The doorbell was still forty minutes away, and Priya had lost the good serving spoon.

"Check the drawer with the batteries," Mark called from the dining room, where he was wrestling the leaf into the table. It had warped slightly over the summer, and he had to lean his hip against the edge to make the halves meet.

She found the spoon behind a coil of twist ties. "Found it. It's sticky."

"Everything in that drawer is sticky."

The chicken had another twenty minutes. Priya lifted the lid off the rice and steam bloomed against her wrist, and she swore quietly and set the lid down at an angle so it wouldn't seal. Mark came through with four wine glasses hooked between his fingers, and she stepped left without looking, the way she had for years, so they passed each other in the narrow spot by the refrigerator without touching.

"Did you buy candles?" she asked.

"I bought the wrong candles. They're the tall ones."

"Those are fine."

"They're the ones that drip."

"Put them on saucers."

He found saucers. He also found the cloth napkins, still in their plastic sleeve from the last time, and he shook them out one at a time and folded them into imperfect rectangles while Priya tasted the sauce and added more lime.

At six-fifty she changed her shirt. Mark swept the front hall, which did not need sweeping, and then stood in the kitchen doorway watching her arrange olives in a bowl.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks fine."

"That's what I said."

She handed him the bowl. He carried it out and set it in the center of the table, adjusted it half an inch, and turned on the lamp in the corner instead of the overhead light, because that was the one she liked.

Then the doorbell rang, and they both went.


Marguerite noticed the crack in the serving platter at four in the afternoon, which gave her exactly three hours to decide whether it mattered.

"It's on the bottom," Dev said, turning it over in the light. "Nobody flips a platter."

"Sylvia flips platters."

"Sylvia has never flipped a platter in her life. You're thinking of her mother."

He was probably right, but Marguerite set it aside anyway and pulled down the wooden board instead, the one they'd bought at a roadside place in Vermont years ago and used maybe twice. Dev had already claimed the kitchen's east half, where he was doing something aggressive to a bulb of fennel. He cooked like he was late for something, even when he wasn't.

"Did you get bread?"

"I got two kinds," he said. "The good one and the one you actually like."

She let that go and started on the table. Four chairs, though six people were coming, which meant dragging the bench in from the mudroom and wiping six months of pollen off it. The bench wobbled. She folded a magazine subscription card under one leg and tested it with her hip.

By six they'd stopped talking except in fragments — *behind you*, *do we have the small tongs*, *did I salt this already* — the shorthand of two people who had assembled a hundred evenings like this one. Dev found a bottle in the back of the cabinet that neither of them remembered buying and held it up questioningly. Marguerite shrugged. Into the ice bucket it went.

At six-fifty she changed her shirt. Dev stood in the doorway of the bedroom eating an olive he'd stolen from the bowl.

"It looks nice out there," he said.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

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


At six, Marisol set the kettle on and began chopping onions while Dev hauled the extra chairs up from the basement. They had four coming: two old friends from Dev's cycling club and a couple Marisol knew from the community garden.

"Do we own six matching plates?" Dev called up the stairs.

"We own eight. Three of them have chips."

"Chips are character."

She heard him laughing to himself, the particular laugh he had when he was pleased with a line nobody had asked for. He came up carrying the chairs one-handed, which she had told him not to do since the shoulder thing, and she gave him a look, and he pretended not to see it.

The chicken had been marinating since morning in yogurt and lemon and too much garlic, the way Marisol's mother made it, and Dev slid the tray into the oven while she started the rice. They moved around each other in the small kitchen with a choreography built over years — she stepped left, he ducked right, neither of them looked up.

"I forgot wine," he said.

"You didn't. It's in the car."

"I forgot it's in the car, then."

He went out in his socks and came back with two bottles and cold feet. Marisol had put out the good tablecloth, the one with the faint stain near the corner they always positioned under the bread basket. Dev lit candles that were slightly too tall for the room and dimmed the overhead light until she told him it looked like a séance.

At quarter to seven they stood a moment in the doorway, surveying it: the table, the mismatched chairs, the smell of garlic and lemon filling the house.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like us," she said, and went to find her shoes.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded in the back of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar and the last holiday. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev knelt at the oven, peering through the glass at a chicken that had, in his estimation, another twenty minutes of dignity left in it.

"Did you salt the potatoes?" she asked.

"I salted them twice, which is either perfect or a disaster."

She laughed and went to find candles. There were four in a drawer, mismatched, two of them stubs from a birthday nobody remembered. She set them out anyway and lit them early, because the light was better that way, softer against the walls she'd painted the summer before last.

Dev came in wiping his hands on a dish towel and stopped to look at the table. He moved one water glass half an inch to the left.

"It was fine," Marisol said.

"It's finer now."

They had forty minutes. She swept the front hall, and he took the recycling out to the bin, coming back in with the cold still on his sleeves. He put on a record, then changed it, then changed it again, and she called out from the bathroom that the third one was right.

At the sink she washed the salad greens twice while he sliced bread, the two of them working around each other in the narrow kitchen with the choreography of people who have collided enough times to stop colliding. He handed her a spoon before she asked. She stepped left as he pivoted with the cutting board.

"Do we have enough wine?" he said.

"We have enough wine."

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. Dev looked at her. Marisol untied her apron, tossed it over a chair, and touched his shoulder as she passed.

"Get the door," she said. "I'll bring the bread."


By six o'clock the kitchen smelled like garlic and browned butter, and Priya had already changed her shirt twice.

"The first one had oil on it," she said, when Marcus raised an eyebrow.

"The second one had oil on it too."

"That's why there's a third."

He was at the sink, scrubbing the good wine glasses, the ones that lived in the back of the cabinet and came out maybe four times a year. Six of them, and one had a chip on the rim he was pretending not to see. He set it at his own place instead.

"Did you text Danny about the shellfish thing?"

"I texted Danny. Danny says he's fine with shellfish now. Danny says the doctor told him it was probably the tequila." Priya slid the tray of roasted carrots out and prodded one with a fork. "I'm not making a meal around Danny's tequila theory. There's chicken."

Marcus dried his hands and began setting the table, counting silverware twice because he always miscounted once. He put the candles out, then moved them, then moved them back. Priya watched him from the stove with an expression that was mostly affection.

"They're fine where they were."

"They were crooked."

"They were charming."

At 6:40 he found the playlist he'd made and put it on low, and she reached over and turned it down further, and he turned it up a notch, and they arrived at a volume neither had chosen. He opened the wine to breathe. She wiped the counter one last time, then the same spot again.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"We have exactly enough chairs."

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. They looked at each other — that half-second of shared panic — and then Priya laughed, untied her apron, and threw it at him.

"You get it," she said. "I'm still not ready."

He was already walking.


The Halloran kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which Marguerite insisted was a feature and not a mistake.

"You caramelized it," Dev said, peering over her shoulder at the pan.

"I *browned* it. There's a difference, and the difference is intentional."

He didn't argue. He had learned, over nineteen years, that arguing about the food was a losing proposition, and anyway she was usually right. He went back to the dining room table, where he was doing the part he was good at: the arranging. Four plates, none of them matching, because the matching set had been reduced to three by a Thanksgiving incident nobody was allowed to bring up. He set the odd plate at his own seat.

"Did you find the good napkins?" she called.

"Define good."

"The linen ones. Not the ones with the reindeer."

He found them in the buffet drawer, under a stack of birthday cards they'd never thrown away. They were wrinkled. He considered the iron, considered the clock — twenty-two minutes — and then folded each one in a way that hid the worst of it.

Marguerite came in with a bowl of olives and stopped. "Those are wrinkled."

"Those are *rustic*."

She laughed, which was the whole point, and set the olives down and moved his water glasses two inches to the left, where they belonged.

"Are we doing the good wine or the regular wine?" he asked.

"It's Priya and Tom."

"Good wine, then."

He went to the basement for it. When he came up she had put music on, something with horns, and was standing at the window watching the street with a dish towel over her shoulder, and he had the brief, ordinary thought that he would like to keep doing this for a while longer.

Headlights swung into the driveway.

"They're early," she said.

"They're always early."

He got the door.


The invitations had gone out three weeks earlier, which meant Dolores had three weeks to worry about the tablecloth.

"It has a stain," she said, holding it up to the kitchen window.

Ray looked over from the counter, where he was slicing cucumbers with more concentration than the task required. "Where?"

"Right here. From the Easter ham."

"That was two years ago."

"And here it still is." She folded it back into the linen drawer and pulled out the blue one instead, the one they'd gotten as a wedding gift from her aunt. It smelled faintly of cedar. "This is better anyway."

Ray had made the salad dressing from memory, the way his mother used to, and he'd been tasting it every few minutes to see if it needed more mustard. It did not need more mustard. He added a little anyway.

"Did you get the good glasses down?" Dolores asked.

"They're soaking."

"All six?"

"All six, and I found a seventh in the back that I forgot we had."

She came over and stood beside him, looking at the dressing, then at his face, then back at the dressing. "It's too vinegary."

"It's supposed to be."

"Says who?"

"Says the man who made it."

She dipped a spoon in, tasted, made a face that was mostly performance. "It's fine."

Outside, the light was going gold across the driveway. Ray wiped his hands and went to put on a shirt with buttons. Dolores set the table, moving each fork a quarter inch until it looked deliberate, then lit the two candles she'd bought specifically and hidden in the pantry so she wouldn't use them on an ordinary Tuesday.

When the doorbell rang, they were both in the hallway, and they looked at each other for a second before she reached for the handle.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another hour, but Dolores had already changed her shirt twice.

"The blue one," Ray said from the kitchen, not looking up. He was scraping the burnt edges off a pan of roasted carrots, working with the patient concentration of a man defusing something.

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

"I saw it this morning when you tried it on. Blue."

She came in and stole a carrot. Too hot. She passed it back and forth between her palms while Ray shook his head at her, the way he had for thirty-one years.

The table was set for six. They'd argued mildly about whether to use the good plates — Ray thought it was just the Petersons and Anne, hardly the good-plate crowd — but Dolores had won by the simple method of setting them out while he was at the hardware store. Now he admitted, privately, that they looked nice. The candles were his idea, though he'd never say so.

"Did you get wine?" she asked.

"Two reds. And that fizzy thing Anne likes."

"You remembered."

"I write things down."

She wiped a water spot off a glass with the hem of her shirt, which he pretended not to see. Outside, the light was going amber over the neighbor's fence. Somebody's dog was barking at nothing.

Ray untied the apron, hung it on the hook, and stood a moment surveying the counter: the bread waiting to go in, the salad tossed but undressed, the roast resting under foil. He liked this part — the ten quiet minutes when everything was done and nothing had started.

Dolores put a hand flat on his back as she passed. "It smells good in here."

"It'll be fine."

"It'll be more than fine."

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


The Ndiayes had been arguing about the chairs for twenty minutes.

"Six people, six chairs," Amadou said, holding the folding chair he'd retrieved from the basement. Its vinyl seat had split along one edge, revealing yellowed foam.

"Nobody wants to sit on that." Miriam was slicing cucumbers into translucent coins, her knife working faster than seemed safe. "Bring up the desk chair from the office."

"The desk chair rolls."

"Then someone will roll." She scraped the cucumbers into a bowl with the flat of the blade. "Marcus won't care. Marcus once ate dinner off an ironing board at our old place."

Amadou set the folding chair against the wall and went for the office. Miriam heard the wheels catch on the hallway runner, heard him swear quietly in a way that meant he'd hit his shin.

The kitchen smelled like garlic and browning onions. She'd started the stew at two, which was too early, and now it needed watching so it wouldn't reduce to paste. She added a half cup of water and stirred.

"Where do you want it?" Amadou called.

"Head of the table. You sit in it."

He wheeled it into place and stood back, assessing. The tablecloth had a wine stain from Thanksgiving that they had both agreed was invisible if you set a candle on it. He set a candle on it.

"Napkins," he said.

"Drawer."

"The cloth ones?"

"We have cloth ones?"

He found them, wrinkled, in the back of the sideboard, and stood ironing them on a towel on the counter while Miriam tasted the stew and added salt and tasted it again.

At six-forty the doorbell rang, early, and they looked at each other across the kitchen — her hands wet, his shirt untucked.

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


The invitations had gone out two weeks earlier, casual texts that said *come hungry*, and now Denise stood in the kitchen wondering whether four kinds of cheese was excessive for six people.

"It's not excessive," Roy said, reading her mind from the dining room, where he was wrestling the extra leaf into the table. The wood groaned. He'd been meaning to sand and re-oil it since spring. "It's hospitality."

"It's four cheeses."

"Then it's generous hospitality."

She sliced the baguette on a diagonal because it looked better that way, and because her mother had always done it, and because there was a certain pleasure in unnecessary care. Behind her, Roy found the mismatched chair — the one from his old apartment, oak where everything else was walnut — and set it at the head, then thought better of it and moved it to the middle, where the difference read as charm instead of oversight.

The chicken had been in the oven forty minutes. Denise checked it, basted it, and shut the door with her hip while holding the spoon aloft like a conductor's baton.

"Do we have candles?"

"We have birthday candles."

"That's not the same thing."

Roy went to the hall closet anyway and emerged with a box of white tapers, dusty, from a power outage two winters back. He wiped them with a paper towel and found two holders that almost matched.

At six-forty they stood together surveying the room. The table was set. The napkins were folded into nothing fancy, just rectangles. Music played low enough to be ignored.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

He kissed the top of her head, then went to change his shirt, and she poured herself a small glass of wine and drank it standing up, alone, in the last quiet minute before the doorbell.


The forecast had promised rain, so Nadia moved the folding table indoors and set it end-to-end with the kitchen table, hiding the seam under two mismatched cloths. Desmond argued for candles. She argued that candles would make it look like they were trying too hard.

They compromised: one candle, unlit, in the middle, as a kind of joke about their own indecision.

He handled the chicken because he always handled the chicken, rubbing it with paprika and garlic while she chopped cucumbers into rounds so thin they curled. The kitchen radio played something with too much bass, and neither of them changed it. Around five, Desmond discovered they had no lemons. Nadia said the recipe didn't need lemons. Desmond said the recipe absolutely needed lemons and drove to the store anyway, returning eleven minutes later with lemons, a bag of ice, and a small bunch of daisies he claimed had been on sale.

She put them in a water glass because the vase was still packed from the move two years ago.

At six they walked through the apartment together, seeing it the way guests would. Nadia straightened the couch cushions. Desmond shut the door to the room where the laundry lived. They found a coffee mug on the bookshelf, another on the windowsill, and a third behind the television, which made them both laugh in the tired way of people who have had the same argument enough times that it has softened into a routine.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she asked.

"Five. We need six."

He carried the desk chair in from the bedroom, rolling it across the carpet, and she declared it the seat of honor.

At six-forty the buzzer sounded. Desmond wiped his hands on a dish towel; Nadia lit the candle after all. They looked at each other for half a second — a check, a confirmation — then she went to press the button and let their friends in.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the back of the linen closet, still creased from the last time. She shook it out over the dining table while Andre worked the corkscrew, swearing softly at a cork that had crumbled.

"Strain it," she said, not looking up.

"I'm straining it."

The apartment smelled like garlic and the lemon cleaner he'd used on the bathroom sink an hour earlier, when they'd divided the house between them without much discussion. She'd taken the kitchen and he'd taken everything else, which was the arrangement they always fell into, and neither of them had ever said out loud whether it was fair.

He came in with a coffee filter and the wine bottle and set both on the counter beside her. She was slicing a baguette at an angle, the way she'd seen someone do once on television, and she paused to let him taste the sauce off the wooden spoon.

"Salt," he said.

"You always say salt."

"You always need salt."

She added a pinch, and he went to find the folding chair from the closet, because they had four chairs and there would be six people, and one of them would have to sit on the piano bench. They'd argued about the piano bench earlier — whether it was rude to make a guest sit on it — and had resolved nothing, and now Andre carried it out and set it at the head of the table like it had been his idea all along.

Marisol lit two candles and stepped back. The room looked better than it usually did.

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

"They're always late."

"I know. I'm just saying it now so I don't say it later."

She laughed. He put his hand flat on her back for a second, then went to find matches, though the candles were already lit.


The Ferrises had exactly ninety minutes before the doorbell would ring, and Dana had already burned the first batch of garlic bread.

"It's fine," Malik said, scraping the blackened slices into the trash. "Nobody counts the bread."

"Renee counts the bread."

He laughed and pulled the second loaf from the freezer, setting the oven timer this time. Dana was at the stove, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon, adding pepper, tasting again. The kitchen smelled like tomatoes and rosemary and the lemon cleaner she'd used on the counters that morning.

They moved around each other in a rhythm worn smooth by nineteen years. He wiped down the table; she set out the mismatched wine glasses, the good ones and the ones from the grocery store, because there had never been eight matching anything in this house. He found the folding chair in the hall closet and wedged it at the corner of the table where the legs didn't quite fit.

"You're wearing that?" she asked.

He looked down at his shirt. "What's wrong with this?"

"There's a stain on the pocket."

"That's a shadow."

She reached over and rubbed the fabric with her thumb, and it did not come off, and he sighed and went upstairs to change while she moved the salad to a bigger bowl.

When he came back down in a green shirt she liked, she was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, arms crossed, surveying it all.

"It looks good," he said.

"The candles are crooked."

He straightened them. She turned off the overhead light and turned on the lamp in the corner instead, and the room went soft and gold, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

Then the timer went off for the bread, and headlights swung across the front window, and they both went to answer the door together.


The Lindqvists had exactly ninety minutes before the doorbell would ring, and the kitchen looked like a crime scene involving flour.

"You said you'd start the sauce at four," Deborah said, not accusingly, just as a matter of record. She was wrestling a leaf into the dining table, which had swollen with humidity and refused to accept it.

"I did start it. Then I tasted it and had to start it again." Ray held out a spoon. "Here. Be honest."

She tasted. Considered. "More acid."

"That's what I thought." He went digging for a lemon.

They had done this maybe two hundred times over thirty-one years, in four different kitchens, and the choreography held: he cooked, she staged. She wiped down the good glasses, the ones that only came out for company, and held each up to the window light like a jeweler. Two had spots. She washed them again.

"Did you tell Marcus about the dog?" she called.

"What about the dog?"

"That we have one now. He's allergic."

Ray paused with the lemon half in his fist. "I did not tell Marcus about the dog."

"Okay." Deborah set down the glass. "So Cricket goes in the bedroom, and we open a window, and we don't say anything unless he starts sneezing."

"That's your plan?"

"That's the plan."

He laughed and squeezed the lemon, catching a seed in his palm. She came behind him and looked over his shoulder at the pot, one hand resting flat between his shoulder blades, the way she always did, as though checking he was still warm.

"It smells good," she said.

"It's better than good."

"Don't get arrogant. Set the bread out."

At 6:52 she lit two candles and turned off the overhead light, and the room went soft and forgiving, hiding the flour they'd both forgotten on the counter. Ray untied his apron. Headlights swung across the front window.


At half past four, Nadia stood at the counter with a knife in one hand and a bunch of cilantro in the other, deciding how fine was fine enough. Behind her, Owen was arguing with the folding table, which had opened crookedly and now refused to close or fully commit.

"It's fine," he announced. "Nobody looks at the legs of a table."

"Marcus looks at everything."

"Marcus is bringing wine, which means he forfeits the right to critique furniture."

She laughed and swept the cilantro into a bowl. The kitchen smelled like cumin and browning onions. She had started the stew at two, mostly because she liked the long afternoon of it, the way the apartment slowly filled up with the promise of the evening. Owen finally wrestled the table into place and threw a cloth over it, then stood back with his hands on his hips like a man surveying a completed bridge.

"Napkins," he said.

"Second drawer. The cloth ones, not the paper."

"We have cloth ones?"

"We got them for the wedding. You've folded them maybe four times."

He found them, ironed two of the worst wrinkles out with the heel of his hand, and set the table while she tasted the stew and added more salt than she'd admit to. At quarter past five, he put on music — something low and instrumental, the kind of thing that fills silence without demanding attention — and started slicing bread.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"Four and the piano bench."

"Somebody's getting the piano bench."

"You are," she said. "You're the host."

He kissed the side of her head on his way past with the bread board. At half past five, the buzzer rang early, as it always did, and they looked at each other across the small warm room and Nadia said, "Okay. Go."


By four o'clock the kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter, and Renata had already burned her thumb twice on the same pan handle.

"You're supposed to use the towel," Dev said, coming in from the garage with two folding chairs under his arm.

"The towel is wet."

"Then get a dry towel." He set the chairs against the wall and looked at the counter, which had disappeared under cutting boards, a colander of green beans, three lemons, and a bowl of something he couldn't identify. "What's that?"

"Don't touch it. It has to sit."

He didn't touch it. He'd learned that much in twenty-two years. Instead he took the vacuum out of the hall closet and ran it over the living room rug, which didn't especially need it, then moved the ottoman two feet to the left so five people could sit without anyone straddling the coffee table. He counted chairs. He counted again. He went back to the garage for a fourth.

Renata came out to inspect. "That one wobbles."

"Everyone wobbles by nine o'clock."

She laughed despite herself and went back to the beans. He followed her, took the colander out of her hands, and started snapping the ends off, dropping them into the sink in a rhythm she found mildly infuriating and deeply familiar.

"Marisol's bringing a dessert," she said. "So don't offer them the ice cream."

"We have ice cream?"

"Behind the frozen peas. Which is why you don't know about it."

At six-fifteen he changed his shirt. At six-twenty she wiped down the bathroom sink and hid the toothpaste tube, which had been squeezed from the middle for two decades and had never once been squeezed from the bottom. At six-thirty they stood in the kitchen with nothing left to do, and Dev poured two glasses of wine and handed her one.

"It looks good," he said.

"It looks fine."

The doorbell rang. She set the glass down and went to answer it.


The invitation had said seven o'clock, which meant Dana started worrying at four.

"The chairs don't match," she said, standing in the dining room with a dish towel over her shoulder.

Rob looked up from the cutting board, where he was working through a pile of shallots with more enthusiasm than technique. "They've never matched. Marcus has sat in that green one probably forty times."

"That's different. That was casual."

"This is casual."

Dana didn't answer, which he'd learned meant she was already three steps ahead, mentally rearranging something. She disappeared into the hallway and came back dragging the desk chair from the spare room, which matched nothing at all, and set it at the head of the table like it had been the plan all along.

The kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter. Rob had committed to a braise that morning, an act of confidence he now regretted, because the recipe assumed a level of familiarity with the word "deglaze" that he did not possess. He'd texted his sister twice.

"Taste this," he said, holding out a spoon.

Dana tasted. She made a face he couldn't read, then reached past him for the salt.

"That much?"

"That much."

By six-fifteen the table was set, the wine was open, and Dana had changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. Rob found her in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed with one shoe on.

"It's just Marcus and Priya," he said.

"I know."

"And they're bringing dessert, so we can't fail completely."

She laughed, and something in her shoulders let go. She put on the other shoe.

The doorbell rang at seven-oh-four. Rob got there first, wiping his hands on his jeans, and Dana came up behind him, and they opened the door together into the noise of arriving friends.


The invitation had gone out three weeks earlier, casual and confident, and now the evening had arrived with its usual ambush of details.

Dana stood at the counter, sleeves pushed up, working a knife through a pile of shallots. She had committed to a braise that morning, the kind of dish that promised to take care of itself and then demanded attention every forty minutes. The kitchen smelled of wine reducing and something faintly scorched she hadn't identified yet.

"The Bergmans are bringing a dessert," Paul said, coming in from the garage with two folding chairs under one arm. "So don't make anything sweet."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were looking at the tart pan."

"I was moving the tart pan."

He set the chairs against the wall and surveyed the dining room, which had spent the last four months functioning as a place to set down mail. He gathered the accumulated stacks into a laundry basket and carried it upstairs, where it would remain, they both knew, until sometime in the spring.

By six they had reached the phase of the evening that Dana thought of as the quiet part, when everything was either finished or too late to fix. Paul wiped down the water glasses with a dish towel, holding each one up to the light. She watched him do it and did not tell him that nobody would notice.

"Did you light the thing?" she asked.

"What thing?"

"The candle. The one that covers up the dog."

He lit it. The room settled into a warmth that felt, briefly, like a room in a magazine, and then the dog wandered through and lay down directly in the center of the floor.

Headlights swung across the front window. Dana untied her apron. Paul reached over and straightened her collar, one small correction, and then they went to open the door together.


The Ferrantes had been arguing about the chairs since noon.

"We have six," Dolores said, counting again with her finger, as though the number might have changed since the last census. "Six chairs, seven people."

"The piano bench," Marco said. He was elbow-deep in a bowl of ground lamb, folding in breadcrumbs and mint with the patience of a man who did not want to discuss chairs.

"You can't put Ruth on a piano bench. She has the hip."

"Then I'll sit on the piano bench."

"You'll be up and down the whole night anyway." Dolores said it fondly, which was how she said most things to him, even the complaints. She went out to the garage and came back dragging a folding chair with a rust spot on one leg, and she set a cushion on it and stood back and decided it looked deliberate.

By four the house smelled like garlic and the good olive oil, the one Marco rationed like a miser. He'd made the meatballs small, the way Ruth liked, and a pan of eggplant for Deb, who had announced two months ago that she was through with meat and had not been permitted to forget it.

Dolores ironed the tablecloth on the table itself, which he had asked her not to do a hundred times, and she did it anyway, quickly, listening for his footsteps. She put out the mismatched wineglasses. She put a jar of zinnias in the center, cut that morning, still sticky at the stems.

"Salt," Marco said from the kitchen, meaning taste this.

She tasted it. "More."

"You always say more."

"Because it's always more."

He salted it. Outside, a car door shut, and then another, and Dolores untied her apron and hung it on the hook and reached up to smooth the back of his hair before she opened the door.


The invitation had said seven o'clock, which meant Nadia had been cooking since four.

"You're going to burn the garlic," Tomás said from the doorway, not moving to help yet, because he knew better than to interrupt her before she asked.

"I'm watching it."

"You're watching the door. You keep looking at the door."

She was. The Ferreiras were always early, and the table wasn't set, and there was a smear of something on the window above the sink that had been there since March. She turned the heat down and pointed her wooden spoon at him. "The good glasses. The ones on the top shelf."

He got the step stool. There were six glasses and one of them had a chip on the rim, so he set that one at his own place and said nothing about it. Then he laid out the napkins wrong—folded into triangles instead of rectangles—and she came over and refolded them without a word, and he let her, and they both understood this was how it had always gone and would keep going.

"Did you buy bread?" she asked.

He had not bought bread.

"Tomás."

"There's the end of the loaf from Tuesday."

She closed her eyes for a second. Then she opened them and said, "Croutons. We'll cut it up and make it a garnish and nobody will know it was a mistake."

He laughed at that, the short surprised laugh she still liked hearing, and he found the serrated knife and started cubing. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and hot oil. Outside, a car door slammed too early, the way he'd known it would.

"They're here," he said.

She untied her apron, handed it to him, and smoothed her hair with both palms. "Answer it slowly," she said. "Give me thirty seconds."

He gave her forty.


The Hendersons had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"The blue one shows every crumb," Marcus said, holding it up to the kitchen light like evidence in a trial.

"The white one has that wine stain from Diane's birthday." Priya was elbow-deep in a colander of arugula, rinsing it for the third time because she'd read somewhere that grit hides in the folds. "Which nobody noticed, by the way, because nobody looks at tablecloths."

"You're looking at tablecloths."

"I'm looking at *you* looking at tablecloths."

He set the blue one down and went to check the chicken, which had another forty minutes and did not need checking. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and burnt garlic — the first batch had gone dark and gone in the trash, and they'd agreed not to mention it.

Priya dried her hands and started on the water glasses, holding each one up to see if the dishwasher had left spots. Four of six had spots. She began polishing them with a dish towel, which she knew was a thing her mother did and had once found unbearably fussy.

"Do we have enough chairs?" Marcus asked.

"Six chairs. Six people."

"Steve might bring his brother."

"Steve is not bringing his brother."

"He brought him to the thing in March."

"That was a barbecue." She held a glass up again. Still spotted. "If Steve brings his brother, you can sit on the stepladder."

Marcus laughed, and something in the room loosened. He came over and took the towel out of her hand and polished the glass himself, badly, and set it on the counter with the others.

At 6:40 they put out the white tablecloth. At 6:52 Priya moved the candle to cover the stain, and Marcus pretended not to see her do it, and the doorbell rang.


The Kowalski-Reyes kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt sugar by five o'clock.

"You caramelized it," Marisol said, peering over Danny's shoulder at the pan.

"I *deliberately* caramelized it. There's a difference." He tilted the skillet so she could see the onions gone glossy and brown at the edges. "Trust the process."

"I trust the process. I don't always trust the processor." She kissed the back of his neck and moved on to the dining table, where four mismatched place settings waited in a state of near-completion. The good plates had come from his grandmother; the wine glasses were from a discount store two towns over and neither of them cared, because guests never noticed and if they did, they weren't the right guests.

Danny had been planning this dinner for nine days. Marisol knew because he'd mentioned it approximately nine times, each mention accompanied by a revision to the menu. It had started as steak. It had passed through a phase involving homemade pasta, which she had gently discouraged on the grounds that they owned no pasta machine and possessed no relevant skills.

"Napkins," she called out. "Cloth or paper?"

"Cloth. It's Priya and Ben."

"Priya and Ben have seen us eat cereal for dinner."

"That was different. That was a Tuesday."

She laughed and got the cloth napkins from the drawer where they lived undisturbed most months. Outside, the light was going orange over the neighbors' fence. She could hear Danny humming something tuneless, the way he did when he was concentrating.

At six-fifteen he came out with two glasses of wine, one for each of them, and they stood together in the doorway looking at the table.

"It's good," he said.

"It's very good."

"Something's missing."

"Candles," she said, already turning to find them.

The doorbell rang eleven minutes early. Neither of them minded.


The lasagna was Marguerite's contribution, and she guarded it like a state secret. Dennis had been banned from the kitchen twice already, once for lifting the foil to check on it and once for suggesting, mildly, that it might need more oregano.

"You don't put oregano in at hour two," she said. "You put oregano in at minute one."

"I stand corrected."

He took his exile to the dining room, where he was folding napkins into shapes that had seemed simple in the video and now resembled failed origami swans. Four place settings, plus the two of them. The Ochoas were bringing wine, and Bridget was bringing a salad she'd described over the phone as "aspirational."

Marguerite came out to inspect. "What are those?"

"Napkins."

"They look like they're surrendering."

"They are. To me." He flattened one and started over. "Did you find the good glasses?"

"The good glasses have a chip in them. Somebody put them in the dishwasher."

"Somebody did that eight years ago and has been paying for it ever since."

She laughed and moved past him to straighten a picture frame that had been crooked so long neither of them noticed it anymore except when company was coming. Dennis got the candles from the drawer in the hall, the tapered ones they only used for occasions, and set them in the holders his mother had left them.

"Music?" he called.

"Nothing with words. People talk over words and then nobody's listening to anything."

He put on something instrumental and low. The house smelled like garlic and melting cheese, and the windows had gone dark enough to throw the room back at them, the two of them moving around the table, adjusting things that didn't need adjusting.

"Twenty minutes," Marguerite said.

Dennis lit the candles. "Then we're ready."


The Weeknight Invitation

Dana got home first and immediately regretted the ambition of the menu. Braised short ribs on a Tuesday. She had texted the recipe to Marcus that morning with three exclamation points, and now, standing in the kitchen with her coat still on, she counted the steps and the hours and did the math badly.

Marcus came in at five-forty, shaking rain off his jacket. "I got the wine," he said, "and they were out of the good bread, so I got the okay bread."

"The okay bread is fine. Can you do the onions?"

He did the onions. He was better at onions than she was, patient in a way she wasn't, and he stood there slicing while she seared the meat and the windows fogged and the kitchen filled with that particular smell that meant something was actually happening. They didn't talk much. Every so often one of them said a small logistical thing—*Do we have thyme? Is the oven at three-twenty-five?*—and the other answered, and that was the whole conversation.

At six-fifteen Dana looked at the table and said, "It looks like a hotel," and Marcus said, "That's a compliment where I come from," and moved the candles two inches to the left, which somehow fixed it.

They had twenty minutes. He wiped down the bathroom sink. She changed her shirt and put the okay bread in a basket with a dish towel over it so it looked intentional. In the hallway they passed each other and he touched her back briefly, not saying anything, and she said, "I know," to whatever it was.

The doorbell rang at seven, four minutes early, which was so like Priya that they both laughed before Marcus went to answer it, still holding the corkscrew.


The Delacroix-Whitmores had exactly ninety minutes before their guests arrived, and Nadia had just discovered the roast was still frozen at the center.

"It's a brick," she announced, prodding it with a fork. "A cold, expensive brick."

Theo looked up from the dining table, where he'd been arranging mismatched cloth napkins into what he insisted were "rustic fans." He crossed the kitchen, took the fork from her hand, and stabbed the roast himself, as though it might yield to a second opinion.

"We could cube it," he said. "Cube it and sear it. Call it something French."

"You don't speak French."

"I speak enough French to name a dish."

They cubed it. Nadia worked the knife while Theo pulled onions and a bottle of red from the pantry, moving around each other in the narrow galley with the practiced choreography of people who had renegotiated this space a thousand times. He turned the radio on. She turned it down. He turned on the oven for bread and forgot to tell her, and she opened it to check the potatoes and got a face full of heat.

"Warn me next time."

"I did warn you. Internally."

By seven-fifteen the apartment smelled like caramelized onion and thyme, and the improvised stew was doing something genuinely promising on the back burner. Theo lit two candles, then a third when Nadia pointed out the asymmetry. She changed out of the flour-dusted sweater into a green shirt he liked, and he noticed, and said so.

"It's going to be fine," he said.

"It's going to be fine," she agreed, "as long as nobody asks what it's called."

The buzzer rang at seven twenty-eight. They looked at each other across the small bright kitchen, both slightly damp at the temples, and Nadia wiped her hands on a dish towel and went to let their friends in.


The Delgados had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"The blue one has a stain," Renata said, holding it up to the kitchen window like a jeweler inspecting a flawed stone.

"Nobody's going to see it under the platters." Marcus was elbow-deep in a colander, rinsing cilantro he'd bought that morning from the stand near the highway. "We put the rice there, the stain disappears."

"And if somebody moves the rice?"

"Then we'll have a story."

She snapped the blue cloth open over the table anyway, smoothing it with both palms. The dining room was small enough that she had to sidestep the chairs to reach the far corners, and she did this without looking, the way a person moves through a house they've lived in long enough to have forgotten it has walls.

Marcus had planned the menu three weekends ago and revised it twice. Pork shoulder, started at six that morning, now filling the house with something dark and sweet. Rice with the cilantro. A salad Renata insisted on making herself because he always overdressed things.

"Did you call Doreen about the peanuts?" she asked.

"I called. It's her sister's kid, and the kid isn't coming."

"So we're fine."

"We were always fine. I'm not putting peanuts in anything."

Renata found the good glasses in the back of the cabinet, four of them, and held each one to the light before setting it down. Two had water spots. She washed those by hand while Marcus tasted the sauce, added vinegar, tasted it again, and made a face she'd seen a thousand times and still couldn't read.

At six-forty, headlights swung across the front window.

"They're early," she said.

"They're always early."

He wiped his hands on the dish towel and hung it on the oven handle, crooked, the way he always did, and went to open the door.


The invitation had gone out three weeks earlier, and now Priya stood in the kitchen doorway, surveying the damage she and Daniel had made of a Saturday afternoon.

"You said the roast needed two hours," she said.

"It does need two hours." Daniel was crouched in front of the oven, squinting through the glass. "It has had two hours. It is simply refusing."

She crossed the room and nudged him aside with her hip. The roast, when she opened the door, released a gust of rosemary and fat that fogged her glasses. It looked, she thought, entirely finished. It had looked entirely finished forty minutes ago.

"You keep opening it," she said. "Every time you open it, the temperature drops."

"I'm monitoring."

"You're interfering."

He conceded the point by retreating to the dining room, where he began the ritual he performed before every gathering: the counting and recounting of chairs. There were six people coming and eight chairs, which he arranged, unarranged, and rearranged while Priya folded napkins into shapes that would not survive contact with actual dinner guests.

At six, she found him standing in front of the sideboard holding two bottles of wine, one in each hand, as though weighing them.

"Both," she said.

"That's what I thought. I wanted confirmation."

The doorbell rang at seven minutes past. Priya was still barefoot; Daniel still had a dish towel over his shoulder. They looked at each other with the particular alarm of people who have been preparing all day and are somehow not prepared.

"Shoes," she said.

"Towel," he said, pulling it off.

She got her shoes. He got the door. And in the small confusion of coats and greetings and someone's misjudged bottle of gin, the roast sat quietly on the counter, resting, having been right all along.


The Vasquez kitchen had two cooks and one narrow strip of counter, which everyone agreed was the source of all their problems.

"You're standing on the drawer," Delia said.

Marcus shifted six inches left, still holding the colander of green beans. "Better?"

"Marginally."

She was trimming the ends off the beans he'd already washed, working with the quick indifferent competence of someone who had done this a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. Marcus set the colander down and went back to the roast, which had been resting under foil for twenty minutes and which he was now second-guessing.

"It'll be fine," Delia said, without looking up.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say it looks small."

"It looks small."

"There are six of us. It's not small." She swept the trimmed beans into a bowl. "Do we have the good napkins or did we lose those in the move?"

"Third drawer down in the hutch. Behind the candles we never light."

She went to find them. Marcus heard her rummaging, then a soft triumphant noise, and she came back with a stack of cloth napkins in a color she called oatmeal and he called beige, an ongoing disagreement of some eleven years' standing.

"Julie's bringing dessert," Delia said. "Which means we'll have two desserts, because you made that tart."

"I made the tart before she called."

"I know. I'm just saying it out loud so I've said it."

He laughed. She set the napkins down and finally stopped moving for a second, both hands flat on the counter, surveying the small warm chaos of it — the roast, the beans, the tart cooling by the window, the wine breathing on the table.

"Twenty minutes," she said.

"We're fine."

"We're close to fine."

The doorbell rang eleven minutes early. They looked at each other. Marcus went to answer it; Delia hid the dish towels in the oven drawer.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at four-fifteen, which meant Priya had exactly two hours before anyone arrived and roughly forty minutes before she started apologizing for things nobody would notice.

"The chairs don't match," she said.

Daniel was on his knees in the dining room, wiping a ring off the table with his shirtsleeve, which she had asked him not to do at least six times in eleven years. "They've never matched. Ruth has sat in that chair a hundred times."

"Ninety of those times I apologized."

He stood, considered the table, and moved the crooked candlestick two inches left. It was still crooked. He left it.

In the kitchen she was doing three things at once: tasting the dal, checking the oven, texting Ruth about whether Marcus still couldn't eat shellfish or whether that had been the other Marcus. Daniel came in behind her and reached over her shoulder for the wooden spoon, and she surrendered it without looking.

"Needs salt," he said.

"It needs to sit. Everything needs to sit. That's the whole thing about dal."

"Then it needs salt after it sits."

He salted it anyway. She let him, because he was usually right about salt and never right about how long anything took.

By five-thirty the bread was out, the good glasses were down from the top shelf, and Daniel had changed his shirt twice, settling on the gray one because Priya had glanced at it and said nothing, which was the highest available praise.

She found him in the living room, straightening a stack of magazines that did not need straightening.

"It's four people," she said. "They've all seen the house."

"I know."

"Then why are we like this?"

"Because we like them," he said, and moved the magazines back.

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


The Kowalskis had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"The blue one hides stains," Renata said, pulling it from the linen drawer.

"The blue one is for Thanksgiving." Dev was slicing shallots at the counter, his knife work quick and imprecise, the way it always was when he was running behind. "It's practically a holiday tablecloth. People will think we're confused."

"Nobody has ever thought that about a tablecloth."

He conceded with a shrug and went back to the shallots, which were destined for a vinaigrette he'd been perfecting since October. Renata laid the blue cloth anyway and smoothed it with her palms, then began setting out the good plates—six of them, though the Ahmeds had asked if they could bring Priya's sister, so she went back for a seventh.

"Seven," she called.

"Seven's fine. There's plenty of chicken." Dev tasted the vinaigrette off the back of a spoon, made a face, and added honey. "Do we have candles that aren't birthday candles?"

Renata found two tapers in the sideboard, slightly bent, and set them upright in the brass holders his mother had given them. She lit one to check the wick, then blew it out, wanting the smell of smoke gone before anyone arrived.

By six-fifteen the chicken was resting under foil and Dev was scrubbing the roasting pan, sleeves shoved above his elbows. Renata stood in the doorway with a glass of wine she hadn't started drinking.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

"That's my point." He dried his hands and came to look at the table—the bent candles, the mismatched seventh plate, the blue cloth. He put his arm around her shoulders. "It's good," he said. "They'll be late anyway."

The doorbell rang at six-twenty. They both laughed, and Renata went to answer it.


The Ferraro-Lin household smelled like burnt garlic at 4:40, which Marisol considered a bad omen and Dev considered a normal Saturday.

"It's fine," he said, scraping the pan into the trash. "I have more garlic. I have, like, an alarming amount of garlic."

She was at the dining table with a roll of butcher paper, writing names in marker to mark the seats. She'd bought the paper for a craft project two years ago and had been finding uses for it ever since. "Anne is allergic to shellfish."

"I know."

"You made shrimp last time."

"I made shrimp *once*, and she ate the bread and forgave me." Dev came around the counter and read the seating chart upside down. "Why is Theo next to me?"

"Because you two haven't talked since the thing."

"There wasn't a thing."

"There was a small thing." She capped the marker. "Sit next to him. Ask about his mother."

He went back to the stove and started the garlic over, watching it this time. Behind him he heard her moving the good glasses down from the top shelf, the ones they used four times a year and washed by hand afterward, complaining the whole time.

At 5:20 they collided in the hallway, both carrying chairs from the bedroom. They stood there a second, chair legs interlocked like antlers.

"You should change," she said.

"Into what?"

"The blue one."

"You always say the blue one."

"Because it's the good one." She freed her chair and kept going.

He put on the blue one. When he came out she was lighting the candles with a lighter that only worked at a certain angle, tongue between her teeth, and he stopped in the doorway to look at her doing it.

The doorbell rang eleven minutes early.

"That's Theo," they said together.


The rain had let up by four, which Dolores took as a good sign. She was arranging chairs around the table, counting them twice, while Miguel stood at the counter making a mess of the garlic.

"You're supposed to smash it first," she said.

"I am smashing it."

"With the flat of the knife. Not the whole hand."

He held up his palm, which was slick and smelled like a delicatessen, and she laughed at him in the way she'd been laughing at him for thirty-one years — not unkindly, but not gently either. He went back to work with the knife. Outside, a car passed slowly, its tires hissing on the wet street, and neither of them looked up.

They were having the Petersens and Ruthie from down the block, who had been widowed in March and had not yet learned how to sit at a table without apologizing for taking up space. Dolores had decided, privately, that tonight Ruthie would not be allowed to apologize once. She had a plan involving the good wine and a story about Miguel falling off the ladder last spring.

"Do we have the tablecloth? The blue one."

"Bottom drawer. Under the placemats we never use."

She found it, shook it out, and it billowed for a moment like something alive before settling. There was a small stain near one corner from a Thanksgiving neither of them could pinpoint. She turned the cloth so the stain faced the wall.

Miguel put the chicken in at five-fifteen and immediately began worrying about it. He opened the oven twice in ten minutes.

"You're letting the heat out."

"I'm checking."

"You're worrying."

"Same thing."

By six the house smelled like garlic and rosemary and the windows had gone soft with steam, and Dolores stood in the doorway a moment, looking at all of it, before going to change her shirt.


The invitation had gone out three weeks earlier, and now Dolores stood in the kitchen doorway watching Ray attempt to fold a napkin into something resembling a swan.

"It looks like a wounded pigeon," she said.

"It's a swan in progress." He set it down and reached for another. "You said you wanted them nice."

"I said clean." She crossed to the stove and lifted the lid off the pot. Steam rolled up, carrying the smell of tomatoes and oregano. She tasted from a wooden spoon, considered, added a pinch of salt, and tasted again.

Ray had already set the table twice. The first arrangement had put the water glasses too close to the edge; the second had left no room for the bread basket. He was working on a third when the doorbell chimed and he froze.

"They're an hour early."

"That's the neighbor kid selling something." Dolores wiped her hands on a dish towel. "Get the door, I'll finish these."

It was, in fact, a package delivery. Ray brought it in, set it on the counter unopened, and returned to the napkins with the grim focus of a man defusing something.

By six the house had reached a kind of equilibrium. The salad waited in the refrigerator under plastic wrap. Two bottles of wine stood on the sideboard, one red, one white, because Dolores could never remember which Patricia preferred. Ray had changed his shirt and combed his hair and then messed it slightly, on purpose, so it wouldn't look like he'd tried.

"You look nice," Dolores said, pinning back a piece of her own hair.

"So do you."

They stood a moment in the quiet dining room, surveying it together. The napkins were folded into rough triangles. It was fine. It was, Dolores decided, more than fine.

Then headlights swept across the front window, and they both went to answer the door.


The invitation had gone out three weeks ago, which meant Dolores had been mentally rearranging the seating for twenty-one days.

"Four people," Ray said, setting the leaf into the dining table. "You'd think we were doing the Vatican."

"The Kellers haven't been over since the porch was finished. I want them to see it."

"They'll see it. It's attached to the house."

She was pulling serving bowls from the high cabinet, standing on the step stool she refused to admit she needed. Ray put a hand on her hip to steady her without saying anything about it, and she let him without saying anything either. Thirty-one years had trimmed most of the commentary out of their marriage, leaving just the gestures.

The chicken had been marinating since morning. Ray took it out to the grill while Dolores dealt with the salad, tearing romaine into a wooden bowl that had been a wedding present from someone whose name neither of them could reliably recall. Through the kitchen window she watched him poke at the coals, adjusting them with the concentration he brought to anything involving fire.

At six-fifteen she found him in the bedroom, holding two shirts.

"The blue," she said.

"The blue's got that thing on the collar."

"Then why'd you offer it?"

"To see what you'd say."

She took the striped one off the hanger and handed it to him, and he laughed, and they both went back to work.

The Kellers arrived at seven with a bottle of wine and an apology about traffic that nobody needed. Ray took coats. Dolores brought out the crackers with the good cheese, the kind she only bought when someone was coming, and they all went out to the porch because the evening had turned unexpectedly soft, and Dolores did not mention the porch once, and Ray noticed, and said nothing.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another hour, but Rosa had already changed her mind twice about the tablecloth.

"The blue one," Danny said from the kitchen, not looking up from the cutting board. "You picked blue an hour ago."

"The blue washes out under that light." She held the cream linen against the table, squinting. "But this shows every drop of wine."

"So we'll drink carefully."

"Nobody drinks carefully at your brother's table."

He laughed and swept a pile of chopped garlic into the pan, where it hissed and immediately filled the apartment with a smell that made them both go quiet for a second, appreciating it. Rosa laid down the cream linen. It was too late to iron the blue one anyway.

She moved through the rooms doing the small dishonest work of hosting — sliding a stack of mail into a drawer, turning a chair to hide the tear in its seat, lighting the candle that smelled vaguely of cedar. In the bathroom she folded the good towels in thirds, the way her mother had, and set out the soap they never used.

"Do we have enough chairs?" Danny called.

"Five and the piano bench."

"The piano bench counts?"

"It counts if Marisol sits on it. She's the only one who won't complain."

He tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted it again, then carried the spoon out to her without a word. She blew on it, took it in her mouth, and considered.

"More lemon."

"You always say more lemon."

"And I'm always right."

He went back for the lemon. Rosa followed him in, took the corkscrew from the drawer, and opened the first bottle so it could breathe. Then she stood beside him at the stove, her hip against his, watching the pan, and neither of them said anything at all until the buzzer went off downstairs.


The Osei-Lindqvists had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"It's stained," Amara said, holding it up to the kitchen window. A pale ring, ghost of some long-ago spill, floated near one corner.

"Turn it around. Nobody sits there." Peter was at the counter, shelling peas he'd bought that morning at a stand off the highway, the pods snapping open under his thumbs. He had flour on his forearm and didn't know it.

"Somebody always sits there. Marisol will sit there."

"Then put the bread basket over it."

Amara considered this, decided it was the kind of solution that only sounded good, and went to the linen closet for the other one — the blue, which was too formal, which she would apologize for and everyone would say was lovely.

In the oven, a chicken was doing whatever chickens do at 375 degrees. Peter had rubbed it with lemon and too much thyme, because he always used too much thyme, and Amara had learned nineteen years ago not to comment.

"Did you call your brother?" she asked from the hallway.

"He's not coming."

"You didn't call him."

"I texted. It's the same." He slid the peas into a bowl and finally noticed the flour, brushing it off in a small white cloud. "He's got the thing with the truck."

She came back with the blue cloth and they laid it out together, one at each end, snapping it flat over the table the way they'd done a hundred times, the fabric ballooning and settling. Peter set down glasses. Amara counted forks, recounted, found five, went for a sixth.

"The candles or no candles," he said.

"Candles. But the short ones. Nobody can see over the tall ones."

Headlights swung across the front window. Amara touched her hair. Peter went to the door.


The Pham-Okonkwo household smelled like burning garlic at 5:40, which Adaeze considered a bad omen and Duc considered a normal Tuesday.

"It's fine," he said, scraping the black bits into the sink. "The second batch will be better. Garlic is cheap."

"Everything is cheap until you've burned it four times." She was setting the table, counting forks. Six people, but only five matching forks, so she put the odd one at her own place, the way she always did, a small private accounting.

They had lived in the house eleven years. The dining room still had the wallpaper from the previous owners, a pattern of faded blue vines that Adaeze had hated for a decade and secretly grown fond of. Duc had promised to strip it. He had also promised to fix the drawer that stuck.

"Did you hide the mail?" she asked.

"I put it in the drawer."

"Which drawer?"

"The one that sticks. Nobody's opening that one."

She laughed despite herself. He was standing at the stove in the apron their nephew had given him as a joke, the one that said WORLD'S OKAYEST COOK, and he'd tied it wrong so the strings hung down like a tail.

At six she lit the candles, then blew them out, deciding it was too early and they'd burn down before dessert. At 6:15 she lit them again.

"Come taste this," Duc said.

She tasted. It needed acid. She squeezed half a lemon in without asking and handed the spoon back, and he tried it and made a face that meant she was right, which was his way of saying so.

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. They looked at each other — one shared, panicked, delighted glance across the kitchen — and then Adaeze untied the apron strings behind him, wordlessly, while he wiped his hands, and they went to the door together.


The soup needed another twenty minutes, which meant Ana had exactly that long to convince Desmond that the good tablecloth was not, in fact, ruined.

"It's a water stain," she said, holding the linen up to the kitchen window. "Water dries."

"It's been drying since Thanksgiving." He was cubing bread for croutons, moving with the unhurried precision he brought to everything, including arguments he intended to win. "Use the blue one."

"The blue one is for casual."

"Sandra and Petey are casual. Petey once ate a hot dog in our bathtub."

"He was four."

"He was twenty-six." Desmond slid the bread into the oven and wiped his hands. "That was the anniversary party. You blocked it out."

Ana set the tablecloth down, defeated, and went to find the blue one. From the linen closet she called, "Did you get wine?"

"Two bottles. And the seltzer for Marguerite."

"She's not doing seltzer anymore, she's doing that ginger thing."

A pause. "The ginger thing."

"The kombucha."

"I did not get the kombucha."

Ana came back with the blue cloth over her shoulder. "It's fine. We'll give her cranberry juice and act like it's intentional."

They set the table together, which they had done enough times that it required no discussion — Desmond laying plates, Ana following with silverware, the two of them orbiting the small dining room without collision. He straightened a fork she'd set crooked. She moved it back.

At six-forty the soup was done and the house smelled like thyme and butter. Ana lit the two candles she'd bought that afternoon, cheap ones, and stood back to look.

"It's nice," Desmond said.

"It's a little nice."

"It's the right amount of nice."

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. Ana swore quietly, pulled off her apron, and handed it to him, and Desmond was still folding it over his arm when she opened the door.


Marisol and Dev had been saying they would drive up to the lake "sometime" for the better part of two years. On Thursday night, Dev finally opened the laptop at the kitchen table and typed in dates before either of them could talk themselves out of it.

"Two nights," he said. "Cabin's got a woodstove. Ninety-four dollars."

Marisol looked up from the sink. "Ninety-four? What's wrong with it?"

"Reviews say the road's bad and there's no cell signal."

"Book it."

Friday after work they packed with the particular efficiency of people who have been together twenty-two years and have learned not to supervise each other. Marisol handled food: a cooler with eggs, coffee, a bag of oranges, the good cheese she'd bought on sale, and a bottle of red wine wrapped in a dish towel so it wouldn't clank. Dev handled everything else, which in practice meant flashlights, a first-aid kit, three flannel shirts he would not wear, and the ancient camp radio he refused to throw away.

They left at 6:40, later than planned, and hit the tail of the commute. Marisol drove the first stretch while Dev read the cabin instructions aloud — a lockbox code, a warning about raccoons, a note that the nearest grocery was eighteen miles back.

"Did we get bread?"

"We got bread."

"Did we?"

She glanced at him. "You put it on top of the cooler."

He turned around, found it, and held it up like evidence.

The highway thinned out past the county line. Dev took over driving north of the reservoir, and Marisol put her feet on the dash, which she knew he hated and he didn't mention. The sky went from orange to a deep, unhurried blue.

The road was, in fact, bad. Gravel pinged the undercarriage for a mile and a half. When they finally pulled up, the cabin was small and dark and smelled like cold ash.

Dev found the light switch. Marisol started unloading the wine first.


The Alvarez-Nguyen household ran on a shared calendar, and the last weekend in October had been outlined in blue for a month.

"Two nights," Marisol said, setting her laptop on the kitchen island. "The place near Cedar Point has a room with a kitchenette. Ninety-four a night."

Danh looked up from the pot of rice he was rinsing. "Kitchenette means we cook. That's not a vacation."

"It means we don't spend sixty dollars on breakfast." She turned the screen toward him. "Look at the porch."

He looked. There was a porch, gray-planked, with two rocking chairs and a view of something that might have been water or might have been fog. He nodded. "Book it."

They packed Friday after work, which meant Marisol packed and Danh carried. She had a system — one duffel for both of them, toiletries in a gallon bag, a canvas tote for the cooler items. He questioned the number of sweaters. She questioned whether he really needed to bring the good camera when his phone took perfectly fine pictures. Neither won.

The drive was three hours and twenty minutes, most of it interstate. Danh took the first leg. Marisol read aloud from an article about a woman who had walked across Mongolia, and then stopped reading when she noticed he'd gone quiet in the way that meant he was thinking about work.

"It'll be there Monday," she said.

"I know."

"Say it out loud."

"It'll be there Monday." He put on his blinker and moved into the right lane.

They stopped at a gas station outside Sandusky for coffee and a bag of pretzels, and Marisol took over driving. The sky went orange, then purple, then nothing. When they finally pulled into the gravel lot, the porch was exactly as advertised, and the fog was, in fact, water.


**Weekend at the Lake**

Denise found the cabin listing on a Tuesday, three weeks out, and showed Ray the pictures on her phone while he was eating cereal at the counter. Two nights, a wood stove, a dock. He squinted, chewed, and said it looked cold. She said that was the point—nobody else would want it in October, which was why it cost what it cost.

They put the deposit down that night. Ray printed the directions because the last time they'd driven north his phone had lost signal for forty minutes and Denise had never quite let it go.

The Friday came slower than either of them expected. Ray got off at three, which meant three-forty by the time he'd walked out, and Denise had the cooler already packed and sitting by the door: sandwiches, two thermoses of coffee, a bag of the pretzels he liked and pretended not to. She'd taken the afternoon off, done a load of laundry, and left the thermostat at sixty. Their daughter would swing by Saturday to check the mail.

"You get the propane?" she asked, backing out of the driveway.

"It's in the trunk. And the flashlight, and the extra blanket, and the thing for the tire."

"The compressor."

"The thing for the tire."

They stopped once, at a gas station outside of town, and Ray bought a coffee he didn't need and a scratch ticket he lost. Denise drove the second half while the light went orange and then gray over the fields, and Ray fell asleep with his head against the window the way he always did, waking only when the pavement turned to gravel.

The cabin was colder than the pictures suggested. Ray knelt at the stove with the kindling while Denise carried in the cooler, and neither of them said much, which was fine.


Marisol counted the toll money into the cupholder while Dave pumped gas, the numbers on the pump climbing past what she'd budgeted. Fifty-two dollars. She'd figured forty.

"We could still do the state park instead," she said when he got back in. "It's free with the pass."

"We booked the room already." Dave clicked his seatbelt. "Non-refundable, remember? You said."

She had said that. She'd found the deal on a Tuesday night after the kids were asleep, eighty-nine dollars for a motel two blocks off the boardwalk in Ocean City, and she'd read the reviews twice and then booked it before she could think about the water heater that had started making a knocking sound.

They'd left at six-thirty to beat traffic. Emma and Nick were at her mother's in Dover, which was the whole reason the weekend was possible at all — three nights of no one asking where their cleats were. Dave had taken Friday off, burning half a personal day, and Marisol had traded shifts with Adaora at the clinic, which meant working the following Sunday, but that was future-Marisol's problem.

They stopped at a Wawa outside Milford. Dave got a coffee and a bag of pretzels; Marisol got iced tea and the sandwich she'd packed from home, which felt like a small victory.

"Do you remember when we came here before Emma?" she said, back on the road. "That place with the crab cakes."

"That place closed. It's a vape shop now."

"That's depressing."

"It's got a nice sign, though."

She laughed and put her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he didn't say anything about it. The sun was coming up over the flat green farmland, and the radio was playing something from the nineties, and they had two hundred and eleven dollars set aside for the whole weekend, and it felt, briefly, like enough.


Marisol and Dev had been talking about the cabin for three years, and the talking had become its own tradition, a thing they did on Sunday nights while folding laundry. Then in February the talking finally turned into a reservation, two nights in a rented A-frame ninety minutes north, the cheapest weekend they could find before the summer rates kicked in.

The planning happened in fragments. Dev made a list on the back of a grocery receipt: firewood, coffee, the good blanket, ibuprofen. Marisol added *chargers* and *the book I keep not reading*. She wanted to leave Friday at four; he pointed out that his shift didn't end until five-thirty, and they compromised on six, which meant driving into the dark, which she didn't love but accepted.

Thursday night she packed for both of them because she knew he'd forget socks. He came in from the garage with the cooler and found her sitting on the bedroom floor, surrounded by neat piles, laughing at nothing.

"What," he said.

"We're actually going."

They left at six-forty. The traffic on the interstate was worse than either had planned for, and for twenty minutes neither of them spoke, which was fine. Dev drove. Marisol held her phone up to the windshield to photograph the sunset going orange behind the water towers, then gave up and just watched it.

They stopped at a gas station outside of town for terrible coffee and a bag of pretzels, and Dev bought her a scratch-off ticket as a joke. She won two dollars and made him pull over so she could go back in and claim it.

The cabin was smaller than the photos and colder. Dev knelt at the woodstove with the newspaper and the long matches while Marisol found the light switches one by one. By nine the fire had caught, and they sat on the floor in their coats, waiting for the room to warm.


Marisol had the cooler packed before Dev finished loading the truck, which was how it usually went. She'd been thinking about this trip since Tuesday, when the clinic manager confirmed she could leave Friday at noon instead of five.

"Did you get the chairs?" she called from the kitchen.

"Chairs, tent, the good lantern." Dev appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on his jeans. "I couldn't find the other sleeping bag."

"It's in the hall closet behind the winter coats. I put it there in April."

He went to look. She heard him shifting boxes, then a triumphant grunt.

They were driving to a state park about two hours north, a place they'd been twice before, once the summer they got married and once four years ago. Marisol had booked the site online in February, when it opened, because Dev had mentioned in passing that he missed sleeping outside. He'd forgotten saying it. She hadn't.

The truck was old and the air conditioning worked in moods. They rolled the windows down instead and Dev put on a playlist Marisol had made, mostly songs from before either of them had gray in their hair. She rested her arm on the window frame and watched strip malls give way to soybean fields.

"We should stop in Colby," Dev said. "That diner."

"The one with the pie?"

"That's the one."

They stopped. The pie was cherry and worse than they remembered, but the coffee was hot and the waitress called them both honey. Marisol used the restroom and came back to find Dev studying a laminated map of the county on the wall, tracing a road with his finger.

"There's a lookout," he said. "Fifteen minutes off the highway."

Marisol looked at her watch, then at his face, and picked up her purse.

"Show me," she said.


The Reyes Weekend

Marisol found the cabin listing on a Tuesday, between loads of laundry. Two nights, a wood stove, a lake she'd never heard of, eighty miles north. She sent the link to Danny with three words: *before winter hits.*

He called during his break at the shop. "That's not cheap."

"It's cheaper than the dentist, and we survived that."

He laughed, the short one that meant she'd won. "Saturday to Monday? I'd have to trade with Rolando."

"So trade."

He did. Thursday night they sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad, dividing the work the way they always had — she wrote the food list, he handled the truck. Oil change overdue by six hundred miles. Tire that had been slow-leaking since August. He went out to the driveway with a flashlight while she checked whether their daughter could handle the dog, then remembered their daughter lived in Tucson now and it had been eleven years since anyone needed a sitter.

Friday she packed the cooler: eggs, coffee, a sleeve of tortillas, the good cheese. Danny loaded firewood he'd split in September, because he didn't trust that a rental would have any worth burning.

They left at 6:40 Saturday morning, earlier than planned, because neither could sleep. The highway was empty and gray. Marisol read the exits aloud, though he knew them. He complained about her radio station, then let it play.

At the turnoff the pavement ended. Gravel drummed under the tires for two miles, and then the lake came up on the left, flat and pewter-colored, steam rising off it.

Danny cut the engine. Neither of them moved.

"Okay," Marisol said finally. "It was worth it."

He was already reaching behind the seat for the cooler. "Get the door," he said. "Before I drop the eggs."


Marisol had the cooler packed by six-thirty Friday evening, though she'd been mentally packing it since Tuesday. Two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, a bag of grapes, the good thermos filled with coffee for the morning. Dennis came in from the garage with the tire pressure gauge still in his hand.

"Rear passenger was low," he said. "Thirty-one. I put it up to thirty-five."

"You checked them all?"

"I checked them all."

They were driving to Galena, two and a half hours northwest, because Marisol's coworker had gone in October and wouldn't stop talking about the bed-and-breakfast with the wraparound porch. It cost more than they usually spent. Dennis had done the math twice and then stopped doing the math, which was his way of agreeing.

The house had that particular stillness of a place about to be left. Marisol went room to room unplugging things—the coffee maker, the space heater in the den, the phone charger she'd forget otherwise. Dennis set the thermostat to sixty-two and stood looking at it a moment longer than necessary.

"The Hendricksons are getting the mail," she said.

"I know. You told me."

"I'm reminding myself, not you."

They pulled out at seven-fifteen, later than planned, which was itself a kind of tradition. Dennis drove. Marisol had printed directions even though the phone would do it, and she held the paper folded on her knee like a talisman. The interstate was thick with Friday, everyone leaving somewhere.

Twenty minutes in, she reached over and turned down the radio.

"We should do this more," she said.

"We say that every time."

"I know. That's why I'm saying it."

He put his hand on her knee, on top of the folded directions, and left it there past the exit for Rockford, past the last of the city's light, into the flat dark where the fields began.


Marisol and Dev had been talking about the cabin for two years, and finally the calendar cracked open: a Friday off for him, a swapped shift for her.

They planned it at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night, a laptop between them and the dishwasher grinding through its cycle. Marisol wanted to leave at four. Dev pointed out that four meant traffic, and traffic meant three hours instead of two, and three hours meant arriving after dark on a gravel road he'd never driven.

"So we leave at three," she said.

"So we leave at three," he agreed, and wrote it on the whiteboard beside the refrigerator, underlining it twice, which was his way of making things real.

She handled the food. Two grocery bags: coffee, eggs, a loaf of good bread, the sharp cheddar he liked, a bottle of wine, and, because she knew him, a bag of the salt-and-vinegar chips he pretended not to want. He handled the car — oil checked, tire pressure checked, the jumper cables moved from the garage shelf to the trunk, where they belonged and where he could never remember leaving them.

Friday came humid and bright. Dev loaded the trunk while Marisol walked through the house doing what she called the last look: thermostat down, coffee maker unplugged, back door locked, the plant on the windowsill given more water than it needed. She found her sunglasses in the pocket of a jacket she hadn't worn since March.

They pulled out at 3:12, which Dev noted and Marisol ignored.

Twenty minutes past the city limits the buildings thinned and the fields opened up, corn on both sides, a hawk on a fencepost. Marisol put her bare feet on the dash. Dev reached over without looking and rested his hand on her knee, and neither of them said anything for a long while, and it was fine.


Marisol had the cooler packed by six-thirty Friday morning, which was earlier than Dev had asked and later than she'd wanted. He came into the kitchen still working the knot of his tie loose, having decided at the last minute that he could take the whole day off instead of half of it.

"Two nights," he said, looking at the cooler, the duffel bags, the folding chairs leaning against the doorframe. "We're going two nights."

"You'll thank me when it rains."

They drove north with the windows cracked because the air conditioning made her sinuses ache, and Dev didn't argue about it, just turned the radio up over the wind. Marisol read the exits aloud as they passed, a habit from when the kids were small and needed narration to stay calm. The kids were grown now. Neither of them mentioned this.

At the halfway point they stopped at a gas station with a good bathroom, one they'd used before, and Dev bought two coffees and a bag of sunflower seeds. Marisol took over driving. She was faster than he was, and he pretended not to notice the speedometer.

The cabin was smaller than the photos suggested, which they'd expected, and smelled like cedar and old smoke. Dev carried the bags in while Marisol opened windows and ran the tap until the water came clear. There was a lake through the trees, gray under the overcast, with a dock that listed slightly to the left.

"We could walk down," she said.

"Let me get the beer cold first."

So he did, and then they walked down, and stood on the crooked dock in their jackets, not saying much. A heron lifted off the far shore. Marisol slid her hand into his coat pocket, where his hand already was, and they stayed until the light went.


Marisol and Dev had been talking about the cabin for two years, and finally the calendar cooperated.

They planned it on a Tuesday night at the kitchen table, phone flashlights on because the overhead bulb had burned out and neither had gotten around to replacing it. Dev pulled up a map on his laptop. Three hours north, a rented A-frame with a woodstove and no cell service. Marisol wrote a list on the back of a grocery receipt: coffee, the good pillow, rain jackets, the deck of cards with the missing seven of clubs.

"Do we need the cooler or just the tote?" Dev asked.

"Cooler. I'm bringing eggs."

"We could buy eggs there."

"There isn't a there. That's the whole point."

Friday afternoon they packed the car in the driveway while their neighbor mowed. Marisol handled the trunk—she had a system, soft things on top, nothing that could slide. Dev checked the tire pressure because his father had drilled it into him, then checked the oil for no reason at all, wiping the dipstick on a paper towel and squinting at it like it might tell him something new.

They left at four and hit traffic immediately. Marisol drove. Dev fed her pretzels from the bag and read aloud from a book about volcanoes, skipping the boring parts. Somewhere past the second toll the highway opened up and the light went gold and low across the fields, and they stopped talking for a while, which was its own kind of comfortable.

At a gas station outside Millbrook they bought two coffees and a bag of ice. Dev drove the last leg. The road turned to gravel, then to something rougher, and the headlights swung across pine trunks.

The key was under a flowerpot, exactly where the listing said. Marisol got the woodstove going. Dev found a mouse in the silverware drawer and did not mention it until morning.


Marisol counted the cash in the coffee tin twice before she said anything.

"We could do it," she told Ray, who was rinsing his thermos at the sink. "Two nights. My cousin's place in Galveston is empty till the fifteenth."

Ray dried his hands on the dish towel that had hung on the same hook for nine years. He was fifty-four, and his knee had been complaining since March, but the idea of salt air made him feel briefly younger. "Gas is what, forty each way?"

"About. I'll pack sandwiches so we're not stopping."

They left Thursday after his shift, later than planned, because Ray insisted on checking the tire pressure and then found the spare was low too. Marisol sat in the passenger seat with the door open, feet on the driveway, texting their daughter to say they'd be back Sunday and no, she didn't need to water anything.

The truck smelled like the cab of a truck that had gone 190,000 miles. Marisol had brought a bag of oranges, a thermos of coffee for the morning, and a paperback she'd already read. Ray drove with one wrist on the wheel and let her pick the music until she fell asleep somewhere past Rosenberg, her head tipped against the window, and then he switched to the AM station with the ballgame.

The cousin's house was small and smelled like closed windows. They opened everything. Marisol found the light switch for the porch on the third try, and they stood out there in the dark listening to the Gulf doing what it does, invisible past the dunes.

"We should've done this in June," Ray said.

"We said that in June."

He laughed. She leaned into his shoulder. In the morning they would walk to the water, slowly, because of the knee, and it would be enough.


The Weekend at Rocky Gap

Denise found the deal on a Tuesday, scrolling on her phone while the dishwasher ran. Two nights at a lodge near the lake, ninety minutes north, half off if they booked by Friday.

"We could leave after I get off Saturday," she said, holding the screen up for Marcus to see from the couch. He was watching the tail end of a game he didn't care much about.

He squinted. "Is that the place with the golf course?"

"You don't golf."

"I could look at it."

They booked it. That was the easy part. The rest of the week went the way weeks go — Marcus picked up an extra shift Thursday because someone called out, and Denise spent Wednesday evening on the phone with her mother, who wanted to know why they weren't coming to visit instead. By Friday night the bag was still empty on the bed.

Saturday, Denise got home at two and found Marcus already loading the car. He'd packed the cooler with sandwiches, a bag of pretzels, and four bottles of water, and he'd remembered the phone chargers, which she hadn't.

"You washed the car," she said.

"It was filthy."

They hit traffic outside the city, sat in it for twenty minutes, and Denise put on the playlist she'd made — half hers, half songs she knew he'd sing along to whether he admitted it or not. He drummed the steering wheel through the second one.

Past the exit for the outlets, the road opened up, hills going gold at the edges. Marcus rolled his window down a few inches and the car filled with cool air and the smell of cut grass.

"Two whole days," Denise said.

"Almost two."

"Don't."

He laughed. She watched the guardrail slip past and let herself stop thinking about Monday.


Marisol Reyes had the cooler packed by six on Friday morning, though they weren't leaving until after work. She'd made the sandwiches the night before, wrapped them in wax paper the way her mother used to, and stacked them beside a bag of oranges. Dave came into the kitchen still buttoning his shirt, saw the cooler by the door, and laughed.

"We're going two hours away," he said. "Not crossing the Rockies."

"You'll be glad when you're hungry on I-70 and everything's closed."

He didn't argue, because she was right, and because arguing would cost him ten minutes he didn't have. He worked at a distribution center off the highway; she taught fourth grade and had spent Wednesday evening writing sub plans detailed enough for a stranger to follow. The cabin belonged to Dave's cousin, who rented it out most weekends but had a cancellation. Two nights, no charge, just leave it clean.

They left at 5:40 with the sun still up. Marisol drove the first stretch while Dave slept with his head against the window, mouth slightly open, the way he always did on the first leg of anything. She let him. He'd been picking up Saturday shifts since February and the tiredness had settled into his face in a way she didn't like.

At the halfway point they stopped for gas and switched. He bought a coffee and a bag of pretzels and she took one look and said, "There are sandwiches."

"I know. I'm saving them."

The last forty minutes were two-lane road, dark and curving, headlights catching the reflective eyes of something in the ditch. When they pulled up to the cabin, the porch light was on a timer and the key was under a flowerpot exactly where the cousin said it would be. Dave carried the cooler in. Marisol stood a moment in the gravel, listening to how quiet it was, then followed him inside.


The Ortegas had been talking about the lake for three years, and on Thursday night Marisol finally said, "We're going. I already asked Dana to feed the cats."

Ray looked up from the sink, hands still soapy. "Saturday's the game."

"They have a TV at the cabin. Probably."

He dried his hands and considered this. Twenty-six years of marriage had taught him which battles carried weight. "Probably," he agreed. "I'll get the cooler out of the garage."

Friday evening became a small logistical campaign. Marisol made a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, the good pillows, her book, sunscreen, Ray's blood pressure medication, which he would otherwise forget on the bathroom windowsill. Ray checked the tire pressure on the Corolla and discovered the rear passenger tire was low, which led to a trip to the gas station, which led to buying two bags of pretzels and a scratch-off ticket that won them nothing.

"I'm bringing the folding chairs," he announced when he got back.

"There are chairs there."

"There are *supposedly* chairs there."

She let him load the chairs.

They left at six-forty Saturday morning, earlier than either had planned, because Ray had been awake since five and made enough noise in the kitchen that Marisol gave up on sleep. The highway was nearly empty. Fog sat low over the fields in long gray strips, and neither of them talked much for the first hour, which was comfortable rather than strained.

At a rest stop near the county line, Marisol bought two coffees and handed Ray the one with too much cream, the way he liked it. He was standing by the car looking at a map on his phone, though he knew the route.

"Ninety minutes," he said.

"Then let's go."

She got in. He folded himself into the driver's seat, adjusted the mirror he hadn't moved, and pulled back onto the road.


Marisol Vega set the laundry basket on the kitchen table and announced that they were going to the lake.

Danny looked up from his phone. "This weekend?"

"Saturday morning. Back Sunday night. I already checked—the cabins by the boat launch are forty dollars off after Labor Day."

He did the arithmetic he always did, silently, the one that accounted for the truck payment and his sister's birthday and the fact that his hours at the warehouse had been cut to thirty-six. Then he said, "Okay. Let's do it."

They spent Thursday evening assembling the trip out of what they already had. Marisol dug the cooler out from behind the water heater and washed it in the driveway with the hose. Danny checked the tire pressure on the Corolla and discovered the rear passenger side was low, which he fixed at the gas station on Kingsley for free, standing in the cold with his hood up. She made a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, eggs, tortillas, the good salsa, ibuprofen, her book, his boots.

"You don't need the boots," she said.

"There's trails."

"You've never walked a trail in your life."

"There's a first time."

Saturday they left at 7:40, only forty minutes later than planned, which Marisol counted as a personal victory. The sky was flat and gray over the interstate. Danny drove the first hour and she read him the reviews of the cabin aloud, including a bad one from a man who had apparently expected room service.

Somewhere past the second exit for Mount Pleasant, the clouds broke apart and the fields went gold and sudden. Marisol put her bare feet on the dashboard, which he hated, and he didn't say anything about it.

"Two whole days," she said.

"Two whole days," Danny agreed, and passed a semi.


The Ferraro-Nguyens had been talking about the coast for three years, and on a Tuesday in October, Bea finally opened her laptop and booked two nights in a motel with a cracked neon sign and good reviews.

"It's a hundred and ten a night," she called out.

Dan was in the garage, doing something loud to the lawnmower. "For a motel?"

"For a motel by the ocean. There's a difference."

He came in wiping his hands on a rag, forty-eight years old and still walking like a man who'd played too much basketball in high school. He looked at the photos over her shoulder. Turquoise doors. A picnic table. A gull standing on a railing like it owned the place.

"That's fine," he said. "That's actually fine."

They spent Thursday evening arguing pleasantly about the cooler. Bea said they didn't need one; there were restaurants. Dan said restaurants were how you spent four hundred dollars in two days. He packed it anyway — string cheese, two apples, a six-pack, the leftover pasta salad — and she let him, because winning that particular argument had never been the point.

Friday they left at 4:40, beating the worst of the traffic by maybe eleven minutes. Bea drove the first leg. Dan controlled the radio and kept landing on stations that dissolved into static twenty miles later, which he found personally insulting.

Somewhere past the reservoir the hills went gold and then gray, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was the good kind of nothing.

"We should've done this in the summer," Dan said.

"We say that every year."

"I know."

At the state line they stopped for gas and Bea bought a bag of pretzels and a road atlas she didn't need, out of nostalgia. Dan took over driving. She put her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he didn't say a word about it, and she noticed that he didn't, and that was most of the trip right there.


Marisol and Dave Ruiz had been talking about the cabin for three years, and on Thursday night Marisol finally opened her laptop at the kitchen table and booked it.

"Two nights," she said. "Friday to Sunday. It's four hours away, and it has a wood stove."

Dave looked up from the sink, hands wet. "Who's taking Bella?"

"Your mother. She offered. She actually offered, Dave, I didn't even ask."

He dried his hands and came over to look at the photos on the screen: pine walls, a red plaid couch, a lake the color of slate. "There's no TV."

"That's the point."

Friday morning they moved around each other in the familiar choreography of a small house. Dave loaded the cooler—sandwiches, a six-pack, the good coffee, because the listing said the cabin only had instant. Marisol packed the duffel and then unpacked half of it, deciding that three sweaters for two nights was the kind of thing her mother would do. She threw in a deck of cards instead.

They dropped the dog at his mother's at nine, stayed twenty minutes longer than they meant to, and were on the highway by ten. Dave drove the first stretch. Marisol read him the parts of the reviews she found funny.

"'The mattress is firm but the silence is firmer,'" she read. "What does that even mean?"

"It means somebody's husband snores."

They stopped at a gas station outside Millersburg for coffee and beef jerky and a bag of ice, and Marisol took over driving. The road narrowed. The cell signal dropped somewhere past the second bridge, and Dave held his phone up to the windshield for a while before giving up and putting it in the glove box.

"That's it," Marisol said. "That's the whole weekend, right there."

Dave rolled the window down. The air smelled like water and cut grass, and neither of them said anything for a mile.


The alarm went off at five-thirty, which Denise thought was ridiculous for a two-day trip, but Ray had already been up for twenty minutes, standing in the kitchen in his socks, checking the tire pressure app on his phone.

"It's four hours," she said, pouring coffee into the travel mugs. "Not a expedition."

"Four hours if we leave now. Five and a half if we leave at eight."

They had been talking about the cabin since February, when Ray's coworker mentioned his brother rented it out cheap in the off-season. Denise had written the dates on the kitchen calendar in green marker, then rewritten them twice when her mother's cataract surgery got rescheduled. Now it was the second week of October, the leaves were supposedly turning, and the dog was at her sister's.

Ray carried the bags out while Denise did the last walkthrough — coffee maker unplugged, thermostat down to sixty, the bathroom light on a timer because she'd read an article. She stood in the hallway a moment longer than she needed to. Twenty-six years in this house and she still checked the stove twice.

In the car, Ray had the route pulled up but Denise reached over and turned the phone face down.

"We know how to get to Pennsylvania."

"I want to see the traffic."

"There's no traffic. It's six in the morning."

He let it go. She found a station playing something from the seventies and they drove east into a sky that was just beginning to gray at the edges. Around the second exit, Denise unwrapped one of the sandwiches she'd made the night before and handed him half without asking.

"You packed the good pillows?"

"I packed the good pillows."

Ray nodded, chewing. The highway opened up ahead of them, mostly empty, and he moved into the left lane.