Marisol got home first, which meant the good knife was already dirty by the time Dev walked in.

"You started without me," he said, setting down a paper bag that clinked.

"I started with the onions. Nobody wants to start with the onions." She scraped them into the pan, where they hissed and went translucent. "Did you get the bread?"

"I got the bread, the wine, and the thing you texted me about that I couldn't read because you spelled it with three vowels missing."

"Sumac."

"They didn't have sumac. They had a man in an apron who looked personally wounded that I asked."

Marisol laughed and pointed at the cutting board with her elbow. "Peppers. Thin."

They fell into the rhythm of a kitchen too small for two people who had learned, over four years, exactly how to move through it. Dev sliced; she stirred; when she turned, he was already leaning back so her hip could pass. The radiator ticked. Somewhere below, a dog complained about something.

"Table or coffee table?" he asked.

"Table. It's four people, not a picnic."

"The table has your work stuff on it."

"The table has *our* work stuff on it, and you know it."

He carried the papers to the bedroom in one unsteady stack, came back, and found the good tablecloth in the drawer where it always was and where he always forgot it was. Marisol tasted the sauce, made a face, added salt, tasted again, made a better face.

"Try this."

He did, from her spoon, and nodded. "More of whatever that is."

"There isn't more."

"Then it's perfect."

At six forty, they stood together looking at the set table, four mismatched plates, a candle scavenged from the bathroom. The buzzer rang. Marisol untied her apron and threw it at him.

"You're closer," she said, and went to open the door anyway.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at 6:40, and Priya swore softly, because the guests weren't due until seven-thirty and now the rice would be gluey.

"It's fine," Marcus said from the sink, where he was scrubbing the good pan with the burnt spot he'd never quite gotten out. "We'll fluff it. Rice is forgiving."

"Rice is not forgiving. Rice is the least forgiving thing in this kitchen."

He flicked water at her. She dodged, laughing, and went back to the cutting board, where a pile of cilantro waited for her knife. Outside, the apartment's one good window held a rectangle of dimming blue, and the radiator ticked in the corner like something impatient.

They had been arguing pleasantly about the seating for two days. Four guests, one small table, and Marcus insisted that Dana and Ellis had to be separated because of the thing at the barbecue in August. Priya thought the thing at the barbecue had been overblown and, besides, moving Dana meant putting Kwame next to the wall, and Kwame's elbows required territory.

"Then we put the table sideways," Marcus said.

"The table doesn't go sideways. We tried."

"We tried in the old place."

They tried it in this place. It went sideways.

Priya set out the mismatched plates, the four from his mother and the three she'd bought at an estate sale, and decided the mismatch looked intentional if you set them in an alternating pattern. Marcus lit the two candles that had been in the drawer since somebody's birthday, then turned the overhead light off to check the effect, then turned it back on because they still needed to see.

At 7:22 the buzzer sounded. They looked at each other over the crowded table.

"Rice is forgiving," Priya said.

"Now you believe me."

She went to press the button, and he wiped his hands and followed.


Dana got home first, which meant the music was already too loud when Marcus came through the door with two bags of groceries and rain on his jacket.

"You bought the wrong onions," she said, not looking up from the cutting board.

"I bought onions. Nobody said which kind."

"I texted you a picture."

He set the bags down and kissed the top of her head, which was his standard move when he had no defense. The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt toast, the toast being an earlier casualty they'd agreed not to discuss. Outside, the rain kept up its steady work on the fire escape.

They had four people coming at seven — two from Dana's old job, one couple Marcus knew from his brother's wedding, and there had already been a small negotiation about whether that counted as three or four. Marcus started on the chicken. Dana wiped down the table they almost never ate at, the one that usually held mail and a laundry basket and, currently, a bike wheel.

"Where does this go?"

"Bedroom."

"It doesn't go in the bedroom, it lives in the bedroom, which is different."

She carried it to the bedroom anyway. When she came back he had the pan going and was tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon, frowning at it in the way that meant it was fine.

"More lemon," she said.

"You haven't tried it."

"I know your face."

He added lemon. She lit the two candles they owned, which didn't match, and set out the good plates and one plate that wasn't from the set because there were only five good ones and they hadn't gotten around to fixing that in three years.

At six-fifty the buzzer went. They looked at each other across the small bright kitchen, and Marcus turned the music down, and Dana went to answer it.


The Apartment on Sinclair Street

Dana got home first and started the sauce, because Marcus always oversalted it and then acted wounded when anyone mentioned it. She had the windows open, the radio going, and by the time he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine he'd clearly agonized over, the kitchen smelled like garlic and August.

"Did you get the bread?" she asked.

"I got the bread." He set the bags down and looked at her. "I got the wrong bread."

She peered into the bag. Sourdough, when she'd asked for a baguette. She sighed the particular sigh of eleven years together and said, "It's fine. We'll cut it thick."

Marcus took over the salad because that was the one job she trusted him with completely. He tore the lettuce instead of chopping it, the way his grandmother had, and Dana didn't correct him even though she thought it looked messy. He hummed along to something on the radio, off-key, and she reached past him for the colander and let her hand rest on his back for a second longer than she needed to.

At six-fifteen they realized they had only three matching chairs. Marcus dragged the desk chair in from the bedroom and put a cushion on it. Dana lit two candles and then blew one out because the smell was competing with the sauce.

"They're going to be late," she said. "Priya's always late."

"Then we have time to sit down."

They sat at the table they'd bought secondhand four years ago, in the apartment they'd both signed for, and drank a little of the wine before anyone arrived. The sauce simmered. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"It's good," Dana said, meaning the wine.

"I know," Marcus said, meaning something else.


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

"I can go," Marisol said, already reaching for her keys. She had flour on her forearms from the tortillas she'd insisted on making from scratch, which Devin had told her was insane on a Tuesday, which she had ignored.

"You're covered in dough."

"So I'll wash my hands." She rinsed at the sink, water running pink where she'd nicked her thumb on the can opener an hour ago. "Four limes? Six?"

"Six. Tomás drinks like a man being chased."

She laughed and was out the door, the screen banging behind her the way it always did because neither of them had gotten around to the spring. Devin moved through the kitchen alone, tasting the beans, adding salt, tasting again. He set out the mismatched plates — three from her old apartment, three from his, one from a thrift store on Pike Street that neither of them liked but both refused to throw away. Their apartment was small enough that the dining table doubled as her desk, and he stacked her papers into a pile and moved them to the bedroom, resisting the urge to straighten the edges. She hated when he straightened.

By the time she came back, he had the music on and the candles out.

"Two dollars a pound," she announced, holding up the bag. "Highway robbery."

"You bought them anyway."

"I bought them anyway." She kissed the side of his neck, cold from the walk, and started slicing.

At seven the buzzer went, and Marisol looked around the room the way she did before company came, taking inventory. Devin caught her hand on the way past.

"It's good," he said. "It's fine."

"It's good," she agreed, and went to let them in.


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because Dana always started the sauce. It was the one thing she made without a recipe, and she liked the twenty minutes alone with it — the onions going soft, the radio low, the apartment slowly filling with a smell that made it feel like a place people came to on purpose.

Marcus arrived at six with two bags of groceries and an apology already forming.

"They didn't have the good bread," he said. "They had bread. It's not the good bread."

"Nobody's going to notice."

"Priya will notice."

"Priya will say something. That's different from noticing."

He set the bags down and started unloading, and she reached past him for the garlic without asking, and he shifted his hip to give her room without looking up. Eleven months in this apartment, three years before that in the one with the terrible radiator, and the choreography had gotten quiet.

He wiped down the table while she finished the sauce. There were four chairs and they needed five, so he brought the desk chair in from the bedroom and put it at the end where the wobble wouldn't matter. She found the cloth napkins in a drawer they hadn't opened since the move and shook them out, and they were creased into stiff squares, and she decided that was fine.

"Do we have wine glasses?"

"We have four. And two of those jars."

"Jars are charming," Dana said.

"Jars are what we have."

At six-forty he changed his shirt. At six-fifty she lit the candle from the bathroom, the one that smelled vaguely of cedar, and set it in the middle of the table where it could compete with the sauce and lose.

The buzzer went at seven-oh-five. He looked at her. She untied the apron, handed it to him, and went to let them in.


The apartment smelled like garlic and scorched butter, which Devon insisted was intentional.

"It's called *fond*," he said, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. "It's flavor."

Marisol leaned past him to check the oven. "It's carbon."

They had forty minutes. She'd texted everyone seven, which meant Priya would arrive at 6:45 and Theo would drift in around eight, apologetic, holding a bottle of something too expensive to be casual. Marisol pulled the chicken out, poked it, put it back. The thermometer had died sometime in the spring and neither of them had replaced it, which felt increasingly like a statement about their relationship that neither wanted to examine.

Devon set down the spoon and started clearing the table, which had accumulated a stack of unopened mail, a bike helmet, and a paperback swollen from being dropped in the bath. He carried the whole armload to the bedroom and dumped it on the dresser.

"That's not cleaning," Marisol said, without turning around.

"It's triage."

She laughed. She was arranging cheese on a cutting board in a way she'd seen online, fanning the slices, tucking in olives, and she stepped back to evaluate it with genuine seriousness before pushing an olive two inches to the left.

Devon came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. "It's beautiful. It's a beautiful little plate of food."

"Shut up."

"I mean it. I'd frame it."

He found the good glasses in the back of the cabinet, six of them, one with a chip he turned toward the wall. Marisol put on music, changed it, put the first thing back on. The chicken came out at 6:38, golden and probably fine.

At 6:44 the buzzer rang. They looked at each other, and Devon wiped his hands on his jeans.

"Ready?"

"No," she said, and went to answer it.


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

"It's not intentional," Marcus said, fanning the pan with a dish towel. "You said you'd watch it."

"I said I'd watch the timer. The timer went off. I did my job." She was setting the table, or attempting to — they owned four matching plates and needed six, so the two chipped ones from Marcus's college years were going to whoever arrived last.

He turned the chicken over. It was salvageable. Most of it. He tore off the darkest edges and ate them standing at the stove, the way his mother used to, and Dana caught him doing it and smiled without saying anything.

"Do we have wine glasses?"

"We have glasses."

"That's not what I asked."

"That's the answer you're getting."

She laughed and went to check the bathroom, which was the real crisis — Marcus had left a razor and a coffee mug on the sink, and there was a towel on the floor that had been on the floor since Tuesday. She hung it up. She put the mug in the dishwasher on her way past. He was chopping parsley now, badly, the way he always did, holding the knife too far back on the handle.

"Let me."

"I've got it."

"You're bruising it."

He handed over the knife. She chopped. He poured himself a glass of the cheap red they'd bought for the table and stood beside her, close enough that their arms touched, watching the way she worked — fast, unbothered, the whole pile done in fifteen seconds.

"Show-off."

"You asked."

The buzzer rang. Neither of them moved for a second.

"Ready?" she said.

"The chicken's a war crime."

"They'll eat it." She pressed the button. "They always do."


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

"I'll go," Priya said, already reaching for her keys off the hook by the door. "You're in the middle of the thing."

The thing was a pan of chicken thighs he'd been babysitting for twenty minutes, skin-side down, refusing to move them until they released on their own. He'd read that somewhere. He nodded without looking up.

She was back in eleven minutes with limes, a bag of ice, and a bunch of cilantro she hadn't been asked to buy but knew he'd want. He took the cilantro without comment, which was its own kind of thanks.

"Marcus texted," she said, washing her hands at the sink. "They're running late. Something with the sitter."

"Good. Buys me time."

"You don't need time. You need to stop hovering." She bumped him with her hip and he stepped aside, letting her at the cutting board. She sliced the limes into wedges while he finally turned the chicken, and the kitchen filled with a sound like applause.

They had lived here two years, long enough that the apartment had absorbed them both — his records on the shelf under her plants, the mismatched chairs they'd collected one at a time from curbs and estate sales. Six of them now. Enough for tonight.

Priya lit the candle on the table, the one they only used for company, and stood back to look at the room the way a guest might.

"It looks nice," Devon said from the stove.

"It looks like people live here."

"That's the same thing."

The buzzer sounded. She glanced at him — apron on, hair damp at the temples, entirely absorbed — and went to let their friends in, holding the door open with her foot while the stairwell filled with voices.


Dana got home first and immediately started rearranging the living room, which was her way of pretending she wasn't nervous. The coffee table went against the wall. The two mismatched armchairs got dragged toward the couch. She stood back, frowned, and moved everything again.

Marcus came in at six carrying two paper bags and a bottle of wine that had been recommended by a teenager at the liquor store. "It's under twenty dollars and it's red," he said, setting it on the counter. "That's the whole story."

"Fine. Nobody's a sommelier." Dana took the bags from him and started unpacking. "Did you get the good bread or the cheap bread?"

"I got the bread that was there."

She held up the loaf, examined it, and decided it would do. Marcus washed his hands and took over the cutting board without being asked, working through an onion while she got the oven going. They'd cooked together enough times to have worked out an unspoken choreography — she took the stove, he took the prep, and whoever finished first started on dishes.

"Do we own four matching plates?" she asked.

"We own six plates. Four of them match."

"That's fine. I'll take a weird one. You take a weird one."

By seven-fifteen the apartment smelled like garlic and browning meat, and Marcus had lit the candle Dana's sister had given them at Christmas, the one that smelled aggressively like cedar. Dana looked at it, then at him.

"It's a nice candle," he said.

"It smells like a hardware store."

"It smells like a *forest*."

She blew it out. He laughed and put it back on the shelf. Then the buzzer went, and they both looked toward the door, and Dana wiped her hands on a dish towel and said, "Okay. Here we go."


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

"I can go," Marisol said from the bathroom doorway, one earring in, the other held between her teeth. She took it out. "Seriously. It's four blocks."

"You're not going anywhere in that shirt. You'll get salsa verde on it before anyone arrives."

She laughed and disappeared back into the bedroom. Devon wiped down the counter for the third time, moving the same crumbs from one spot to another, and considered whether four folding chairs plus the two good ones counted as enough seating for six people. Someone would end up on the ottoman. Someone always ended up on the ottoman.

Marisol came out in a different shirt and grabbed her keys. "Limes. Anything else?"

"Ice. We have ice for exactly nobody."

"Ice." She kissed the side of his head and was gone, the screen door banging behind her in the way he'd stopped noticing eleven months ago.

He pulled the chicken from the oven and let it rest, then dragged the small table from the entryway and pushed it against the big one. The heights didn't match. He folded a dish towel and shimmed one leg, which helped, and then unfolded it and tried a magazine instead, which helped more.

By the time she returned, he'd set out the plates — two of the good ones, four mismatched — and lit the candle that smelled vaguely like a forest.

"They're going to be late," Marisol said, dumping ice into the cooler. "Priya texted. Traffic."

"Good. I need twenty minutes."

She looked at the table, at the shimmed leg, at the way he'd arranged the napkins into something like fans. "You did all this while I was gone?"

"I did all this while you were gone."

"Show-off," she said, and started cutting the limes.


The apartment smelled like garlic before either of them had finished dressing.

Renée stood at the stove, sleeves pushed to her elbows, coaxing onions toward translucence in a pan that had belonged to her grandmother. The handle wobbled. It had wobbled for eleven years, and she had refused every replacement Devin offered.

"They're going to be late," he called from the bedroom. "Marcus is always late."

"Then the bread will be warm instead of hot. Nobody's ever died from warm bread."

He came out buttoning a shirt she hadn't seen in a while, the green one, and she noticed and didn't say anything, which was its own kind of saying something. He kissed the back of her neck on his way to the cabinet and started pulling down plates—four of the good ones, two of the everyday ones, because they'd broken two of the good ones last spring and neither had gotten around to replacing them.

"Mismatched," he said.

"Rustic," she corrected.

Devin set the table while she worked, folding napkins into rough triangles, moving the stack of unopened mail off the counter and into a drawer where it would live for another month. He found the candles in the bottom of the hutch, half-burned from someone's birthday.

"Do we have wine glasses that match?"

"We have wine glasses."

He laughed and started rinsing them anyway, holding each up to the window light, frowning at water spots.

Renée tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted it again, and held the spoon out to him without turning around. He crossed the kitchen and tried it.

"More pepper."

"More pepper," she agreed, and reached for the grinder.

The buzzer sounded twenty minutes later, early, not Marcus. Devin pressed the button, then looked back at her—hair pinned up, flour on her wrist—and she waved him toward the door, already reaching for the bread.


Dev found the good tablecloth crumpled at the back of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar and the last time they'd used it, which had been Thanksgiving, which had been a disaster.

"It's wrinkled," he called.

"It's atmospheric," Renata said from the kitchen. She was standing over a pot of something that had gone from a plan into an improvisation about twenty minutes ago. The recipe had wanted fennel. The store had wanted eleven dollars for fennel. So now there was celery in it, and a little dill, and Renata had decided this was fine and possibly better.

Dev shook the tablecloth out over the table anyway. Four places. Marcus and June were bringing wine and would bring too much of it, as always, and then take the leftovers home, which everyone had agreed years ago was a perfectly acceptable system.

"Do we have candles?"

"Under the sink. Behind the thing."

"The thing."

"The bucket. Dev, the bucket."

He found them behind the bucket. Two tapers, unequal — one had clearly been used during a power outage and burned down a third. He put the short one in the holder closer to the wall and the tall one in front and stepped back and decided nobody was going to be measuring candles.

Renata came out wiping her hands on a dish towel that had been hanging on the oven handle since March. She looked at the table. She adjusted the fork on the left-hand setting by maybe a quarter inch.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's what nice is."

He laughed. She went back to the stove, tasted the celery-fennel-adjacent thing, made a face, added salt, tasted it again, and made a different face — the good one.

The buzzer went at seven-ten. June was already talking before the door was fully open.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Dana came through the door with the wine, still shaking rain off her jacket.

"They said seven," Malik called from the kitchen. "It's six-forty. We're fine."

"You always say we're fine." She set two bottles on the counter and peered into the pot on the back burner. "That smells like your mother's."

"It is my mother's. Mostly. I put less cinnamon because Jules said last time it tasted like a candle."

"Jules is a philistine."

He handed her a spoon without looking up, and she tasted, considered, and reached past him for the salt. He let her. Fifteen months in this apartment and they had worked out most of the choreography — she salted, he watched the timing, neither of them mentioned it anymore.

Dana pulled the folding chairs out of the hall closet, wiped them down, and set the table for six, then remembered Priya was bringing her brother and went back for a seventh. There weren't seven matching plates. There had never been seven matching plates.

"The blue one's fine," Malik said, reading her hesitation from across the room. "Put it at your seat."

"Or your seat."

"Put it at my seat, then."

She put it at his seat. He came out with the bowl of greens and stopped to look at the table — the mismatched plates, the candle stub in a jar, the window fogging over the fire escape.

"It looks good," he said.

"It looks like us."

"That's what I said."

The buzzer went at 6:52. Dana pressed the button and left the door cracked, and Malik turned the music down two notches so people could hear each other, and then there were voices in the stairwell, and the small apartment began to fill.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary, and Denise was fanning the smoke alarm with a dish towel before it could start shrieking.

"I told you the broiler runs hot," Marcus said, not looking up from the cutting board.

"You told me after."

He laughed and swept the diced shallots into a bowl. He'd been cooking since four, moving through the small kitchen with the particular efficiency of a man who had memorized where everything was because he'd put it all there himself. Denise handled the parts he found tedious — the table, the lighting, the question of whether four chairs and a piano bench counted as seating for six.

"It counts," she decided, dragging the bench in from the front room. "Ruth won't mind. Ruth once ate Thanksgiving on a cooler."

They had forty minutes. Denise ironed the tablecloth badly, gave up, and turned it so the wrinkles faced the wall. She lined up mismatched wine glasses, three of hers and three of his, a small archaeology of two households folded into one. Marcus tasted the sauce, made a face, added lemon, made a better face.

"Try this."

She came over and let him hold the spoon up. It was good. It was better than good, and she told him so, and he pretended the compliment didn't land the way it did.

At six-fifteen the buzzer went. Denise swore, kicked her slippers under the couch, and pulled the door open on Ruth and her husband holding a bottle of something they'd clearly bought at the gas station on the corner.

"We're early," Ruth announced.

"You're perfect," Marcus called from the kitchen, and Denise stepped back to let them in, already reaching for the corkscrew, already laughing at something Ruth hadn't finished saying yet.

Behind her, a pan hissed. The night began.


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

"I can go," Priya said, already reaching for her keys, but he waved her off.

"You've been standing since two. Sit down for five minutes."

She did not sit down. She wiped the counter instead, then rearranged the mismatched plates they'd inherited from her aunt—three white, two with a blue floral rim, one that was frankly a serving platter but would work if she gave it to Marcus, who never noticed anything.

Devon came back with limes, a bag of ice, and a bunch of tulips that had been sitting by the register looking desperate.

"You bought gas station flowers."

"I bought *reduced* gas station flowers. They have twelve good hours left in them. That's all we need."

She laughed and found the jar they used as a vase, the one with the faded label still glued to the bottom. The tulips slumped immediately in six different directions, which somehow suited the table better than anything upright would have.

At six-fifteen they took inventory: chicken resting under foil, a salad Priya kept adding things to, rice, the flatbread Devon had gotten too dark on one side and turned over so the dark part faced down. Six chairs, one of them the desk chair from the bedroom, wheels and all.

"They'll sit wherever," Devon said.

"Rachel will want the wheels."

"Rachel will absolutely want the wheels."

He put on music, low, the kind that fills a room without demanding attention. Priya changed out of the shirt with sauce on it. When the buzzer went, they looked at each other for a second in the small, briefly perfect apartment—warm, garlic-smelling, tulips leaning—before Devon crossed the room and let everyone in.


Dana got home first and immediately started rearranging the living room, which meant dragging the armchair six inches to the left and then standing back to squint at it. By the time Marcus came through the door with two grocery bags and a bottle of wine tucked under his arm, she'd moved it back.

"It looked crowded," she said.

"It looks the same."

"It looks intentional now."

He set the bags on the counter and started unpacking. Chicken thighs, a bag of shallots, the good butter, a lemon that had clearly been chosen with care because he'd turned it over three times in the store. Dana leaned against the fridge and watched him line everything up.

"You're doing the thing," she said.

"What thing?"

"The general-planning-a-campaign thing."

Marcus tied on the apron with the burn mark on the pocket. "Someone has to. Last time you 'improvised' and we ate at ten-fifteen."

"They loved it. Priya said it was the best late dinner of her life."

"Priya is unfailingly polite."

Dana laughed and went to find candles. She turned up three mismatched ones and a votive from a hotel, arranged them down the middle of the table, then swapped two of them because the heights were wrong. Behind her the pan started hissing and the kitchen filled with the smell of shallots going soft.

"Napkins or paper towels?" she called.

"It's Priya and Owen."

"Napkins," she decided, and dug them out of the drawer that never closed all the way.

At a quarter to seven she put on music, something low with a lot of piano in it, and Marcus handed her a glass without looking up from the pan. She tasted the sauce off his spoon, made a face, added salt, and he pretended to be offended for exactly four seconds before the doorbell rang and they both looked up.


The Anderson-Reyes kitchen smelled like garlic and burning butter, which meant Dara had gotten distracted again.

"You're supposed to stir it," Marcus said, reaching past her to pull the pan off the heat. He was still in his work shirt, sleeves shoved to the elbows, tie hanging loose around his neck like he'd forgotten it was there.

"I was stirring. Then I was answering the door for the wine delivery, which you said you'd handle."

"I said I'd handle it if I was home by six."

"It's six-fifteen."

He conceded this with a shrug and took over the sauce, adding a splash of cream to salvage it. Dara moved to the dining table, counting placemats. Four, then five, then she remembered Priya was bringing her brother, so six. She dug through the sideboard for the mismatched napkins they'd inherited from his grandmother.

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

"Seven. Which means Colin shows at eight."

The apartment was small enough that they had to choreograph around each other — she squeezed behind him to reach the drawer, he stepped left without looking, an old rhythm. Their dog, an anxious terrier named Biscuit, tracked the movement from her spot under the table, hoping for casualties.

Dara lit two candles, then blew one out. "Too much?"

"Keep both. It's nice."

She relit it. He tasted the sauce, made a face, added salt, tasted again, and held the spoon out to her without turning around. She took it, considered.

"More lemon."

"There's no more lemon."

"Then it's fine."

By quarter to seven the table was set, the record player was on, and Marcus had changed into a shirt without cuffs. Dara stood in the doorway looking at the room, at the crooked candles and the good plates, and decided it looked like people lived there.

The buzzer rang at 6:58.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which meant Renée had started the glaze too early again.

"It's fine," she said, waving a wooden spoon at the pan. "It's supposed to look like that."

Dev didn't look up from the table. He was arranging mismatched plates into something like symmetry — the two good ones from his mother, the three chipped ones from the thrift store on Vine, and a saucer standing in for a fourth dinner plate because they'd never gotten around to buying more. "We have five people coming and four chairs."

"The desk chair rolls in."

"The desk chair squeaks."

"Then whoever sits in it will be memorable." She turned the burner down and came over, tucking a dish towel into the waistband of her jeans. She surveyed the table, moved a fork an inch to the left, and declared it perfect.

They had lived here fourteen months. Long enough that the mail came addressed to both of them, that Dev's records had colonized the bottom shelf and Renée's plants had taken the windowsill hostage. Long enough to have a system: he cleaned, she cooked, and they both pretended the bathroom faucet wasn't dripping.

"Marcus is bringing wine," Dev said. "The bad kind."

"All wine is the bad kind to you."

"That's not true. I like the kind that's beer."

She laughed and reached past him for the pepper grinder, and he caught her wrist for a second — nothing dramatic, just a pause, a thumb against her pulse — before letting go so she could get back to the stove.

At 6:52 the buzzer went off. Renée swore, yanked the pan off the heat, and shoved a stack of unopened envelopes into a drawer. Dev straightened his shirt, glanced back at her, and got a nod.

He opened the door.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six o'clock, which Danielle insisted was the correct smell for a Saturday.

"You put it in too early," Marcus said, waving a dish towel at the smoke detector. "The recipe said twenty minutes."

"The recipe was written by someone with a better oven." She pulled the tray out anyway and inspected the potatoes, prodding one with her thumbnail. "These are fine. These are rustic."

He set the towel down and started clearing the table, which had been serving as a mail depot for the better part of a month. Bills, a coil of phone charger, a library book three weeks past due. He stacked it all in a laundry basket and slid the basket behind the couch, which was, they had long ago agreed, a legitimate cleaning technique.

"Four people or five?" he asked.

"Five. Ruth is bringing her cousin." Danielle was slicing bread now, fast and slightly crooked. "Don't make the face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You have a face about Ruth's cousin."

"He talks about cryptocurrency."

"He talks about a lot of things. Cryptocurrency is just one." She handed him the cutting board. "Put this in the basket with the good napkins. Not the paper ones."

Marcus found the napkins in the bottom drawer, still creased in their original folds. He set the table while she opened wine to breathe, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything, just moved around each other in the narrow kitchen the way they'd learned to over four years — a hand on a hip, a step sideways, a plate passed without asking.

At six-forty the buzzer went off. Danielle untied her apron and threw it at him.

"Get the door," she said. "I need thirty seconds to look like I wasn't panicking."

He was already laughing when he turned the lock.


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

"It's a glaze," she said, scraping at the pan with a wooden spoon. "It's supposed to catch a little."

Marcus leaned into the kitchen doorway, holding two shirts on hangers. "Blue or the gray one with the buttons?"

"Gray. The blue makes you look like you're going to a job interview."

He disappeared down the hall. Renée turned the heat down and checked the clock — forty minutes, and the table still had last week's mail on it, plus the space heater they'd never put away, plus a bag of soil from the balcony tomatoes that had died in September.

Marcus came back in the gray shirt, sleeves pushed to the elbow, and started clearing without being asked. He carried the mail to the bedroom and dropped it on the dresser, where it would live for another eleven days.

"Did you tell Priya about the stairs?" he asked.

"I told her third floor."

"That's not the same as telling her the light on the second landing is out."

"She'll manage." Renée pulled a stack of plates down, counted six, put one back. "Kev's not coming. He texted."

"Of course he did."

They moved around each other easily, the way people do in a small kitchen after enough years — Marcus reaching over her for the salt while she opened the oven, neither one saying excuse me. He put on music, some old soul record he'd been playing all month, and she didn't complain about it, which was its own kind of compliment.

At seven, he lit the candles. She wiped down the counter one last time, then untied her apron and hung it on the pantry door.

"It looks good," Marcus said.

Renée surveyed the room. "It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

The buzzer rang.


Dana got home first and immediately started rearranging the living room, which was her habit whenever people were coming over. She pushed the coffee table three inches to the left, stepped back, and pushed it two inches to the right.

"It was fine," Marcus said, coming through the door with two grocery bags hooked on one arm and a bottle of wine in the other hand. "It's been fine for two years."

"It's fine now."

He set the bags on the counter and started unpacking. Chicken thighs, a bunch of cilantro that had gone slightly limp in the car, limes, a bag of rice he was fairly sure they already had three of in the cabinet. Dana came in behind him and looked over his shoulder.

"You forgot the sour cream."

"I did not forget the sour cream." He held it up.

"Okay. You didn't forget the sour cream."

They worked around each other in a kitchen that had never been designed for two people. Marcus browned the chicken while Dana chopped, and twice they collided at the sink, and the second time she elbowed him in the ribs on purpose. He put a hand on her back as he squeezed past with the pan.

At six-fifteen she went to change her shirt and came back to find him tasting the sauce with a spoon he then put back in the pot.

"Marcus."

"What?"

"You know what."

He got a clean spoon. She lit the two candles they owned, both of them different heights and one of them scented like pine, which made no sense in April. Marcus turned the overhead light off and the lamp on, and the room looked warmer, softer, better than it had any right to.

The buzzer rang at six-thirty. Dana looked at him. Marcus wiped his hands on a dish towel.

"Ready?"

"Get the door," she said.


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

"It's char," she said, waving the sprig at Marcus. "Restaurants do it."

"Restaurants do it on purpose." He took the pan from her anyway and scraped the blackened bits into the trash, then set it back on the burner without comment. This was the arrangement they'd worked out over four years: she cooked with enthusiasm, he cooked with damage control.

Dana went to deal with the table. They owned four matching plates and two that didn't match, which meant every dinner party involved a small negotiation about who got the orphans. She gave them to herself and Marcus, the way she always did, and set the good ones out for Priya, Theo, and Theo's new girlfriend whose name they had both been practicing all afternoon.

"Ines," Marcus called from the kitchen. "Ee-ness. Not Agnes."

"I never said Agnes."

"You said Agnes twice on Tuesday."

She lit the candles — the tall ones from the drawer, half-melted from Priya's birthday in March — and stepped back to look. The table was too small for five, honestly. Somebody would end up with a corner leg between their knees. She moved the chairs anyway, an inch here, an inch there, as though inches could fix it.

Marcus came out with two glasses of wine and handed her one. His shirt had a water spot on the front from the sink.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

"Fifteen. Theo's always early."

They stood there a moment, drinking, surveying the room the way people survey a room they've cleaned for company: seeing it strangely, as guests might, noticing the crack in the plaster above the window and the stack of mail nobody had touched.

"It looks nice," Marcus said.

Dana leaned into his shoulder. "It looks like us."

Then the buzzer went off, eleven minutes early.


Dana got home first, which meant the music was already on when Marcus came through the door with two bags of groceries and an apology.

"They were out of the good bread," he said. "I got the seeded one."

"Fine. Nobody's going to notice." Dana was wiping down the counter for the second time, which Marcus knew meant she was nervous, though she'd deny it.

They had lived in the apartment three years. The dining table sat four comfortably, five if someone took the piano bench, and tonight it would be five: Rosalyn, Theo, and Theo's sister who was visiting from Ohio and had, according to Theo, strong opinions about food.

Marcus started the onions. Dana came behind him, reached around, and turned the burner down.

"They'll burn," she said.

"They were not going to burn."

"They were going to burn."

He let her have it. She always won the stove arguments and was, annoyingly, usually right.

While the chicken braised, Dana pulled the good plates from the top shelf, the ones her grandmother had left her, and Marcus dried them one by one because they'd been sitting up there gathering a fine film since the last time anyone came over. He held one to the light.

"You're being weird about the plates," Dana said.

"I'm being thorough."

She found candles in the junk drawer, mismatched, and set them out anyway. He put on a different record, something quieter. At six-forty the apartment smelled like garlic and thyme, and the two of them stood in the small kitchen a moment without saying anything, surveying it.

"It's good," Dana said.

"It's good."

The buzzer went off at ten to seven, early, which was very Rosalyn. Marcus wiped his hands on a dish towel. Dana blew out the match she was still holding and went to get the door.


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

"It's fine," Priya said, not looking up from the cutting board. She was working through a pile of red onions with the focused violence of someone who'd had a long week. "Nobody's going to interrogate us about garnish."

"Marcus will."

"Marcus brings boxed wine."

Devon laughed and pulled the folding chairs from behind the coat closet, the ones with the wobbly leg they kept meaning to fix. Their apartment fit six people if two of them didn't mind sitting near the radiator. He set the table with the mismatched plates—three from her old place, three from a thrift store on Warren Street—and then rearranged them so the chipped one landed at his own seat.

"You're doing the plate thing again," she said.

"I'm not doing a thing."

"You absolutely have a plate hierarchy."

She wiped her hands on a dish towel and came to stand beside him, surveying the table. The candles were too tall for the low ceiling; she pushed them toward the center anyway. Outside, a car alarm went off and then stopped, defeated.

Devon went back to the stove and lifted the lid on the curry, tasting it with the wooden spoon that had gone black at the tip. Too much heat. He added yogurt, stirred, tasted again.

"Better?" she asked.

He held the spoon out to her. She blew on it, tried it, made a face that meant yes.

At six-fifteen the buzzer rang, early, which meant it was Nadia, who was always early and always apologetic about it. Priya went to press the button. Devon turned the burner down, straightened the crooked chair, and looked around the room one last time—the folded blankets, the crowded counter, the small deliberate warmth of it—before the door swung open.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six-thirty, which was earlier than either of them had planned.

"You put it in at four hundred," Daniel said, waving a dish towel at the oven's small cloud of smoke.

"You said four hundred."

"I said three-seventy-five and then I said *maybe* four hundred, which is different." He pulled the tray out anyway. The potatoes were fine — dark at the edges, the way people pretended to prefer them. Rina took one, burned her fingers, ate it anyway.

She had spent the afternoon rearranging the living room, which mostly meant pushing the couch eight inches left and dragging in the desk chair so there'd be five places to sit. The coffee table had a water ring she'd tried three products on before giving up and setting a candle over it.

"Cheese board," she said. "Do we own a cheese board?"

"We own a cutting board. It's a matter of framing."

She found the good knife, the one they'd bought at a flea market the first summer in this place, and started slicing a wedge of cheddar into pieces that got progressively less even. Daniel came up behind her, reached past her shoulder for the pepper grinder, and stayed there a second longer than he needed to.

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

"Then we have time to hide the laundry."

They did the laundry together, stuffing a basket of unfolded shirts into the bedroom closet and shutting the door with a hip. Rina lit the candle. Daniel put music on and then changed it twice. The buzzer went at ten past seven, and he looked at her — hair up, flour on her sleeve, the apartment warm and slightly smoky around them — and said, "Okay. Ready?"

"Get the door," she said, and wiped her hands on her jeans.


Dana got home first and immediately started moving furniture, which was her way of pretending she wasn't nervous. The apartment had one long room that had to be living room, dining room, and hallway all at once, and the folding table only fit if the armchair went into the bedroom.

Marcus arrived twenty minutes later with two paper bags and a bottle of wine he'd been talked into by someone at the store. "He said it was food-friendly," he reported, setting it on the counter. "I don't know what that means. All wine is food-friendly."

"It means it was on sale." Dana was wrestling a tablecloth out of a drawer where it had been crushed for a year. "Do we own an iron?"

"We own an iron. It's under the sink for reasons I've never understood."

He found it, and she steamed the creases out while he started the onions. They had negotiated the menu over three days of texts: roast chicken, because he could do it without thinking; a salad with too many things in it, because she liked assembling; bread from the place on Delancey; and a lemon cake she'd made the night before that had come out slightly sunken in the middle.

"Nobody's going to notice the cake," Marcus said.

"Priya will notice the cake."

"Priya will say something nice about the cake and then eat two pieces."

By seven the table was set with mismatched plates, four chairs and one stool, and the good glasses that were only good because they matched. Dana lit a candle, considered it, and blew it out. "Too much."

"It's a little much," Marcus agreed.

The buzzer went off while he still had flour on his hands. Dana wiped them with a dish towel, laughing, and went to press the button.


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

"It's a glaze," she said, prodding the pork shoulder with a fork. "It's supposed to caramelize."

Dev looked over her shoulder, skeptical. "That's past caramel. That's approaching charcoal."

"Then set the table before I put you in the oven."

He laughed and went to the closet where they kept the good plates, the ones his mother had sent them two winters ago, still in the original box because they never had occasion. Six plates. Four guests, two of them. He counted twice and carried them out in a stack that made his forearms ache.

Renata had cleared the mail off the table that morning — two months of it, mostly catalogs — and the bare wood surprised him every time he walked past. She'd found a water ring near the corner and covered it with a folded napkin, then decided the napkin looked deliberate and folded three more.

"Wine's in the fridge," she called. "The white. I don't know if it's cold enough."

"It's been in there since Tuesday."

"That's not an answer."

He put a hand on the bottle. "It's cold enough."

The buzzer would go off in forty minutes. Renata pulled the pork out, and it was, in fact, glazed — dark and glossy and smelling like something out of a magazine. She looked at Dev with an expression of open vindication.

"I never doubted you," he said.

"You said charcoal."

"I said *approaching.*"

She handed him a spoon with sauce on it. He tasted it and made a face he couldn't hold, and she saw right through it, and neither of them said anything else about the pork.

He lit the two candles they owned. She turned off the overhead light. The room went warm and forgiving, and they stood there a moment, surveying it, before the first knock came.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at four-thirty, an hour ahead of schedule, and Priya swore under her breath.

"It's fine," Marcus said from the sink, where he was scrubbing the black skin off a roasted eggplant. "We'll just reheat it. Nobody's ever complained about rice."

"Your sister complained about rice."

"My sister complains about oxygen."

She laughed and went back to the cutting board, working through a pile of cilantro with the dull knife because the good one had gone missing sometime around the holidays and neither of them had gotten around to replacing it. The apartment smelled like cumin and burnt sugar — the burnt sugar was his fault, a caramel experiment abandoned twenty minutes in, the pot now soaking in the other side of the sink like evidence.

Marcus dried his hands and started clearing the table, which had been serving as a mail sorting station, a laundry folding surface, and a place where library books went to die. He carried an armful of it into the bedroom and shut the door on the whole mess, which was, they'd agreed years ago, a completely legitimate cleaning strategy.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"Four, plus the desk chair, plus the folding one from the closet." She counted on her fingers. "That's six. Dev's bringing his roommate."

"Then someone sits on the ottoman."

"Someone always sits on the ottoman."

He put on music, something with horns, and poured them each a glass of the wine they were technically supposed to be saving for the guests. She held hers by the stem and surveyed the table — mismatched plates, cloth napkins that had been a gift, a candle in a jar.

"It looks good," she said.

"It looks like us."

The buzzer went off at six-fifteen. Neither of them had changed their shirt.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Devon came in from the balcony with the folding chairs, one under each arm, cobwebs on his sleeve.

"Four or six?" he asked.

"Six," Priya said. "Marcus is bringing whoever he's bringing."

"He's been 'bringing whoever he's bringing' for three months. At some point that's just a person with a name."

She laughed and went back to the cutting board, working through a pile of scallions with the fast, sloppy technique she'd learned from her mother and never bothered to correct. Devon set the chairs down, wiped his sleeve on his jeans, and started clearing the table — the mail pile, the phone charger with the frayed cord, a library book three weeks overdue that neither of them had touched.

"Do we own a tablecloth?"

"We own a bedsheet."

"That's not a no."

They'd lived in the apartment two years, long enough that the kitchen had a rhythm: he took the left side of the sink, she took the right, and whoever got there first ran the water. Devon pulled beers from the back of the fridge and lined them up on the counter, then rearranged them because the labels weren't facing out, then felt stupid about it and left them alone.

Priya slid the pan of chicken into the oven and set a timer on her phone. "Twenty-five minutes. Music?"

"You pick. Last time I picked, Andrea said it sounded like a dentist's office."

"Andrea's not coming."

"Then I'm picking."

He put on something with horns in it. She turned it down two notches. He turned it up one, and she let it stand.

By the time the buzzer rang, the bedsheet was on the table, ironed badly, and the scallions were in a small blue bowl neither of them remembered buying.


Dana got home first and found the apartment exactly as they'd left it that morning: the dishes from breakfast still soaking, the mail avalanching off the counter. She swept the envelopes into a drawer, which was not solving the problem but was solving the problem for tonight.

Marcus arrived twenty minutes later with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine he'd been talked into by someone at the store.

"They said it goes with pork," he reported.

"Does it?"

"I have no idea. He seemed confident."

Dana had already started the onions. Marcus set the bags down and began unpacking without being asked, which was one of the reasons this arrangement had lasted four years. He found the thyme, then couldn't find the thyme, then found it again behind the coffee.

"Do we own six chairs?" he asked.

"We own four chairs and that stool."

"Someone's sitting on the stool."

"Ravi will sit on the stool. He likes being tall."

Marcus laughed and started on the potatoes. They worked around each other in the narrow kitchen with the unthinking choreography of people who had negotiated this exact square footage a thousand times — he stepped back, she slid past, neither looked up.

At six thirty Dana realized the pork needed longer than she'd budgeted. Marcus suggested putting out more cheese. This was his solution to most timing problems and it had never once failed.

She lit the candle they'd been saving. He put on a record, then took it off, then put on a different one. She said the first one had been fine. He said the first one had been trying too hard.

The buzzer rang at 7:04. Dana wiped her hands on a dish towel and looked at him.

"Ready?"

"The wine guy was confident," Marcus said, and went to let them in.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Devon came in from the balcony with the folding chairs, one under each arm, sawdust from last summer's project still clinging to the legs.

"We only have four plates that match," Rosa said. She was standing at the open cabinet, counting. "Five if you count the one with the chip."

"Nobody's going to inspect the plates."

"Marisol will."

Devon set the chairs down and came to look, as if his opinion might change the inventory. It didn't. He pulled out the chipped plate, turned it so the flaw faced away, and set it at the head of the table. "That's mine. Problem solved."

Rosa let him have the small victory and went back to the stove, where the pork had been braising since two o'clock in the afternoon and the whole apartment smelled like cumin and orange peel. She lifted the lid, prodded, tasted, and made the face she always made when something was almost right but not yet.

"More salt?" Devon asked.

"More time."

He wiped down the table with a dish towel, then wiped it again because the first pass left streaks. The overhead light was too bright, so he swapped in the dimmer bulb they kept in the closet for exactly this reason, and lit the two candles Rosa had bought at the hardware store, which smelled faintly of nothing.

At six-forty she changed her shirt twice. At six-fifty he found the corkscrew in the junk drawer, under the batteries.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"Four, plus the desk chair, plus the ottoman if Kevin sits on it."

"Kevin always sits on the ottoman."

The buzzer went at seven-oh-five. Rosa turned the burner down. Devon pressed the button and held the door open with his foot, and the stairwell filled with voices coming up.


Dana got home first, which meant the music was already too loud when Marcus came through the door carrying two paper bags and a bottle of wine he'd been talked into by a very persuasive teenager at the register.

"You bought the fourteen-dollar one," Dana said, not looking up from the cutting board.

"I bought the one with the nice label."

"That's the same thing."

He set the bags down and started unpacking. Onions, a bag of limes, the sour cream she'd texted about twice. She'd already gotten the pork shoulder going that morning before her shift, and the whole apartment smelled like cumin and orange peel, warm in a way that made him want to sit down and not get up.

Instead he pulled out the folding chairs from behind the closet door and wiped the dust off them with a dish towel, which earned him a look.

"That's the good towel."

"It's a towel."

"It's *the good towel*, Marcus."

They had exactly six plates that matched, which was fine, because there were six of them counting Priya, who was bringing dessert, and Theo, who would say he was bringing something and then arrive with nothing but a very good story. Dana set the table while Marcus chopped, badly, the onions sliding off the board.

"You're going to lose a finger."

"I've had this finger thirty-four years."

She came up behind him, put a hand on his hip, and moved him two inches to the left so she could reach the drawer. It was a small kitchen. They had learned to move around each other like people who'd done it a thousand times, because they had.

At six-forty the buzzer went off early, and Dana swore, and Marcus laughed, and she wiped her hands and went to let them in.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Dev came in from the balcony with the folding chair, one leg bent from last winter.

"We're four short," he said.

Nadia looked up from the cutting board, where she was working through a pile of cilantro. "We're four short every time. People sit on the floor. It's fine, they like it."

"Marcus doesn't like it. Marcus has a back."

"Marcus is thirty-four."

Dev set the chair against the wall anyway and came around behind her, reaching past her shoulder for a piece of cucumber. She smacked his hand without looking.

"That's for the salad."

"There's a whole cucumber."

"There's a third of a cucumber and six people."

He took the piece anyway and ate it while she pretended not to notice. The apartment smelled like cumin and something faintly burnt from earlier, when he'd tried to toast the naan directly on the burner and set off the smoke detector. The detector was now sitting on top of the refrigerator with its battery removed, which Nadia had said was a fire hazard and Dev had said was a Sunday problem.

"Did you text Priya about the wine?"

"I texted her. She said she's bringing something 'interesting,' which means it'll be orange and taste like a barn."

Nadia laughed. She scraped the cilantro into a bowl and handed him the board to rinse. "Put the good glasses out. The ones your mother sent."

"We have four of those."

"So put out four and two of the jam jars. Nobody's counting."

He filled the sink and started washing, and she moved around him to check the oven, one hand briefly flat on his back as she passed — not affection exactly, just a way of saying *I'm here, don't step left.* Outside, the light was going amber over the parking lot. The first knock would come in twenty minutes. Neither of them was quite ready, and neither of them was worried about it.


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

"Store run," he announced, already reaching for his keys off the hook by the door.

Marisol didn't look up from the cutting board, where she was working through a pile of tomatillos with the kind of focus she usually reserved for spreadsheets. "Get limes too. We only have two, and Priya puts lime in everything."

"Two limes is plenty."

"Two limes is not plenty for Priya."

He conceded the point and left. The apartment settled into that particular quiet that comes when one person leaves and the other keeps working. Marisol scraped the tomatillos into the blender, added garlic, hesitated over the jalapeño, then added it whole, stem and all, the way her aunt did. The blender screamed. She tasted the salsa off a spoon and made a face — too sharp — then set it aside to mellow.

By the time Devon came back, she'd wiped down the counters twice and started rearranging the living room, dragging the armchair away from the wall so people would actually sit in it.

"You're moving furniture," he said, setting down the bag.

"There were only four places to sit. Now there are six."

"There are five of us."

"So one of us gets a choice." She held out her hand for the limes.

He handed them over and started on the cilantro, rinsing it under cold water, shaking it out over the sink. She hip-checked him gently to get to the knife block. Somewhere in the next twenty minutes they fell into the rhythm they always fell into — he chopped, she seasoned, neither one narrated what they were doing.

At six forty, the buzzer went. Marisol pulled off her apron. Devon lit the candle on the table, which they both knew was slightly ridiculous, and neither of them mentioned it.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at 5:40, and Dev shouted from the kitchen that the timing was going to be tight. Priya, standing on a chair in the living room, told him it was fine, that people always came late, and went back to fishing a cobweb out of the ceiling corner with a dish towel.

They had not hosted since March. The apartment showed it. Dev had spent the afternoon scrubbing the burnt ring off the good pot, and there were still two mugs on the coffee table from that morning, ringed with tea.

"Do we have enough chairs?" he called.

"Four plus the piano bench."

"That's five."

"Someone can sit on the arm of the couch. Marisol always does anyway."

He came out drying his hands and looked at the table she'd set — mismatched plates, the cloth napkins her mother had sent, folded badly. He straightened one without saying anything, and she noticed and said nothing back, which was its own kind of conversation.

At six, she put on music too loud and he turned it down. He was worried the chicken was underdone; she cut into a thigh with a paring knife to prove it wasn't, then ate the piece standing over the pan, which annoyed him more than he let on.

"You've got flour on your face," she said.

"You've got dust in your hair."

They stood there for a second in the small warm kitchen, both a little sweaty, the windows fogged from the pot of greens.

The buzzer went at 6:20 — early, of course, because Theo was always early and always apologetic about it. Priya hit the button without asking who it was. Dev threw the towel over his shoulder, took one last look at the table, moved a candle two inches to the left, and went to hold the door open.


The rice cooker beeped, and Dana swore softly, because the beep meant she'd forgotten about the rice entirely and now it was sitting there, done, going gummy while the chicken still had twenty minutes.

"It's fine," Marcus said from the living room, where he was moving the coffee table three inches to the left and then three inches back. "Nobody's ever complained about rice."

"You complained about rice in October."

"That was different rice." He came into the kitchen and looked over her shoulder at the sheet pan, the lemon slices going brown at the edges, the thyme he'd bought because she said thyme and then had stood in the produce aisle for six minutes deciding whether the stuff labeled thyme was actually thyme. "It looks good."

"It looks like something."

They had four people coming at seven. Marcus had bought too much wine, which he did every time, and Dana had made a dessert that morning that she was already planning to apologize for. She wiped down the counter and then wiped it down again. Marcus put on a record and then took it off and put on a different one.

At 6:40 he found her standing in the bathroom with a hand towel, staring at the towel bar.

"The good ones or the regular ones?"

"Dana."

"The good ones."

"Nobody's going to—"

"I know." She hung them anyway. He watched her do it, leaning in the doorframe, and when she turned around he was smiling in the specific way that made her want to throw something at him and also not.

"What," she said.

"Nothing. This is nice."

"It's chicken."

"Yeah," he said, and went to answer the door, because Anthony was always ten minutes early and always pretended he wasn't.


Dana got home first and started pulling things out of the fridge — a bag of shallots, the chicken thighs that had been marinating since morning, half a lemon wrapped in cling film. The kitchen was small enough that two people in it had to negotiate, so she worked fast while she had it to herself.

Marcus came in twenty minutes later with the wine and a bakery box he set on top of the microwave, the only clear surface left. "They had the olive bread," he said. "I got two."

"We don't need two."

"Sam eats a whole loaf by himself. You've seen him."

She conceded the point with a shrug and handed him a knife and the shallots. He took off his jacket, hung it on the back of a chair instead of the hook, and she let it go because the guests were coming at seven and there were larger battles.

They fell into the rhythm of it. He diced; she got the oven up to temperature and cleared the mail off the table — a stack that had been growing for two weeks, bills and catalogs and a postcard from his sister. He put music on his phone, something with horns, and she turned it down two notches without comment.

At six-forty she realized they had no candles, and he said there were birthday candles in the junk drawer, which made her laugh for the first time all day. They compromised on a bowl of lemons in the center of the table.

"Does it look like we tried too hard?" she asked.

He looked at the table, at the mismatched napkins, at the chicken resting under foil. "It looks like we tried exactly enough."

The buzzer went off downstairs. She wiped her hands, he grabbed the corkscrew, and they both went to answer it.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm just as Dana got the last of the folding chairs out of the hall closet. Four chairs, one of them wobbling on a bad leg, plus the two kitchen stools. Six seats for five people, which meant somebody would end up on the arm of the couch anyway.

"Did you salt the water?" Marcus called from the bathroom, where he was scrubbing the sink with a sponge that had seen better decades.

"I salted the water."

"You said that last time."

"Last time I forgot. This time I salted the water." Dana lifted the lid on the pot and let the steam hit her face, then put it back down. The chicken had been marinating since morning in a mix she'd improvised from a half-empty bottle of soy sauce and whatever citrus was left in the fruit bowl. It smelled promising, which she took as a decent sign.

Marcus came out drying his hands on his jeans. He surveyed the apartment the way he always did before people came over — like a stranger might walk in and grade it. The stack of mail on the counter went into a drawer. The laundry basket went into the bedroom with the door pulled shut.

"They know we live here," Dana said.

"They know. They don't need proof."

He put on music, something low and instrumental, and started opening the wine so it could breathe, or whatever it was that wine was supposed to do. Dana handed him the corkscrew before he asked for it.

At six-forty, someone knocked. Marcus looked at her. She looked at the chicken, still five minutes out.

"Stall them," she said.

"With what?"

"Your personality."

He grinned, wiped his hands one more time, and went to get the door.


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at ten past six, which meant Devon was behind. He wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder and leaned into the hallway.

"Are the folding chairs still in the closet, or did we lend them out?"

"Closet," Marisol called back. "Behind the vacuum. Don't pull the vacuum out or the whole shelf comes down."

He pulled the vacuum out. The whole shelf came down—a cascade of extension cords, a badminton set neither of them remembered buying, three mismatched throw pillows. Marisol appeared in the doorway holding a bottle of wine in each hand, surveying the wreckage with the expression of someone who had predicted the weather correctly and took no pleasure in it.

"Red or white?" she asked.

"Both. Ana drinks white, Kevin drinks whatever's open."

She set them on the counter and crouched to help him gather cords. Their knees knocked. He said sorry; she said don't be.

The apartment was small enough that hosting required choreography. The coffee table went against the wall. The kitchen table got dragged into the living room and its wobbling leg got shimmed with a folded magazine subscription card, as it had been shimmed for two years. Marisol lit the one candle they owned that didn't smell like a department store, and Devon put on the playlist he'd spent an embarrassing amount of Tuesday building.

"Too much?" he said, when the first song came on.

"It's fine."

"It's a little much."

"It's a little much," she agreed, "but they'll think you're charming."

He checked the chicken. She folded paper napkins into triangles, then into rectangles, then gave up and stacked them. At 6:52 the buzzer rang, eight minutes early, and they looked at each other across the small bright room.

"Ready?" she said.

"No," he said, and went to answer it.


The rice cooker clicked to warm just as Dev realized he'd forgotten the cilantro.

"I'll go," Marisol said, already pulling her jacket off the hook by the door. "You finish the beans."

"They're finished. They've been finished. They're going to be mush if people don't show up soon."

"Then turn the burner off." She kissed the side of his head on her way past, grabbed her keys, and was gone.

Dev turned the burner off. He surveyed the counter: the beans, the rice, a bowl of pickled onions that had turned an aggressive magenta overnight, a tray of things he'd chopped that morning and covered with a damp paper towel because Marisol had read somewhere that this kept them fresh. He was skeptical. The paper towel looked sad.

He moved the folding chair from the bedroom into the living room, which brought them to five seats for six people, and decided the sixth person could have the ottoman if they arrived last. That felt fair. He straightened the stack of magazines on the coffee table, then unstraightened it slightly, because Marisol claimed a perfectly straight stack looked like a dentist's office.

She came back with cilantro, a lime, and a bag of ice they didn't need.

"They had it by the register," she said.

"We have ice."

"We have four cubes and a mystery."

She washed the cilantro in the colander and shook it dry over the sink while Dev found the good knife. They worked around each other in the narrow kitchen with the unthinking choreography of people who had been doing it a long time — he stepped left, she ducked under his elbow, neither of them looked up.

"Music," she said.

"You pick. Last time you complained the whole night."

"Because you played that album."

The buzzer went off. Dev wiped his hands. Marisol lit the candle on the table, blew out the match, and went to answer it.


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because the sauce took the longest and because Marcus always oversalted it. She set a pot on the back burner, poured in the crushed tomatoes, and turned the radio to the station that played too many commercials but had the right kind of music between them.

Marcus came in at six with two paper bags and a bottle of wine he'd spent eleven minutes choosing. "The good bread was gone," he said, "so I got the other kind."

"The other kind's fine."

He unloaded onions, a bag of salad, a lemon he hadn't been asked to buy. Then he took off his jacket, rolled his sleeves, and went to work on the table, which was cluttered with mail and a phone charger and a paperback Dana had been not-reading for a month. He stacked everything on the bookshelf where they'd deal with it later, meaning never.

"Four or five?" he called.

"Five. Priya's bringing her cousin."

He counted out plates, three matching and two not, and put the mismatched ones at the spots nearest the kitchen so they'd be theirs. Dana tasted the sauce, made a face, added sugar, tasted again, and held the spoon out over her hand for him. He leaned in and took it.

"More basil."

"There is no more basil."

"Then it's perfect."

She laughed and went to change out of her work clothes. When she came back he was folding paper napkins into something ambitious that kept collapsing, so she took one from him and folded it in half.

"Elegant," he said.

"Efficient."

At seven the buzzer went. Marcus wiped his hands, looked at her, and she nodded, and he went to let them up while she moved the pot off the heat.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six-fifteen, which Marcus considered a good sign. He was scraping the blackened bits off the roasting pan while Dana rearranged the folding chairs around a table that had never been meant to seat six.

"They're going to be forty minutes late," she said. "They're always forty minutes late."

"Then the chicken will rest. Resting is good for chicken."

Dana pulled the tablecloth straight, a linen thing her mother had sent that still held its fold lines like a road map. She set out mismatched glasses—three from a set they'd bought together, two inherited from Marcus's old roommate, one that had simply appeared one day and never been claimed. She liked the mismatch. It looked lived-in.

Marcus called from the kitchen. "Do we have a corkscrew, or did we lose the corkscrew?"

"Junk drawer. Under the batteries."

"There are no batteries in the junk drawer."

"Then it's under wherever the batteries went."

He found it eventually, wedged inside an empty tin of shoe polish, and held it up like a trophy she didn't turn around to see. Dana was lighting a candle she'd been saving, the kind that came in a jar and smelled vaguely like a hotel lobby. She'd been saving it for something, and this seemed close enough.

They collided briefly in the hallway, him carrying a platter, her carrying napkins, and both paused for the half-second it took to sidestep each other in the way of people who had done it a thousand times.

"You should change your shirt," she said. "There's oil on it."

"There's oil on everything."

"Marcus."

He changed his shirt. When the buzzer finally rang—forty-two minutes late—Dana was still adjusting a chair, and Marcus was already at the door, hand on the latch, waiting for her to look up before he opened it.


Dev came home with the good tomatoes, the ones from the stand on Fulton that charged too much and were worth it. He set the bag on the counter next to the cutting board where Marisol had already laid out garlic, a lemon, and a knife she'd sharpened that morning because she said the dull one made her feel like she was sawing wood.

"They're bringing wine," she said. "Petra texted."

"Petra's wine or actual wine?"

"Be nice."

He kissed the top of her head on his way to the sink. She'd pinned her hair up with a pencil, which meant she'd been working before he got back, and there was a smear of flour on her forearm from the focaccia proofing under a towel by the window.

They divided the kitchen without discussing it. She took the stove, he took the counter. He sliced the tomatoes thin and salted them and let them sit while he shaved fennel into a bowl. Behind him she was browning sausage and swearing softly at the way the pan spat.

"Four or five?" he asked.

"Five. Bram's bringing that guy."

"The one from the climbing gym?"

"That was two guys ago."

Dev found the fifth chair in the hall closet, wedged behind a box of winter coats they had never once opened in April. He wiped it down and carried it in, and Marisol shifted the table eighteen inches to the left so it would fit, and the leg caught on the rug and she said *hold on* and he lifted the other end and they walked it over together.

At six-forty she lit the candles. At six-forty-five he changed his shirt. At six-fifty they stood in the kitchen eating tomato slices with their fingers over the sink, saying nothing, listening for the buzzer.


The rain had stopped by four, which Priya took as a good omen. She hauled the folding table up from the basement while Marcus wrestled with the chicken, which had been marinating since morning in something he'd improvised from yogurt, lemon, and half a jar of harissa he'd found behind the pickles.

"It's going to be too spicy," she called from the living room.

"It's going to be perfect."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

She wiped down the table with a dish towel and unfolded the good tablecloth, the one his mother had given them, ironed twice and still creased down the middle. Six chairs — four from the kitchen, two borrowed last month from the neighbors and never returned. She positioned the wobbliest one at the end where she'd sit herself.

Marcus came out with a bowl of olives and set it in the center, then moved it two inches left, then back. "Does this look like a centerpiece situation or a no-centerpiece situation?"

"There are flowers in the bucket by the door. From Tuesday."

"Tuesday flowers."

"They're fine. Cut the stems."

He cut the stems. She lit the lamps instead of the overhead light, which made the water stain on the ceiling nearly invisible, and put on a record because he liked the ritual of it even though the turntable skipped on the third track of everything.

At six-fifteen he burned his thumb on the sheet pan and swore loudly enough that she came running, and then they stood at the sink together running cold water over it, her hand around his wrist, both of them laughing at nothing in particular.

"They're going to be late," she said. "Deb is always late."

"Then we have time."

He kissed the top of her head. She turned the oven down twenty degrees, and outside the window the wet street went orange under the streetlights.


Dana got home first, which meant the music was already on when Marcus came through the door with two paper bags balanced against his chest.

"They didn't have the good bread," he announced.

"They never have the good bread on a Friday." She took the top bag before it slid. "You got the backup bread?"

"I got the backup bread."

The apartment was small enough that hosting six people meant strategy. Dana had spent twenty minutes moving the armchair three inches to the left, then three inches back. Marcus set the bags down and started unloading — a chicken, lemons, a bag of green beans that looked slightly tired, a bottle of wine with a label neither of them could pronounce.

"Nine dollars," he said, holding it up. "The guy said it was punching above its weight."

"The guy says that about everything."

He put on the apron she'd bought him as a joke two Christmases ago, the one that said ASK ME ABOUT MY RISOTTO, and began trimming beans with the specific ferocity of a man who did not want to be asked about his risotto. Dana worked around him, wiping the counter, finding the cloth napkins that lived in a drawer they only opened four times a year.

"Kayla's bringing dessert," she said.

"Kayla says she's bringing dessert."

"She's bringing something. It might be a bag of clementines again."

At six-forty they stood in the doorway of the kitchen and surveyed it: chicken in the oven, table set, one wine glass borrowed from a neighbor because they only owned five. Marcus had a smear of lemon zest on his forearm. Dana licked her thumb and wiped it off, and he let her.

"It looks good," he said.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

The buzzer went off. Neither of them moved for a second. Then they both did.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary by six-thirty. Dani had insisted on searing the chicken before roasting it, and now a thin gray haze hung near the ceiling while the window fan struggled.

"It's fine," she said, waving a dish towel. "It's supposed to smell like something."

Marcus set down the folding chair he'd carried up from the storage unit and wiped his palms on his jeans. "It's supposed to smell like food. Not a campfire."

"Campfires are cozy."

He opened the window wider, then went back to the table, which was really two tables — their kitchen table plus a card table pushed against it, hidden under a tablecloth Dani's aunt had given them years ago. The seam showed anyway. He tried shifting the runner to disguise it and gave up.

"Six plates?" he called.

"Seven. Rosa's bringing her cousin."

"Since when?"

"Since this afternoon. I texted you."

He checked his phone, found the message under three others he hadn't opened, and made a small noise of concession. He counted out seven plates, none of them matching, and decided the mismatch looked intentional if he alternated them.

Dani pulled the chicken out and stood back from the heat, blowing hair off her forehead. "Taste this," she said, holding out a spoon of pan sauce.

Marcus tasted. "More lemon."

"You always say more lemon."

"Because it's always true."

She squeezed half a lemon in, tasted again, and conceded nothing out loud. In the living room, he stacked the mail into a drawer, straightened the blanket on the couch, and turned on the lamp instead of the overhead light because Dani said the overhead made everyone look like they were being interrogated.

The buzzer rang at seven-ten. They looked at each other — she still in her apron, he holding a corkscrew — and both laughed, and then she untied the apron and he went to press the button.


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

"I can go," Marisol said from the couch, where she was untangling a string of patio lights they'd bought in July and never hung. "It's four blocks."

"It's raining."

"It's drizzling. There's a difference." She stood, shaking out the cord, and it fell into a shape almost resembling a line. "Also, you can't leave. The chicken needs turning in six minutes and you don't trust me with the chicken."

"I trust you with the chicken."

"You hovered last time."

He conceded this with a shrug and went back to slicing limes. She pulled on his rain jacket, which hung past her wrists, and left the door unlatched behind her the way she always did, which he'd stopped mentioning around year two.

Alone, he turned the chicken, wiped down the counter, moved the stack of unopened mail from the table to the top of the refrigerator, and considered the four mismatched chairs. Two were from her old apartment. One had been on the curb. The fourth they'd bought together at a yard sale, arguing pleasantly about whether they needed it.

She came back damp, holding cilantro and, inexplicably, a bag of ice.

"We have ice."

"We have three cubes and a frozen bag of peas from an era I can't account for."

The friends arrived at seven-fifteen, which meant seven-forty, which gave them time to hang half the lights over the small back window before giving up and draping the rest along the bookshelf. It looked, Marisol declared, intentional.

Devon plated the chicken. She poured the drinks and lit the one candle that wasn't a novelty. When the knock came, they looked at the table together — crowded, uneven, warm — and then at each other.

"Good enough," she said.

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


The rice cooker clicked to warm just as Dana realized she'd forgotten the wine.

"Marcus." She said his name in the particular flat tone that meant a problem had occurred.

He looked up from the cutting board, where he was slicing cucumbers into rounds so uneven she'd stopped commenting on them years ago. "What."

"Nobody's bringing anything to drink."

"Priya said she was."

"Priya said she'd bring dessert. Dessert isn't a beverage."

Marcus set down the knife and wiped his hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle, which she had asked him not to do because it smeared. "There's the store on Halsted. Twelve minutes."

"It's ten to seven."

"Then I should probably leave."

He found his keys in the bowl by the door, then didn't leave immediately, because he was looking at the table. She'd set it with the good plates, the ones from his grandmother, four of them and two mismatched ones from the everyday stack, arranged so the mismatched pair went to the two of them.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like we own six plates."

"We do own six plates."

When the door shut behind him she turned the burner down under the curry and tasted it and added salt and tasted it again. Through the window she could see the neighbor's dog on its balcony, watching the street with tremendous investment. She moved the candles twice and put them back the first way.

The buzzer went off at 7:04, and it was Priya and her boyfriend, who had brought a pie and a bottle of wine after all, and by the time Marcus came up the stairs with two more bottles and a bag of ice he hadn't needed, the apartment was loud enough that he had to say her name twice before she heard him.


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

"I can go," Marcus said from the living room, where he was wrestling a folding chair out of the hall closet. The chair had been in there since they moved in, wedged behind a box of Christmas lights neither of them had gotten around to sorting.

"You'll be gone twenty minutes and they'll be here in thirty."

"Fifteen. I'll take the back way."

She waved him off with a wooden spoon, which he took as permission. The door shut, and Delia stood alone in the kitchen with a pot of black beans going soft and a chicken she'd rubbed with cumin an hour ago sitting on the counter, waiting for the oven to finish preheating.

She set the table for six. Their table only really seated four, so the folding chair went at one end and a stool from the kitchen at the other. She put the good napkins out — cloth, from a set of eight, two of which had gone missing in some laundry incident nobody had investigated.

Marcus came back with limes and also a bag of tortilla chips and a bottle of wine that had been on sale, which he presented like evidence of good judgment.

"You bought chips."

"People like chips."

He was right, she conceded, and put him to work slicing the limes while she checked the chicken. They moved around each other in the narrow kitchen with the easy choreography of people who had done this a hundred times, a hand on a back, a small step sideways without looking.

At six-forty, the buzzer went. Marcus wiped his hands on a dish towel and went to let them in. Delia turned the burner down, took one last look at the table, and decided it was fine — better than fine — and followed him to the door.


The rain had stopped by four, which Dana took as a good sign. She wedged the front door open with a shoe and let the wet-pavement smell come in while she wiped down the table they'd inherited from her aunt.

Miguel was in the kitchen, doing the thing he did where he read a recipe three times before touching anything. "It says to let the dough rest thirty minutes," he called out. "I already let it rest forty-five. Is that worse?"

"It's dough. It's not going to hold a grudge."

He came to the doorway holding a dish towel over his shoulder like a waiter. "You say that, but you didn't see how it looked at me."

She laughed and went back to the chairs — five of them, one borrowed from the neighbor across the hall, and it didn't match, and she'd decided she was fine with that. The apartment was small enough that people would end up standing in the kitchen anyway. They always did.

Miguel put on music, then turned it down, then turned it up two notches. He tasted the sauce and made a face and added something and made a different face. Dana came in behind him and reached past his arm for a spoon.

"Don't," he said.

She tasted it. "It's good."

"It's not done."

"It's good and it's not done. Both."

He conceded this by handing her the pepper grinder. She gave it four twists. He watched her do it and didn't say anything, which she understood as a compliment.

At six-fifteen, the buzzer went. Miguel wiped his hands, twice, on the towel. Dana pulled the shoe out from under the door and looked back at him — the flour on his forearm, the two candles he'd lit early so the wicks were already black.

"Ready?"

"No," he said, and went to answer it.


The Apartment on Fillmore Street

Dana found the good tablecloth at the bottom of the linen closet, wrinkled into a shape that suggested it had been folded by someone in a hurry three years ago. She held it up to the light.

"Iron or lie about it?" she called.

Marcus, elbow-deep in a colander of green beans at the sink, didn't turn around. "Lie about it. Say it's textured."

She spread it over the table anyway and pressed the creases flat with her palms, which accomplished nothing but felt productive. The apartment smelled like garlic and the lemon cleaner she'd used on the bathroom sink an hour ago, and somewhere under both of those, faintly, like the radiator.

He'd been cooking since four. Roast chicken, because it was forgiving, and the green beans because Priya had gone vegetarian in October and might have gone back, nobody was sure. There were candles on the counter still in their plastic. There was a bottle of wine that Dana had chosen based entirely on the label having a bird on it.

"How many chairs do we actually own," Marcus said. It wasn't a question so much as a slow dawning.

"Four. Plus the desk chair."

"That's five people."

"There are five people."

He counted on wet fingers. Himself, Dana, Priya, Theo, Theo's friend from work whose name they'd both agreed to pretend they remembered. "Five," he conceded.

Dana dragged the desk chair down the hall, banging it against the doorframe, and positioned it at the head of the table like a throne. "Whoever's last gets the good one," she said.

Marcus turned the oven light on and crouched to look at the chicken, which was doing the thing chickens do — browning slowly, indifferent to anyone's schedule. Behind him, Dana was lighting the candles with a grill lighter, and the buzzer rang, twenty minutes early, and they looked at each other.

"Textured," she said.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burning butter, which meant Renata had walked away from the pan again.

"I'm on it," Desmond said, sliding the skillet off the burner with a dish towel. He scraped the darkened bits into the trash and started over, because there was no salvaging that and no point pretending otherwise.

Renata came in from the bedroom holding two shirts. "Blue or the green one with the collar?"

"Green. Blue makes you look like you're going to a job interview."

"I like looking employable." She disappeared again. He heard the closet door, then her voice, muffled: "Did you get the bread?"

"I got bread."

"The good bread or the bread from the gas station?"

"There is one loaf of bread in this apartment and it came from the bakery on Fifth, so you can relax."

She reappeared in the green shirt, sleeves pushed up, and started clearing the mail off the table — three weeks of it, catalogs and a jury summons she'd been ignoring. She swept it all into a paper bag and shoved the bag behind the couch.

"That's a system," Desmond said.

"It's a temporary system." She set out four plates, then hesitated. "Wait, is Marcus bringing someone?"

"He said maybe."

"Maybe means yes." She got a fifth plate.

He tasted the sauce, added pepper, tasted it again and handed her the spoon. She blew on it, tried it, made a face that meant it was fine.

"More salt."

"There's plenty of salt."

"Then more lemon."

He squeezed in half a lemon while she lit the two candles they only ever used for this. The buzzer went off downstairs at seven-oh-four, and Renata looked around the room once, quickly, the way she always did — checking for anything obviously wrong — and then went to buzz them up.


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because the sauce took time and Ellis always claimed the onions made him weep like a widower. She had the radio on low, the kind of station that played songs she half-remembered from someone else's car.

Ellis came in at six with two paper bags and a bottle of wine chosen entirely by label design. "Green one or the one with the horse?"

"The horse. Green one's for us later."

He set the bags down and started clearing the table, which meant relocating the mail pile, the phone charger, a library book three weeks overdue, and a small ceramic dish holding screws from a shelf they'd never finished mounting. He put all of it in the bedroom and shut the door, a strategy they had refined over four years.

"Are we doing the good plates?"

"We only have one set of plates."

"Then we're doing the good plates."

Dana tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted it again, and held the spoon out to him without looking. He blew on it, sipped, nodded. "More garlic."

"There's already six cloves in there."

"And it wants seven."

She added the seventh. He set out mismatched glasses, folded paper napkins into approximate triangles, and lit a candle that smelled aggressively of cedar until she made him blow it out.

At seven-fifteen the buzzer went off downstairs and they both froze, taking one last inventory. The bathroom towel was clean. The couch cushions were arranged over the stain. The salad was dressed, the bread was warm, and the radio had been swapped for something with fewer commercials.

"Okay," Ellis said.

"Okay," Dana said, and pressed the button to let their friends in, and by the time footsteps reached the landing they were both standing in the open doorway, laughing at nothing, holding the door for whoever was first up the stairs.


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because the sauce took an hour and Marcus always underestimated it. She browned the sausage in the heavy pot they'd bought at a yard sale two summers ago, the one with the chipped enamel handle that everyone told them to throw out.

Marcus came in at six-fifteen carrying two bags of ice and a bottle of wine he wasn't sure about. "The guy said it goes with red sauce," he said, setting it on the counter. "I don't know. He seemed confident."

"Confidence is most of it," Dana said. She handed him a spoon. "Taste."

He tasted. "More salt."

"It's always more salt with you."

"And I'm always right."

He put the ice in the freezer, then started on the table, which meant clearing the mail pile off it first — six weeks of catalogs, a jury summons he'd already responded to, a postcard from his sister. He shoved it all into a drawer and closed the drawer with his hip.

"You're not hiding that," Dana said without turning around.

"I'm staging."

They had four coming: Priya and her boyfriend, and Tom, and a woman from Dana's office named Renée who Marcus suspected was being set up with Tom, though Dana denied it with a straightness of face that convinced no one.

At seven he found her in the bedroom, changing her shirt for the third time.

"That one," he said.

"You said that about the last one."

"I meant it about the last one too."

She laughed and pulled it over her head, and he went to check the sauce because someone had to, and burned his tongue on the spoon.

The buzzer went off at seven-twenty. Dana got the door. Marcus got the wine.

"Smells incredible," Priya said from the hallway.

"That's all her," Marcus called. "I did the ice."


The rice cooker clicked over to warm at six-fifteen, and Danielle swore, because the chicken still had twenty minutes left in the oven and she'd wanted everything to land at once.

"It'll keep," Marcus said from the sink, where he was scrubbing the last of the mixing bowls. He had flour on his forearm and hadn't noticed. "Rice doesn't care."

"I care."

"You care too much." He said it fondly, flicking water at her, and she dodged and grabbed the dish towel off the oven handle to snap at his hip.

They'd cleared the coffee table an hour ago and pushed it against the wall so the folding chairs would fit. Four people coming: Rosa and her boyfriend, and Terrence, and Terrence's cousin who nobody had met yet. Marcus had insisted on the cousin. He had a theory that a dinner party needed one stranger in it or the conversation just went in circles about work.

Danielle checked the chicken again, closing the oven door too hard out of habit. "Did you get candles?"

"I got candles."

"Real ones, or the—"

"The battery ones were cheaper and you can't tell in the dark."

She laughed, and he took that as a win.

At six-forty the buzzer went, early, which meant Rosa, who was always early and always apologized for it. Marcus wiped his hands and went to buzz her up while Danielle pulled the chicken out and stood there for a second with the pan in her mitts, surveying the apartment — the mismatched chairs, the good plates they'd bought together at a restaurant supply store, the candles that were fake but looked fine.

"It looks good," Marcus said behind her.

"It looks okay."

"It looks good," he repeated, and took the pan out of her hands before she could argue about it.


Devon got home first and immediately started rearranging the living room, which was his way of pretending he'd been productive all day. He shoved the coffee table three feet to the left, decided that looked worse, and shoved it back.

"You're going to scratch the floor," Marisol said from the doorway, still holding her keys and a paper bag of limes.

"I lifted it."

"You dragged it. I heard it from the hallway."

She set the limes on the counter and started pulling things out of the fridge — a package of chicken thighs, a bunch of cilantro going slightly sad at the edges, half an onion wrapped in cling film. Devon came up behind her and looked over her shoulder with the specific expression of a man who wanted to be helpful without being assigned anything.

"Chop," she said, handing him the onion.

They'd argued that morning about whether four people counted as a dinner party or just dinner. Devon had insisted it was just dinner, which meant paper napkins were fine. Marisol had bought cloth ones anyway, on her lunch break, and hadn't mentioned it. They were now folded on the table, and Devon had noticed and said nothing, which was its own form of concession.

By six-thirty the apartment smelled like cumin and browning garlic. Marisol was tasting sauce off a wooden spoon and frowning. Devon was on a chair, changing the bulb in the hallway fixture that had been out since February.

"Now?" she said. "You're doing it now?"

"They'll see it."

"They will not notice a hallway light."

"I'd notice."

She admitted, silently, that this was true, and that it was one of the things about him. The doorbell rang eight minutes early. Devon got down off the chair. Marisol wiped her hands on a dish towel, looked at him, and they both moved toward the door at the same time.