it. Miguel watched, holding a bag of pretzels, and decided not to be insulted.

The highway out of town was clogged until the second exit. Then it opened up, and the strip malls thinned into fields, and Dana put her bare feet on the dashboard, which Miguel hated and tolerated.

"I brought the good coffee," she said. "The one you like."

"With the grinder?"

"With the grinder."

He reached over and squeezed her knee. Somewhere past the county line the light went gold across the windshield, and neither of them said anything for eleven miles, and it was fine.


The Hendersons had been talking about the coast for three years, and on Thursday night Rosa finally said it out loud: "Let's just go. Saturday and Sunday. Two days."

Marcus was rinsing dishes. He didn't turn around, but she saw his shoulders shift the way they did when he was already calculating. "Motel prices in October aren't bad," he said. "And I've got the truck's oil changed."

They spent Friday evening packing badly. Rosa put in three books she wouldn't read. Marcus insisted on bringing the good cooler, the heavy one, because he wanted to stop at the fish market on the way back. He packed sandwiches too, ham and provolone, wrapped in wax paper the way his mother used to do, and Rosa pretended not to notice how carefully he folded the corners.

They left at six thirty Saturday morning, before the neighborhood woke. Rosa drove the first stretch because Marcus was still half asleep, holding a travel mug against his chest like something precious. The highway was empty and gray-gold. Somewhere around the second hour he woke up properly and started reading the road signs out loud in a terrible accent, the way he had on their honeymoon in 1997, and Rosa laughed so hard she had to slow down.

They stopped at a diner outside Bakersville. Marcus ordered eggs and studied the paper map he refused to give up, tracing the county road with his finger. "There's a lighthouse here," he said. "Or there was."

"Then we'll find out," Rosa said.

She watched him fold the map into imperfect quarters, watched him leave a bigger tip than necessary, and thought that twenty-six years had gone somewhere but not, apparently, anywhere bad. Outside, the truck was warm from the sun. Marcus opened her door first, the way he always did, and they drove west toward the water.


Marisol and Dwayne Everett had been talking about the drive to Hocking Hills since February, mostly in the tired shorthand of people who work opposite shifts. On Wednesday she finally pulled up the cabin listing on her phone during her break at the clinic and sent it to him with three exclamation points. He texted back a thumbs up, then, a minute later, *the one with the woodstove?* It was.

Friday afternoon he got home first and started stacking things by the door: a cooler, the good sleeping bag, the cast-iron skillet because he did not trust rental cookware. Marisol came in at five thirty still smelling like hand sanitizer, changed into jeans, and immediately began reorganizing what he'd packed, which was their ritual. "You put the eggs under the milk," she said.

"They're in the carton."

"The carton isn't magic, Dwayne."

They left at six twenty, an hour later than planned, which was earlier than usual for them. The Corolla had 140,000 miles and a rattle in the dash that started around fifty-five. Marisol drove the first leg while he found a station playing old soul, and when the signal dissolved into static outside Lancaster she let him plug in his phone without comment, which he noticed and appreciated.

They stopped at a gas station for coffee and a bag of pretzels. Standing under the fluorescent overhang, she leaned against the car and looked at the sky, which was going the deep blue it gets before it commits to dark.

"We should do this more," she said.

"We say that every time."

"I know." She got back in.

The last twenty minutes were unlit two-lane, trees closing overhead. When the headlights swung across the cabin's gravel turnaround, Dwayne exhaled and said, "Okay. Okay, good," and Marisol was already unbuckling.


The Ramirez house smelled like coffee and dryer sheets on Friday morning. Elena had the laptop open on the kitchen counter, scrolling past cabin listings while her toast went cold.

"Two nights," she said. "Saturday and Sunday. We'd be back before you have to deal with the truck."

Marco leaned over her shoulder, still in his work shirt with the name patch. "That one's three hours out. What's wrong with the lake?"

"Nothing's wrong with the lake. We've been to the lake eleven times."

"Twelve," he said, and she laughed, which he counted as a win.

They settled on a motel two hours north, near a state park with a waterfall Elena had seen in someone's photos. Sixty-eight dollars a night. Marco called the desk himself because he didn't trust the booking site, and the woman who answered said they'd have a room with a mini-fridge.

Saturday morning, Elena packed the cooler — sandwiches, grapes, the good mustard — while Marco checked the tire pressure in the driveway with a gauge he'd owned since before they were married. He topped off the washer fluid. He wrote down the odometer reading, a habit she'd stopped teasing him about years ago.

"Did you text your sister?" he asked through the open door.

"She's got the mail and the plants."

They were on the highway by nine-fifteen. Elena controlled the radio, which was the arrangement. Marco drove with one hand and rested the other on the console, and after a while she put hers over it without seeming to decide to.

Somewhere past the second rest stop, the strip malls thinned out and the hills started showing through. Elena rolled her window down two inches and let the noise in.

"Smells different already," she said.

Marco nodded. He didn't say anything, but he sped up a little, and neither of them minded.


Marisol had the cooler packed by six on Friday evening, because she knew if she waited for Dev to finish his shift at the distribution center, nothing would get done until Saturday and then they'd lose half a day.

"Two nights," she'd said Tuesday, over the kitchen table with the electric bill between them. "We can do two nights."

Dev had run the numbers in his head the way he always did—gas, the motel off the highway, food if they didn't bring most of it. "Sunday night I'm back at four in the morning."

"Then we leave Friday and we come back Sunday afternoon. That's a trip."

He'd agreed. He usually did, eventually, and not grudgingly. It had been fourteen months since they'd slept anywhere but their own apartment, unless you counted the night at his sister's after the wedding, and Marisol didn't count that.

He came in at seven-forty smelling like cardboard and cold air. She handed him a sandwich in the doorway.

"Eat in the car. I already loaded it."

"You loaded it."

"Everything but your bag. I'm not touching your bag."

He laughed, went and got his bag, which took four minutes because he never packed ahead. He came out with two shirts and a phone charger and she decided not to say anything.

The lake was three hours north. They took the surface roads for the first stretch because the interstate on-ramp backed up on Fridays, and Dev drove with one hand while Marisol read him the reviews of a diner she'd found, out loud, in a voice that made him laugh again.

Around nine-thirty the strip malls thinned out. The sky went from orange to nothing. Marisol put her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he didn't say a word about it.

"Two nights," she said.

"Two nights," he agreed.


Marisol and Dave had been talking about the cabin for three years, and finally, on a Thursday night in October, Marisol pulled up the reservation page and clicked before either of them could think better of it.

"Two nights," she said. "We leave Friday after I get off."

Dave was at the kitchen table, sorting through a shoebox of receipts for the tax guy. He looked up. "Who's got the dog?"

"Kayla said she'd come by. She wants the twenty bucks."

Friday afternoon Marisol got home at four-thirty, still in her scrubs, and found Dave had already loaded the truck—cooler, the good sleeping bags, his tackle box, and, inexplicably, the electric griddle.

"We're gone two days," she said.

"You'll thank me when there's pancakes."

They stopped at the Casey's off the highway for gas and a bag of ice, and Dave bought two coffees and a package of powdered donuts he insisted were for later. Marisol drove the first hour because Dave's back had been bothering him since he'd helped his brother move a washer. She put on the country station until it dissolved into static somewhere past the county line, then let the quiet sit.

"I keep thinking I forgot something," she said.

"You always think that."

"That's because I usually did."

The light went long and gold across the harvested fields, then blue, then gone. They found the turnoff by GPS and then by memory of the photos—gravel road, mailbox with a fish painted on it. The cabin was smaller than it had looked online, which somehow pleased them both.

Dave carried in the cooler. Marisol found the light switch, then the thermostat, and stood a moment in the strange, cold, pine-smelling room, listening to him thump around behind her with the griddle under his arm.

"Well," she said. "We're here."


The Ortegas had been talking about the lake for three years, and on Thursday night Danielle finally said, "Let's just go," and Marcus, who had been half-watching a game with his phone in his hand, put the phone down.

They left Saturday morning later than planned, because Marcus insisted on checking the tire pressure and Danielle couldn't find the cooler lid, which turned out to be in the garage under a bag of potting soil. By the time they pulled onto the highway it was almost ten. Neither of them minded much. The traffic had already thinned.

Danielle drove the first stretch. Marcus read the directions out loud even though the GPS was talking, a habit that annoyed her for about twenty minutes and then stopped annoying her. They stopped at a gas station outside Millersburg and bought coffee and a bag of pretzels and a scratch-off ticket that won them two dollars, which Marcus put in the cup holder and declared their vacation fund.

The rental cabin was smaller than the photos suggested. The porch sagged on one side. But the lake was right there, gray-green and flat, and a heron stood in the shallows near a fallen tree, ignoring them entirely.

Marcus carried in the bags while Danielle opened windows to air the place out. They had brought too much food for two nights — she always did — and she stacked it in the little refrigerator with the door held half open by her hip.

"There's a place in town that does fried perch," Marcus said, reading a laminated card from the counter. "Closes at eight."

"Then we should go early."

They sat on the porch first, though, for a while, not saying much. The heron finally lifted off, unhurried, and crossed toward the far shore. Danielle leaned her head against Marcus's shoulder. The whole weekend was still ahead of them.


The Ramirez house smelled like coffee and dryer sheets on Friday morning. Delia had the laptop open on the kitchen table, scrolling through cabin listings while Marco packed lunches for the kids' overnight at his mother's.

"Two hours away," Delia said. "It's got a woodstove. Ninety-four a night."

"Does it have hot water?"

"It says 'rustic charm.'"

Marco laughed and zipped the lunch bag. "That's a no."

They booked it anyway. Delia handled the reservation while Marco checked the oil in the Corolla, which had 140,000 miles and a check-engine light they'd learned to interpret as a personality trait. He topped off the washer fluid, threw a jug of water in the trunk out of habit, and texted his mother the pickup time.

Packing took less than twenty minutes. Fifteen years of marriage had stripped the process down: Delia did clothes, Marco did everything else. He remembered the flashlight, the phone chargers, the ibuprofen. She remembered that he sleeps cold and packed the extra flannel blanket from the hall closet.

The kids were dropped off at four. Delia hugged them longer than they wanted. Marco pretended not to notice her wiping her eyes as she got back in the car.

Traffic was bad until they got past the outlet malls. Then the highway opened up and the light went gold across the fields, and Delia put on the playlist she'd made for their anniversary two years ago, the one with too much Fleetwood Mac. Marco drove with his wrist on top of the wheel.

They stopped at a gas station for gum and a bag of pretzels and split it in the car.

"This is nice," Delia said. "Just quiet."

"It's very quiet."

"Don't get used to it."

The cabin, when they found it at dusk, was smaller than the pictures. The woodstove worked. The hot water, eventually, did too.


The rice cooker was already going when Tomás got home, which meant Priya had left the lab early. He found her in the kitchen with her hair pinned up, wrestling a bag of shrimp under cold water in the colander.

"Don't say anything about the shrimp," she said.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to say they're the wrong size."

"They're the wrong size." He set down two bottles of wine and a bag of limes and kissed the back of her neck. "It's fine. We'll butterfly them."

They had ninety minutes. Priya read the recipe aloud while Tomás chopped, and twice she corrected the order of operations, and twice he ignored her and was right. The apartment was small enough that the smell of garlic reached the bedroom, where the cat had retreated to sulk under the bed.

At six, Tomás started clearing the table, which meant relocating the stack of mail, a phone charger, Priya's field notebook, and a half-assembled bookshelf they had been not-assembling since March. He carried the bookshelf pieces into the closet and shut the door on them.

"Do we own four matching plates?" he called.

"We own four plates."

"That's not what I asked."

She came out with the good tablecloth, the one her aunt had sent, and shook it out over the table so it billowed briefly like a sail. Tomás caught the far corner. They smoothed it together without discussing it, the way they did the sheets on Sunday mornings.

At 6:40 he changed his shirt. At 6:45 she tasted the sauce and added more lime. At 6:50 they stood in the doorway of their own kitchen, surveying it: candles lit, rice steaming, the counter mostly clean.

"It looks like adults live here," Priya said.

"Let's not oversell it," Tomás said, and then the buzzer rang.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six o'clock.

"You said medium heat," Dana said, waving a dish towel at the smoke detector.

"I said medium," Marcus agreed, scraping the pan into the trash. "The stove disagreed."

They had four people coming at seven, and the chicken was now a suggestion rather than a plan. Dana pulled open the freezer and considered the archaeological layers inside. There was a bag of shrimp from a sale in November, and a container of stock she'd labeled with a piece of masking tape and no date.

"Shrimp?" she said.

"Shrimp." Marcus was already filling a pot. "We have the orzo."

She set him to peeling while she wiped down the table, which they'd inherited from his aunt and never quite refinished. Three plates matched. The fourth and fifth were from a set they'd bought at a hardware store, and the sixth was decorative, technically, but it held food. Dana arranged them so the mismatch looked deliberate.

"Do we have candles?" Marcus called.

"We have a candle."

"That's one more than none."

He came out to look at the table, hands wet, and moved the candle two inches left. She moved it back. He let it go.

At twenty to seven, Dana changed her shirt and then changed it again. Marcus put on music, then turned it down, then turned it down further, until it was just enough sound to make the room feel occupied.

"It's fine," he said, mostly to himself. "It's four people. They've seen worse."

"They've seen the ceiling leak."

"They've eaten during the ceiling leak."

The buzzer went off early — someone always came early — and Dana looked at Marcus and he looked at her, and they both laughed, and then he went to press the button while she hid the burnt pan in the oven.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which Dana insisted was intentional.

"It's a glaze," she said, tilting the pan toward Marcus. "It's supposed to look like that."

"It looks like a crime scene."

"Taste it."

He did, licking the spoon she offered, and made a face that slowly reorganized itself into surprise. "Okay. That's good. That's actually good."

"I know it's good." She turned back to the stove, tucking her hair behind her ear with her wrist because her fingers were sticky. "Set the table. They'll be here in twenty minutes."

Marcus counted out four plates from the cabinet, then a fifth when he remembered that Priya was bringing her cousin. Two of the plates matched. The rest were survivors of separate lives — one from his old place on Delmar, two Dana had inherited from her grandmother, chipped along the rim in a way she claimed was character. He arranged them so the chips faced inward.

"Napkins?" he called.

"Drawer by the sink. The cloth ones."

"We have cloth ones?"

"We've had cloth ones for two years."

He found them, folded and slightly stiff, and laid them out. Then he stood back and looked at the table — five plates, mismatched glasses, a candle they'd bought for a power outage and never lit.

Dana came out wiping her hands on a dish towel. She studied the arrangement, moved one fork an inch to the left, and nodded.

"It's fine," she said.

"It's better than fine."

"Don't oversell it." But she was smiling, and she leaned against him for a second, her shoulder into his chest, the towel still in her hand.

Downstairs, the buzzer went off — early, of course, because Priya was always early.

Marcus pressed the intercom. Dana lit the candle.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six-thirty, which Danielle insisted was the correct smell for a dinner party.

"It's not burnt," she said, angling the roasting pan toward the light. "It's caramelized."

Marcus leaned over her shoulder, skeptical. "Those are two different words for a reason."

"Set the table."

He counted out five plates, then remembered Priya was bringing her brother and pulled down a sixth. The table only comfortably seated four, so he dragged in the desk chair from the bedroom and wedged it at the corner where the radiator stuck out. Someone would end up with a hot knee. Probably him, since he'd be the one to offer.

Danielle had bought cloth napkins that afternoon, an extravagance she defended by pointing out that paper ones made everything feel like a barbecue. Marcus folded them into shapes he half-remembered from a video, gave up, and laid them flat.

"Did you hide the laundry?" she called.

"I put it in the closet."

"All of it?"

"Most of it." He went back and got the rest.

At seven she made him taste the sauce, holding the spoon out with her hand cupped beneath it like a nurse. He burned his tongue and said it was perfect.

"It needs acid."

"Then why did you ask me?"

She squeezed in half a lemon and asked him again. This time he said it needed acid, and she laughed and told him he was impossible.

Marcus put on a record because he liked the ceremony of it, then turned it down when the first guests knocked. Danielle wiped her hands on a dish towel, looked around the room once — the crooked chair, the flat napkins, the steam fogging the kitchen window — and decided it was good enough, which in her experience was usually the same as good.

She opened the door.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at six-fifteen, which meant Renée had thirty-five minutes to fix the salad and the mood.

"You moved my knives," Desmond said from the sink, holding a paring knife like evidence.

"I moved them two inches. You've been complaining about the drawer since March."

"I complain about a lot of things. Doesn't mean I want them solved." But he was smiling, and he went back to scrubbing the colander, sleeves pushed to the elbow, water spotting the front of his shirt in a way he wouldn't notice until Marisol pointed it out at the door.

Renée pulled the romaine apart with her hands. Outside, the neighbor's dog was losing its mind about something, probably nothing. She thought about the folding chair with the bad leg and decided Trevor could have it; Trevor was skinny and rarely leaned back.

"Did you get bread?"

"I got bread." Desmond dried his hands. "I got the good bread, not the bread you say is fine but then don't eat."

"That's a very specific accusation."

"It's a very specific bread."

He set the table with the mismatched plates, four blue and two white, arranging them so the whites sat across from each other and looked intentional. Renée watched him do it and didn't say anything, because he was pleased with himself and it cost her nothing.

At six-forty she lit the candle in the jar that had lost its label. Desmond turned on music, then turned it down, then down again, until it was just enough to keep a silence from happening.

"Chairs," she said.

"Chairs," he agreed, and went to get them from the closet, and swore when the stack shifted, and she heard him laughing at himself before he even got them upright.

The doorbell rang four minutes early. Neither of them was surprised. Marisol was always four minutes early.


The apartment smelled like garlic before the oven even finished preheating.

Danielle stood at the counter, sleeves pushed to her elbows, breaking down a head of cauliflower with more force than the task required. "If Marcus asks about the promotion again, I'm going to throw a roll at him."

"You'd miss," Terrence said. He was on his knees behind the couch, wrestling with an extension cord. The floor lamp had been flickering for a week, and he'd decided tonight was the night. "Also, we don't have rolls. You said rolls were a carb trap."

"I said the *bread basket* was a carb trap. Rolls are different."

"Noted." He plugged the cord in, and the lamp held steady. He sat back on his heels and looked at it a moment, suspicious, waiting for the betrayal. It didn't come. "Ha."

She glanced over. "You fixed it?"

"I *addressed* it."

The table needed setting. They had four matching plates and two that weren't, so Terrence put the mismatched ones at their own seats, the way they always did. He folded the napkins into rough triangles, then unfolded them, then folded them again the same way.

"Wine's in the fridge," Danielle said. "The good one and the one for after they've had the good one."

"Strategic."

"Practical."

He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at the sheet pan — cauliflower, chickpeas, a scatter of red onion, all of it glistening. "That's a lot of orange."

"It's paprika. Get the salad thing."

He got the salad thing. Outside, a car door slammed, and they both went still for a second, listening, then relaxed when no footsteps came up the stairs.

"Ten minutes," she said.

"Fifteen. Nobody's ever on time."

She handed him the tongs without looking. He took them without looking. The oven ticked, warming.


Dana got home first and immediately regretted the menu. Braised short ribs in August, in an apartment where the air conditioner had opinions about how hard it was willing to work. She opened both windows, put on the oscillating fan, and started searing meat anyway.

Marcus arrived twenty minutes later with the wine and a bag of ice, because they never had enough ice. He set everything on the counter and looked at the four burners going.

"You're doing the ribs."

"I'm doing the ribs."

"It's ninety-one degrees."

"I bought them Tuesday. They were expensive." She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "Can you do the table? And the thing with the napkins."

The thing with the napkins was folding them into rectangles, which Marcus had done exactly once, four years ago, and which had somehow become his job. He found the good ones in the drawer under the silverware, then discovered they were down to three, so he ironed two dish towels and hoped nobody would look closely.

They had six people coming, which meant borrowing the folding chair from the hallway closet and moving the bookshelf eight inches to the left. Marcus did that while Dana skimmed fat off the braising liquid and swore at the fan for pointing away from her.

"Do you want me to make the salad?"

"I want you to shower. You smell like the train."

"That's fair."

By seven-fifteen the ribs were resting, the apartment smelled like red wine and thyme, and Dana had changed into the green shirt and was aggressively repositioning the fan so guests would feel a breeze without hearing it. Marcus poured two glasses and handed her one.

"It's going to be too hot in here," she said.

"They'll drink more. Everyone will think it was strategy."

The buzzer went off. She drank half the glass and went to the door.


The apartment smelled like garlic before six o'clock, which was earlier than either of them had planned.

Dana stood at the counter, sleeves pushed to her elbows, arguing with a chicken. It was too big for the roasting pan she'd borrowed from her mother, and no amount of persuasion was going to change that. She wedged it in sideways and decided the aesthetics could be handled with parsley.

"You're going to break the pan," Michael said from the doorway, holding four folded napkins like a hand of cards.

"It's cast iron."

"Everything breaks eventually."

He set the table anyway, moving the stack of unopened mail to the windowsill, then to the bedroom when he remembered that Priya always noticed the windowsill. The table had come from a curb on Delaware Street two winters ago and still wobbled unless a folded matchbook lived under the third leg. Michael checked that the matchbook was in place. It was. It always was.

Dana put him on salad duty, which meant she stood behind him and narrated. "Thinner. Thinner than that. Michael, those are logs."

"They're rustic."

"They're logs."

At six-forty he opened the wine to let it breathe, though neither of them was sure that did anything, and she changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. The chicken came out with one wing scorched black. Dana looked at it for a long moment.

"Parsley," Michael said.

"Parsley," she agreed, and buried the evidence.

They stood together in the small kitchen for a moment before the buzzer, hips touching, surveying the table: four mismatched plates, a jar of daisies, the good glasses that had survived the move. She reached over and straightened a fork that did not need straightening.

"It looks like people live here," he said.

"People do live here."

The buzzer rang. She wiped her hands on his shirt, and he went to get the door.


Marisol got home first, which meant she got to pick the music. She put on something with horns in it and started clearing the mail off the table — three weeks of catalogs, a jury summons Devin had already responded to, a coupon book neither of them would open.

Devin came in at five thirty carrying two paper bags and a bunch of tulips wrapped in cellophane.

"They only had yellow," he said.

"Yellow's fine. Yellow's cheerful."

He set the bags down and started unloading. Chicken thighs, a bag of lemons, rice, a block of parmesan he'd gotten because it was on sale and he could never resist. Marisol found a pitcher for the tulips and cut the stems at an angle over the sink the way her mother did.

"Kenny's bringing his new girlfriend," she said.

"I know. He texted me twice about it. He's nervous."

"He should be. She's a lawyer."

"She's a paralegal."

"Even worse. She'll notice things."

Devin laughed and turned the oven on. He was better at the actual cooking; she was better at making a room look like people lived in it well. She swapped the burnt-out bulb in the hall lamp, wiped down the coffee table, hid the laundry basket in the closet and then, after considering, moved it to the bedroom and shut the door.

By seven the chicken was resting under foil and the kitchen smelled like lemon and garlic. Marisol changed her shirt twice. Devin stood at the counter tasting the sauce with a spoon he then rinsed and reused, which she had told him about approximately four hundred times.

"You're doing the spoon thing."

"I rinsed it."

"That's not—" She stopped. "Never mind. It smells incredible."

The buzzer went. They looked at each other for a second, the way people do before a night starts.

"Okay," Devin said.

Marisol went to get the door.


Dana got home first and found the apartment exactly as they'd left it that morning: two coffee mugs in the sink, a folded blanket sliding off the arm of the couch, and the recycling bin overdue by three days. She hauled the bin down to the curb, came back up two flights, and started pulling things out of the refrigerator before her coat was off.

Marcus arrived twenty minutes later with the good bread and a bag of lemons he hadn't been asked to buy.

"They had them by the register," he said. "They looked nice."

"They are nice. Zest them."

He set the bag down, washed his hands, and got out the microplane. Dana had a chicken half-butterflied on the cutting board and was working the knife along the backbone with more force than finesse. Marcus watched for a second, decided not to comment, and started on the lemons.

They divided the kitchen the way they always did — she took the stove, he took the counter and the cleanup that trailed behind her. He wiped the cutting board twice while she wasn't looking. She turned the radio to something with no words in it, then turned it down when he started talking about a coworker who'd quit that afternoon without notice, just walked out mid-shift.

"Good for him," Dana said.

"He didn't finish the inventory."

"Still. Good for him."

At six-forty Marcus swept the crumbs off the table and put out four mismatched plates. Dana came out of the bedroom in a different shirt and looked at the table for a while.

"Candles?"

"Too much?"

"Little bit."

He put them back in the drawer. She straightened one of the chairs an inch and then moved it back.

The buzzer went off at ten past seven. Marcus hit the button; Dana pulled the chicken out, blistered and steaming, and set it down between them.


The rice cooker beeped just as Dev finished slicing the scallions, and Marisol swore softly at the oven, which had decided tonight was the night to run twenty degrees cold.

"It's not cold, you're impatient," Dev said, without looking up.

"The chicken's been in for forty minutes and it still looks like it's thinking about it."

He wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder and came to peer through the smudged glass. They had lived in this apartment for three years and neither of them had ever cleaned the oven door properly. "Give it ten more. Did you text Priya about the peanut thing?"

"She says she can have peanut oil, just not peanuts. I don't understand it either."

Marisol went back to setting the table, which meant hunting for the fourth chair, the one that lived in the bedroom holding clothes that were neither clean nor dirty. She carried it out, brushed off a cardigan, and set it at the corner where the table met the wall. Four people, one table meant for two, a folding stool in reserve.

Dev put on a record because he thought it made the place feel intentional. Marisol thought it made the place feel like a coffee shop, but she liked watching him lower the needle, the small careful ceremony of it.

"Wine's in the fridge," she said. "The one Ana brought last time. We never opened it."

"We should probably open something better."

"There is nothing better. That's the whole inventory."

He laughed. The buzzer would go off in twenty minutes, and there were still glasses to rinse and a candle to find, and the chicken was still, as she'd said, thinking about it. But the kitchen smelled like garlic and toasted cumin, and Dev was singing along badly, and Marisol found she didn't mind the oven at all.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary, which Dana insisted was the correct smell for a Tuesday.

"You put too much in," Marcus said, fanning the oven door open with a dish towel. Smoke curled out in a lazy ribbon and set the detector chirping in the hallway.

"I put in a normal amount." Dana climbed onto a kitchen chair, popped the battery out with her thumb, and set both pieces on top of the refrigerator, next to the mail they hadn't sorted since March. "Now it's a rustic chicken."

"It's a cremated chicken."

"Rustic."

He pulled the pan out anyway. The skin was darker than either of them wanted, but underneath it looked fine, and there were potatoes crowded around the edges soaking up the drippings. Marcus tipped the pan slightly and spooned juice over everything, the way his mother had shown him a decade ago, back when he still resented being taught.

Dana was already in the other room, pushing the coffee table toward the wall to make space. They only owned four matching chairs, so the fifth guest would get the desk chair from the bedroom, wheels and all. She wheeled it out and parked it at the head of the table like a joke about promotion.

"Do we have wine glasses?" she called.

"We have three."

"So five people, three glasses."

"Two people can share," Marcus said. "Or drink from mugs. Mugs are charming."

"Mugs are what you do when you've given up."

He came out of the kitchen wiping his hands and looked at the table—mismatched plates, a cloth napkin folded next to a paper towel, the candle they'd been meaning to light since New Year's. Dana straightened a fork with one finger.

"It looks good," he said.

"It looks like us."

The buzzer rang. They both went for the door.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary, which Dana insisted was intentional.

"It's char," she said, waving the sprig at Marcus. "Restaurants pay extra for char."

He didn't look up from the cutting board, where he was working through a pile of shallots with the slow precision of a man who had watched exactly one knife-skills video and taken it very seriously. "Nobody pays for char. They pay for the *suggestion* of char."

The table was already half-set, which was to say Dana had put down four plates and then gotten distracted by the playlist, which she'd been revising since Tuesday. Something with horns, she'd decided. Nothing with lyrics people would want to sing along to, because then Priya would sing along and the whole evening would tilt.

Marcus scraped the shallots into the pan. The oil complained. "Did you tell them seven or seven-thirty?"

"Seven. Which means seven-forty."

"Then why did we start at five?"

"Because you like to start at five." She said it fondly, reaching past him for the wine opener, her hip nudging him sideways an inch. He shifted without comment, the way he'd shifted a thousand times in this kitchen, which was too narrow for two people and had been too narrow for two people for six years.

She found the corkscrew in the drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus. He tasted the sauce, made a face, added salt, made a better face.

"Try this," he said, holding out the spoon.

She did. She thought about it. "More lemon."

"There's already lemon."

"There's already char, too, and look how that turned out."

He laughed, cut a lemon in half, and squeezed. Outside, a car door slammed — too early to be anyone — and they both glanced toward the window anyway, then back at the stove, and kept going.


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because Marcus always over-salted it and then insisted it was fine.

By the time he came through the door with the wine and a bag of ice that had already begun sweating through the plastic, she had the onions going and the radio on low. He set the bottles on the counter, looked at the pot, and reached for the wooden spoon.

"Don't," she said, without turning around.

"I wasn't going to taste it."

"You were absolutely going to taste it."

He tasted it. He made a face that she chose to interpret as approval, and she let him keep the spoon while she went to deal with the table, which was covered in mail, a phone charger, and a jacket that had been living there since Tuesday.

They had four people coming. It should have been five, but Priya's flight got moved, so now there was an odd number and one extra chair, which Marcus dragged into the bedroom and Dana dragged back out because it looked worse with the gap.

"Napkins?" he called.

"Second drawer. Not the paper ones."

"We have non-paper napkins?"

They did, it turned out — a set from three Christmases ago, still creased in squares. He shook them out one at a time and laid them down while she lit the two candles they owned, which did not match, and decided that was fine.

At six-forty he changed his shirt. At six-fifty she moved the candles two inches to the left. At six-fifty-five they stood in the kitchen together, surveying it: the crowded counter, the mismatched chairs, the sauce that was, honestly, a little salty.

"It's good," she said.

"It's good," he agreed, and then the buzzer went, and she wiped her hands on his shoulder as she passed him on her way to the door.


The Apartment on Kessler Street

Devon found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cardboard from the move eight months ago. He shook it out over the table and frowned at the crease running diagonally across the center.

"Iron's under the sink," Priya called from the kitchen, where she was pressing garlic with the flat of a knife because they still hadn't replaced the press that broke in September.

"Under the sink? Why is the iron under the sink?"

"Because that's where you put it."

He didn't argue, mostly because she was probably right. He retrieved it, set up the board in the narrow space between the table and the bookshelf, and worked the crease until it surrendered.

The chicken had been marinating since morning. Priya slid the pan into the oven and set a timer on her phone, then started on the salad, tearing lettuce with more force than necessary. She'd had a long week. Devon noticed the tearing and came up behind her, taking the head of romaine out of her hands.

"I've got this. Go pick music."

She let him have it. In the living room she scrolled through options, rejecting anything too loud, anything with lyrics that would make people stop talking. She settled on something with a piano in it and turned the volume to the level where you could forget it was playing.

They had six chairs for four guests, which meant two extra, which meant the room looked prepared rather than crowded. Devon lit the candle Priya's sister had given them, the one that smelled like cedar. Priya wiped down the counter twice.

At 6:52, someone buzzed from downstairs. They looked at each other across the small bright room.

"Ready?" she said.

"No." He was already walking to the door.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Devon came in through the side door, arms full of grocery bags and the smell of cold air still on his jacket.

"They're not bringing anything, right?" he asked, setting the bags on the counter.

"Marcus said he's bringing wine, but Marcus always says that and then shows up with a six-pack," Priya said. She was wiping down the table with more attention than it needed, pushing the salt and pepper shakers to one side, then back. "Did you get limes?"

"Two bags. You said two bags."

"I said one bag. Two is fine." She took the limes from him and started slicing them on the board by the sink, and he stood behind her for a second, reading over her shoulder from the recipe she'd printed out and taped to the cabinet door.

"It says to marinate for four hours."

"It's been two. It'll be fine."

Devon opened the oven and looked in at the tray of vegetables, which had gone further past golden than either of them would have liked. He pulled them out and set them on the stovetop, and Priya glanced over, made a face, and went back to the limes.

"They'll taste better than they look," he said.

"Everything does here."

He put on music, then turned it down, then turned it up two clicks. She asked him to find the good napkins, and he found them in the drawer where they'd always been, which she disputed. By six-forty the table was set for five, the extra chair borrowed from the bedroom, and the kitchen smelled like garlic and lime and something faintly burnt underneath it all.

The doorbell rang at ten to seven.

"That's early," Priya said, untying her apron.

"That's Marcus," Devon said, and went to let him in.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as the doorbell's test chime echoed through the apartment — Devon pressing it from inside, checking whether the batteries still worked.

"They work," Marisol called from the kitchen. "They worked yesterday."

"Yesterday was yesterday." He came back down the hallway, wiping his palms on his jeans. "How's the chicken?"

"Resting. Which is what you should be doing." She had flour on one forearm and a dish towel slung over her shoulder like a bartender. The counter held four small bowls of things she'd chopped an hour ago: scallions, cilantro, a jalapeño she'd deseeded twice because Devon's brother claimed anything above mild was assault.

Devon opened the fridge, considered the beer situation, closed it. Opened it again. "We have six. Is six enough for five people?"

"Two of them don't drink."

"So six is plenty."

"Six is generous." She nudged him aside with her hip to get to the butter.

He took the hint and went to deal with the table, which was really a card table pushed against the good table to make room for everyone. The mismatched chairs bothered him more than they bothered her; she'd said once that mismatched chairs meant a house where people actually sat down. He arranged them anyway so the wobbliest one faced away from the door.

At six-fifteen she pulled the bread out and swore mildly at the color of it.

"It's fine," Devon said, not looking.

"You didn't look."

"I don't have to. Everything you make is fine."

Marisol set the loaf on the rack and looked at the kitchen — the crowded counters, the pot she still had to wash, the man refolding napkins into shapes that were not quite triangles.

"Ten minutes," she said. "Put on the other shirt."

He was already going.


The onions had been sitting on the counter since noon, and Priya still hadn't touched them.

"You said you'd start at four," Marcus called from the living room, where he was wrestling a folding chair out of the hall closet. The chair had been in there since the last time they'd had people over, which was long enough ago that a jacket neither of them recognized had gotten tangled in its legs.

"I said I'd start when the rice was done. The rice is not done." Priya lifted the pot lid, releasing a small cloud of steam, and made a face. "The rice may never be done."

Marcus came in, set the chair against the wall, and looked over her shoulder. "You added too much water."

"I added the amount on the bag."

"The bag lies."

She handed him the wooden spoon in a gesture of surrender and moved to the onions. He turned the burner down and put the lid back on at an angle, which he claimed helped and she suspected was superstition.

By six they had a system. She chopped; he cleared the table of mail, a bicycle pump, and a stack of library books, two of which were overdue. He put on music, and she asked him to put on different music, and he did, mostly.

At six-forty, he found the good plates, the ones they'd bought at a yard sale in the spring, and discovered that one had a chip.

"Nobody looks at plates," Priya said.

"Ravi looks at plates."

"Ravi does not look at plates."

Marcus set the chipped one at his own place anyway. Then he stood back and surveyed the table — mismatched glasses, a candle burned halfway down, the folding chair filling in at the corner — and decided it looked like people actually lived here, which was, he thought, the point.

The doorbell rang eight minutes early.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Devon realized he'd forgotten the limes.

"I can go," Maya said from the living room, where she was wrestling the good tablecloth into something resembling flat. "Ten minutes. The corner place has them."

"They're always brown."

"Then they'll be brown limes." She snapped the cloth once, hard, and it settled over the table with a sigh. "Nobody's inspecting the garnish."

Devon leaned out of the kitchen doorway, dish towel over his shoulder. Their apartment was small enough that he could see her entirely from where he stood — the table, the mismatched chairs they'd collected over four years, the one folding chair from her mother's garage that always went to whoever arrived last.

"Priya's bringing her boyfriend," he said.

"I know."

"The one who talks about crypto."

"He talks about a lot of things." Maya crossed to the kitchen and lifted the lid on the pot, releasing a cloud of cumin and something citrusy. She made a face that Devon had learned, over the years, meant approval. "This is good. This is really good."

"It needs salt."

"It doesn't need salt. Stop salting it."

He put the shaker down. Behind them, the front door buzzer had a habit of going off ten minutes early, and they both glanced at it out of reflex, the way people do in a space they know well.

"I'll get the limes," he said. "You do the music. Nothing from that playlist."

"That playlist is excellent."

"It's forty minutes of the same song."

Maya was already pulling her phone from her back pocket, thumbing through options, humming something under her breath. Devon found his keys in the bowl by the door, where they were not usually but occasionally were, and stepped out into the hallway with eight minutes to spare.


Marcus wiped down the counter for the third time, though it had been clean since noon. Behind him, Dee was arguing with the oven, which had a habit of running forty degrees hot regardless of what the dial promised.

"Just put the thermometer in there," he said.

"I did. It's lying to me." She crouched, peering through the smudged glass at the chicken. Steam had fogged her glasses, so she pushed them up into her hair, which had been a bad idea approximately every time she'd done it before.

They had four people coming at seven, which meant five-thirty in Priya's case, because Priya had never once arrived at the stated hour. Marcus had accounted for this. He'd set out the good glasses early, and the cheap wine, and the expensive wine he'd hide until people were too far in to notice the difference.

Dee straightened up and surveyed the apartment. "The chair still wobbles."

"Nobody's going to sit in the wobbling chair."

"Somebody always sits in the wobbling chair. It's like a law."

He found a folded index card and wedged it under the leg, testing with his palm. It held. She kissed the back of his neck as she passed with a bowl of salad greens, and he told her the dressing was in the door of the fridge, second shelf, behind the pickles neither of them ate but neither would throw away.

At six-forty, the chicken emerged looking better than it had any right to. Dee set out the plates while Marcus lit two candles, then blew one out because it smelled like a hotel lobby.

"You're nervous," she said.

"I'm not nervous."

"You've cleaned that counter four times."

"Three."

The buzzer went at six-fifty. Priya, of course. Dee laughed, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and went to let her in.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Denise realized she'd forgotten the limes.

"I can go," Marcus said from the living room, where he was rearranging the coffee table for the third time. He'd moved the stack of magazines to the shelf, then back, then decided the shelf was better after all.

"You'll be gone forty minutes. You always are."

"Because you send me for one thing and I remember eight others."

She conceded the point by tossing him the keys. He caught them against his chest, grabbed his jacket off the hook, and paused at the door.

"How many chairs do we actually have?"

Denise counted in her head. Four at the table, the two folding ones from the closet, and the desk chair if someone didn't mind wheels. "Enough. Go."

While he was out she got the chicken in the oven and wiped down the bathroom sink, then stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the table she'd set. Mismatched plates, but the good ones. A candle she'd bought two years ago and never lit. She lit it, then blew it out, deciding to wait.

Marcus came back with limes, tortilla chips, a bottle of wine, and a bag of ice they didn't need.

"The ice was on sale."

"Ice is always on sale."

He put it in the freezer anyway, then came up behind her and looked at the table over her shoulder. "It looks good."

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

She turned around. There was a smear of something on his sleeve — engine grease, probably, from Tuesday, because he never checked before he put a jacket back on. She brushed at it uselessly.

The doorbell rang eleven minutes early. They looked at each other, and Denise laughed, and Marcus went to answer it with the corkscrew still in his hand.


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because the sauce always took longer than the recipe claimed. She set the pot on the back burner, cracked a window against the steam, and put on the record they'd been arguing about for a week — she liked side two, Marcus liked side one.

He came in at six with two grocery bags and rain on his shoulders. "They were out of the good bread," he said, setting the bags on the counter. "I got the other kind."

"The other kind is fine."

"The other kind is not fine, but it's what exists."

She tasted the sauce and handed him the spoon. He blew on it, tried it, and reached past her for the salt without saying anything, which was its own kind of review. She let him. They had worked out, over four years, which battles were worth the breath.

He wiped down the table and found only three matching placemats, so he abandoned placemats entirely and went with the runner instead. Dana pulled the folding chair from the hall closet and wedged it at the corner where the table met the wall — someone would end up there, and it would probably be Theo, who never minded.

"Did you tell them seven or seven-thirty?" she asked.

"Seven. Which means seven-forty."

"Then I have time to change."

She came back in a different shirt and found him lighting the two candles they owned, which were mismatched heights and slightly bent. He looked at them, then at her.

"It's fine," she said. "It's atmospheric."

"It's a fire hazard."

"It's both."

He laughed. The buzzer went at 7:38, and she went to get the door while he turned the record over to side one, since he figured he'd earned it.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six o'clock, which Devon insisted was intentional.

"It's char," he said, waving a dish towel at the smoke detector. "Char is a flavor."

Priya didn't look up from the cutting board. She was slicing cucumbers into transparent coins, the way her mother did, though her mother would have salted them an hour ago and let them weep in a colander. "The salad's going to be the only thing anyone can eat if you keep going."

"Bold of you to assume they'll eat the salad."

They had four people coming — five, if Marcus brought the woman he'd been vague about for three weeks. Devon had counted chairs twice and come up short both times, then dragged the desk chair in from the bedroom and draped a tablecloth over its wheeled base so it looked, from certain angles, almost intentional.

Priya moved past him to reach the oven and put a hand flat on his back as she went, the small automatic courtesy of two people who had learned to navigate a galley kitchen without collisions. He shifted left without being asked.

"Did you hide the laundry?"

"I put the laundry somewhere strategic."

"That's not the same."

"It's in the closet. Mostly." He pulled the roasting pan out, and the chicken was, against expectation, beautiful — bronzed and glossy, resting in a shallow lake of its own fat. He held it up like evidence.

She considered it. "Okay," she said. "That's good."

"Say it with more enthusiasm."

"That's genuinely good, Devon."

He set it on the stovetop to rest and reached past her for the wine opener, and she handed it to him before he found it. Outside, a car door slammed. They both went still, listening, then Priya untied her apron and Devon straightened the crooked chair, and someone knocked.


The rice cooker clicked to warm just as Devon realized he'd forgotten the wine.

"I can go," Marisol said, already wiping her hands on the dish towel slung over her shoulder. She had been standing at the counter for twenty minutes, coaxing a stubborn avocado into something resembling guacamole. "The place on Fifth stays open till nine."

"You've been on your feet since four."

"So have you."

They looked at each other across the small kitchen, the standoff familiar and affectionate. Devon lost, as he usually did, and reached for his keys.

While he was gone, Marisol lit the two candles they owned—mismatched, one vanilla and one unscented—and set them in the center of the table. She counted out five forks, then remembered that Priya was bringing her brother, and pulled out a sixth. The table only comfortably seated four. She dragged the desk chair in from the bedroom and decided nobody would mind.

The apartment smelled like cumin and browning onions. She turned the music down, then up, then down again.

Devon came back with a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and a bag of ice he hadn't been asked to get.

"The ice was a good call," she admitted.

"I have moments."

He took over the stove while she showered, and by the time she came back out with her hair wrapped in a towel, he had transferred everything into the good serving dishes—the ones from his grandmother, which they used maybe four times a year. He'd even folded the paper napkins into triangles.

"Look at you," she said.

"Don't get used to it."

The buzzer rang eight minutes early. Marisol swore softly, yanked the towel off her head, and shook out her damp hair while Devon crossed the room to let their friends in, wiping his palms on his jeans as he went.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Denise realized she'd forgotten to thaw the shrimp.

"Marcus." She held up the frozen block, still fogged with freezer burn at one corner. "Tell me you have a plan."

He looked up from the folding table he was wedging against the kitchen island to make one long surface. "Cold water, bowl, twenty minutes. Same plan as last time."

"There shouldn't be a last time. That's the problem with having a last time."

He took the bag from her anyway and ran the tap, and she went back to the greens, which needed washing twice because the farmers market grit clung to everything. Their apartment was small enough that she could hear him breathing over the running water, small enough that when the oven ran hot the whole place got close and they had to prop the front door with a shoe.

"Four or six?" he asked. "For chairs."

"Five. Renee's coming alone."

"Since when?"

"Since Tuesday. I told you."

"You told the version of me that was watching the game."

"That's still you."

He carried in the desk chair from the bedroom and gave it a critical look, then draped a dish towel over the ripped seat and decided that was enough. Denise handed him a spoon of the sauce without saying anything. He tasted it, considered, reached past her for the vinegar.

"Don't," she said.

"A little."

"A little," she allowed.

By seven the table was crowded with mismatched plates and the shrimp had come out fine, better than fine, and Denise had stopped apologizing for the folding table somewhere around the second glass of wine. Marcus caught her eye across the noise while Renee was telling a story with her hands, and neither of them said anything, and that was the whole conversation.


The Wednesday before the dinner, Renée had written the menu on the back of an envelope, and by Saturday afternoon Marcus had crossed out half of it.

"Three dips is too many dips," he said, sliding the envelope across the counter.

"There's no such thing as too many dips."

"There is when I'm the one making them."

She let him have that one. He was already elbow-deep in a bowl of chickpeas, the food processor whining in short bursts, and she had the harder job anyway — the apartment. They'd lived there four years and accumulated the sediment of it: the shoe pile by the door, the stack of unopened mail on the radiator cover, a folding chair that had never once been folded. She carried the chair to the bedroom, shut the door on it, and felt the particular satisfaction of hiding a problem rather than solving it.

At five, Marcus put on the playlist he'd made, which was mostly songs Renée had introduced him to and one Steely Dan album she tolerated. She set the table for six, then realized they only owned five matching plates and used a sixth that was close enough. Marcus said nobody would notice. She said she'd notice, and took the mismatched one for herself.

They argued briefly about lighting — he wanted the overhead on so people could see their food, she wanted the lamps only, for atmosphere — and settled on the lamps plus the little light over the stove. He tasted the sauce and made a face; she tasted it and added salt, and he made a different face, the one that meant she was right.

At six forty, with the oven ticking and the windows fogged at the corners, they stood in the middle of the room and looked at it together.

"It's good," Marcus said.

"It's good," she agreed, and went to find her shoes before the buzzer rang.


The apartment smelled like garlic before either of them had figured out what to do with the eggplant.

Marisol stood at the counter with a knife in one hand and her phone in the other, scrolling through a recipe she'd saved three weeks ago and never opened. "It says to salt them and let them sit for an hour," she said. "We don't have an hour."

Dev looked up from the folding table he was wrestling into the middle of the living room. One leg refused to lock. He hit it with the heel of his hand until it snapped into place, then tested the whole thing with his weight. "Then we skip the salting. Nobody's going to know."

"Vanessa will know. Vanessa took a class."

"Vanessa took a class in bread."

Marisol conceded this and started slicing. Behind her, Dev pulled the mismatched chairs from three different rooms — two from the kitchen, one from the bedroom desk, one that had come with the place and had never quite belonged to anything. He counted them twice and came up one short, then remembered the step stool in the closet and decided that was fine, someone would sit on it and make a joke, and the joke would be the good part of the evening anyway.

He came up behind her and reached past for the olive oil. "How long do we have?"

"Forty minutes. Maybe thirty-five."

"Music?"

"Something without words. Words make people listen instead of talk."

He put on something without words. Then he took the second knife from the block, stood beside her at the counter, and started on the onions, and for a while neither of them said anything at all — just the two blades going, the pan warming, the table finally steady in the other room, waiting.


The Apartment on Fenwick Street

Marisol was elbow-deep in a bowl of ground pork and scallions when Denny came through the door carrying two grocery bags and an expression of mild betrayal.

"They were out of the good rice," he said. "I got the other kind."

"The other kind is fine."

"It isn't, but it's what we have." He set the bags on the counter, which was already crowded, and began the negotiation of space that always accompanied cooking together in a kitchen designed for one person to make toast in.

She had been folding dumplings for forty minutes. The first dozen looked like something a grandmother would praise. The most recent dozen looked like they had been assembled during an earthquake.

"Those are getting worse," Denny observed.

"My thumb is cramping."

"Give me the spoon."

He was slower than she was but neater, and they worked in a rhythm that had taken three years to develop. Marisol moved on to the dipping sauce, tasting, adjusting, tasting again, adding a splash of vinegar that Denny would later claim was too much.

At six she went to change. He heard her swearing at a zipper and called out that the green one was better anyway. She emerged in the green one and did not mention that he had been right.

The table was too small for five people, so they'd pulled it away from the wall and stolen the desk chair from the bedroom. Denny lit a candle, then blew it out, then lit it again.

"It's not a candle occasion," Marisol said.

"It's a small candle."

The buzzer went off at 6:40. She wiped her hands on a dish towel, he tucked in his shirt, and they looked at the apartment together for one last assessment before either of them moved toward the door.

"It's good," she decided.

"It's good," he agreed.


Dana got home first, which meant the music was already too loud when Marcus came through the door with two bags of groceries and the particular expression he wore when he'd forgotten something.

"The bread," he said.

"I bought bread yesterday."

"You bought sandwich bread."

Dana wiped her hands on a dish towel and pointed at the counter with her chin, where a bakery loaf sat in a paper sleeve, faintly still warm. Marcus set down the bags and kissed the side of her head on his way to the sink.

They had four people coming at seven, which was really five because Priya always brought her brother when he was in town, and they'd learned to plan for it. Marcus started on the chicken, salting it more heavily than Dana would have, and she let him, because it always turned out better that way and she'd stopped pretending otherwise sometime last spring.

"Do we have the good glasses," he asked, "or did we break the good glasses."

"We broke two. There are four."

"That's five people."

"One of us drinks from a jar," Dana said. "It's rustic."

She set the table while he cooked, and then she went back and moved everything a half inch because the placemats were crooked in a way only she could see. Marcus watched her do it without comment. He'd tried once, early on, to point out that no one would notice. He'd been correct and it had gotten him nowhere.

At six forty she changed her shirt. At six fifty he turned the music down. At six fifty-five they stood in the kitchen with the oven ticking and the counters wiped, not talking, drinking a beer they were splitting because it was the last one and they hadn't wanted to open the wine yet.

"It smells good," she said.

"It's the salt."

The buzzer went at seven-oh-two.


Denise got home first and started the sauce, which was really just crushed tomatoes, garlic, and a fistful of basil she'd bought that morning because the cashier had talked her into it. She had the radio on low, tuned to the station that played too many commercials.

Marcus came in at ten past six carrying a paper sack that clinked. "They didn't have the one you like," he said, "so I got two of something else and figured we'd risk it."

"That's fine." She didn't turn around. "Can you do the table? The good napkins are in the drawer under the silverware, not the one you always check."

He set the bottles down and went to look. The napkins were where she said. He counted out five, then remembered Amy was bringing someone, and pulled a sixth. The table only sat six if nobody wanted elbow room, but nobody ever did.

"Did you tell them seven or seven-thirty?" he called.

"Seven. Which means seven-forty."

He laughed and started folding. He wasn't good at it, but he'd developed a system where the fold hid the fraying corner, and Denise had never said anything about it, so he assumed it worked.

She tasted the sauce and made a face. "It needs sugar."

"It always needs sugar."

"I know. I keep hoping one time it won't." She reached past him for the jar and their arms crossed, brief and unremarkable, the choreography of a kitchen too small for two people who used it anyway.

By quarter to seven the bread was warming and Marcus had lit the candle that smelled like cedar, the one they only brought out for company. Denise wiped her hands on a dish towel and looked at the table.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's what nice is."

The buzzer went at 7:06.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which was mostly Dana's fault. She'd tried caramelizing onions and gotten distracted by a podcast about shipwrecks.

"It's fine," Marcus said, scraping the pan. "We'll call it 'deeply browned.'"

"We'll call it a base note."

He laughed and handed her the wooden spoon, then went to deal with the folding table. They only had four real chairs, so the plan involved the desk chair from the bedroom and a stool that wobbled unless you sat with your weight forward. Marcus put a folded napkin under the short leg, tested it with his palm, and decided it was Jenna's problem. Jenna never sat still anyway.

Dana was chopping parsley now, moving fast, the way she did when she was slightly behind. "Did you text them about the buzzer?"

"I texted them about the buzzer."

"Because last time—"

"I know about last time." He'd stood in the stairwell for ten minutes while Rob and Priya circled the block. "I sent a photo of the door. With an arrow."

She glanced over her shoulder. "An arrow."

"I'm thorough."

The chicken went in at six-fifteen. Marcus wiped down the counter, then the table, then found a candle in the drawer full of takeout menus and batteries. Dana pulled two mismatched serving bowls from the high cabinet, standing on her toes, and he came up behind her and got them down without saying anything about it, which she appreciated more than if he had.

At six-forty she changed her shirt. At six-fifty he put on music, something low and unobtrusive, and turned the overhead light off in favor of the lamp.

"It looks nice," she said, standing in the doorway.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's what nice is."

The buzzer went at seven. They looked at each other, and Marcus went to answer it.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which Danielle insisted was the correct combination.

"You caramelized it too long," Marcus said, peering over her shoulder at the pan.

"I caramelized it exactly right. It's supposed to look like that." She elbowed him back toward the living room. "Go find the good napkins."

He didn't know they had good napkins. He found a stack of cloth ones in the bottom drawer of the sideboard, still creased from whatever wedding they'd been bought for years ago, and shook them out one at a time. Four settings. Priya and Tom were bringing wine, which meant they'd bring two bottles and drink most of one before dinner even started.

Danielle came out with a bowl of olives and set it down, then moved it three inches to the left. "Does the table look weird?"

"It looks like a table."

"That's not an answer."

He turned a chair slightly so it faced the room instead of the wall. "Now it looks like a table where people want to sit."

She laughed and went back to the stove. Marcus put on music, something low with a lot of bass, and lit the candle they only used for company. He could hear her narrating the chicken to herself — *okay, okay, twelve more minutes, don't be dry* — and it made him smile in a way he wouldn't have admitted to.

"Did you sweep?" she called.

"Twice."

"Under the couch?"

"Nobody's looking under the couch, Dani."

"Priya looks everywhere."

He got the broom.

By the time the buzzer rang, the burnt sugar had turned into something glossy and dark over the carrots, and Danielle had changed shirts twice. Marcus caught her hand on the way to the door.

"It's good," he said. "All of it."

She squeezed back, then let go and opened the door to a rush of cold air and voices.