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

"You torched it," Marcus said, waving a dish towel at the smoke detector.

"I *seasoned* it." She pulled the roasting pan out anyway, the chicken skin gone the color of dark honey in patches. "Look at that. That's character."

He leaned over her shoulder to inspect it, then reached past her for the tongs. "Give me two minutes with the pan sauce and nobody will know."

They had thirty-five minutes. The table was still covered in the mail they'd been meaning to sort since October — a stack of catalogs, a jury summons Danielle had already responded to, three separate offers for a credit card neither of them wanted. She swept the whole pile into a canvas tote and shoved it behind the couch.

"That's a system," Marcus said, not looking up from the stove.

"That's an *organizing* system."

He'd bought cloth napkins at the beginning of the week, which she'd teased him about for four straight days and then folded carefully into triangles, one at each of the five places. Five, because Priya was bringing her brother, who was in town and apparently ate a lot.

Danielle put on music, changed it, changed it again, and settled on something with a bassline low enough to talk over. Marcus tasted the sauce, added lemon, tasted it again, and held the spoon out to her without a word. She sipped.

"More salt."

"It's got plenty of salt."

"More salt," she said, already reaching for the box.

The buzzer went off at 6:52. Marcus wiped his hands and looked around the kitchen — the counters clear, the wine breathing, his girlfriend of eleven years pulling glasses down from the high shelf.

"Ready?"

"Absolutely not," she said, and went to let them in.


Dev found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen drawer, which meant twenty minutes with the iron and a spray bottle while the oven preheated. Yolanda had claimed the kitchen an hour earlier and defended it since, moving between the stove and the cutting board with the particular focus she brought to anything involving knives.

"Six or eight?" Dev called from the dining room.

"Six. Marcus is bringing his sister, but Priya bailed."

"Priya always bails."

"Priya has a two-year-old." Yolanda tipped a bowl of diced onion into the pan and it hissed. "Grace under fire, remember. She showed up to your birthday with a diaper bag and a bottle of wine."

Dev laid out the plates, then rearranged them because two of the salad plates had chips along the rim. He hid those in the cabinet behind the cereal bowls and used the mismatched blue ones instead. Nobody would notice. Yolanda would notice.

She noticed. "The blue ones?"

"The others are chipped."

"They're all chipped." She said it without turning around. "Can you do the bread? It's on the counter, and there's butter softening in the yellow dish."

He cut the loaf on the diagonal, which he'd learned from her, and stacked the slices in a basket lined with a dish towel, which he'd also learned from her. Behind him she was tasting something off a wooden spoon, frowning, adding salt, tasting again.

"Is it good?"

"It's going to be." She handed him the spoon. "Tell me what's missing."

He tried it. "Lemon?"

"Lemon." She was already reaching for one. "See, this is why I keep you."

The doorbell went off at ten past seven, early enough to be rude, and they looked at each other across the small bright kitchen before either of them moved.


The rain had stopped by four, which Dmitri took as a good sign. He carried the folding table up from the basement while Renée wiped down the counters, the two of them moving around each other in the narrow kitchen with the practiced choreography of people who had shared a small space for six years.

"The chairs don't match," he said, setting them out.

"Nobody's coming to look at the chairs."

He wasn't convinced. He went back down anyway and returned with a red cushion, placing it on the wobbliest seat like an apology.

Renée had started the sauce at two, and now the whole apartment smelled like garlic and tomato and something faintly burnt she hoped nobody would ask about. She'd doubled the recipe because Farid always went back for thirds and because she'd never once in her life made too little food.

"Wine," Dmitri said.

"On the counter."

"Not that wine. The good one."

"There's a good one?"

He found it behind the cereal boxes, where he'd hidden it in November and then forgotten about entirely. He held it up like a trophy. She laughed and told him to open it early, let it breathe, do whatever it was that people did.

At six-fifteen she changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. Dmitri lit a candle, thought better of it, blew it out, then lit it again when she gave him a look.

"It's just Farid and Chen," he said.

"I know."

"And Bex."

"I know who's coming. I invited them."

He kissed the side of her head on his way past. She pretended not to notice, then reached back and caught his sleeve for a second before letting go.

The buzzer rang at 6:40. They looked at each other. Renée wiped her hands on a dish towel, and Dmitri went to answer it.


The rain had let up by four, which Devon took as a good omen. He wedged the door open with his hip and carried the grocery bags into the kitchen, where Marisol was already elbow-deep in a bowl of masa, her sleeves pushed past the elbow, flour dusting the counter like a light snow.

"They're bringing wine," she said without looking up. "Trina texted. So don't open the good bottle."

"The good bottle is eleven dollars."

"That's why it's the good bottle."

He set the bags down and started unloading — limes, a bundle of cilantro, the queso fresco she'd written on the list twice, underlined. Their apartment was small enough that hosting meant rearranging the whole living room, so he began the familiar choreography: coffee table pushed toward the window, the two folding chairs from the closet, the throw blanket draped over the spot on the couch where the upholstery had given up.

"Do we own six forks?" he called.

"We own five forks and something that might be a fork."

"That's a fork."

"It's a serving thing."

"It'll be a fork tonight."

Marisol laughed and wiped her hands on the dish towel slung over her shoulder. She came over and surveyed his furniture arrangement, tilted her head, then nudged the coffee table two inches to the left. He didn't argue. She had a way of seeing a room that he didn't, the same way he could taste a sauce and know it wanted acid.

By six the windows had fogged and the whole place smelled like toasted chiles. Devon lit the candle they'd been saving, the one that smelled faintly like a cedar closet, and Marisol changed out of her flour-dusted shirt and back into the same jeans.

The buzzer rang at 6:40. They looked at each other across the small warm room.

"Ready?" she said.

"Been ready," he said, and went to let them in.


The Apartment on Nineteenth Street

Dara found the good tablecloth folded in the linen closet behind a stack of towels, still creased from the last time they'd used it. She shook it out over the table and it settled crooked, one corner drooping toward the floor.

"It's too big," she said.

Marcus looked up from the stove, where he was stirring something that smelled like cumin and burnt onion. "It's the same table it's always been."

"It's the same tablecloth. The table shrank." She tugged the corner and the whole thing shifted the other way. "Never mind. Nobody's going to measure it."

He turned the burner down. "How many chairs do we need?"

"Six. Unless Priya brings her sister."

"Then seven."

"Then we don't have seven." Dara counted the chairs anyway — four at the table, the one from the desk, the folding one from the closet that pinched fingers. "Six. If her sister comes she can have mine and I'll eat standing up like a raccoon."

Marcus laughed and tasted the sauce off the wooden spoon, then held it out for her. She came over and took a sip and made a face.

"More salt."

"You always say more salt."

"You always need more salt."

He added salt. She went back and dealt out plates like cards, the mismatched ones on the far side where the light was worse. There was a water stain on the ceiling above the radiator that they'd stopped seeing months ago, and she looked at it now and decided it would be fine.

"Candles?" he called.

"Under the sink. The ones from the blackout."

He found them, three stubs of varying heights, and lined them up down the center of the crooked tablecloth. From the hallway came the sound of the buzzer, twenty minutes early.

"Of course," Dara said, and went to get the door.


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

"It's char," he said, angling the roasting pan so Denise could see the potatoes. "Char is a flavor."

"Char is a warning." She reached past him for the wooden spoon, and he stepped aside without being asked, the way they'd learned to move around each other in a kitchen barely wide enough for one. Four years of this. She could feel where he was standing without looking.

The table was already set — six places, mismatched chairs, the good plates that had been her grandmother's. Denise had spent twenty minutes that afternoon deciding whether to use them and another ten deciding whether that decision was ridiculous.

"Rachel's bringing wine," Marcus said. "Which means she's bringing that terrible orange stuff again."

"Be nice."

"I'm always nice. I drink it. That's the nicest thing a person can do."

He wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder and went to deal with the record player, which had been skipping since October. Denise heard him lift the needle, blow on something, set it down again. The music resumed, warped but recognizable.

She tasted the sauce. Too much lemon. She added butter, tasted again, and decided it was fine, and then decided it was actually good, and then called him over to try it.

He came, took the spoon, considered it seriously.

"That's the one," he said.

"You say that every time."

"It's true every time."

The buzzer sounded downstairs — someone early, which meant Tom, who was always early and always apologetic about it. Denise untied her apron. Marcus was already moving toward the door, pausing to straighten a napkin she'd folded twice.

"Ready?" he said.

She looked at the table, the crooked candles, the whole small chaos of it.

"Yeah," she said. "Let them in."


Dana got home first and started the sauce, because the sauce took the longest and because it was the only dish she trusted herself with. She had the radio on low, the kind of station that played songs she half-remembered from high school, and she was slicing garlic thin the way Marcus's mother had shown her once, over a phone screen, with a lot of laughing about how Dana held the knife.

Marcus came in at six with two bags of ice and a bottle of wine he wasn't sure about. "The guy said it goes with tomato," he said, setting it on the counter and kissing the side of her head. "I don't know. He also said it had notes of leather."

"Then it'll go great with the couch."

He took over the table, which was really the only job he wanted. He liked the geometry of it — four plates, four glasses, the mismatched forks arranged so the mismatching looked intentional. They'd been in the apartment two years and still owned exactly three chairs, so he dragged the desk chair in from the bedroom and put a cushion on it and decided that was fine, that was charming, someone would call it charming.

"Did you clean the bathroom?" Dana asked.

"I'm doing it after this."

"You always say after this."

He went and did it. She heard the fan whining through the wall and turned the sauce down and stood a minute with her hip against the counter, tasting from the spoon, adding salt, tasting again.

At seven the buzzer went. Marcus came out drying his hands on his jeans, and Dana pulled the bread from the oven a little darker than she'd meant, and they looked at each other across the small bright kitchen, and she said, "Okay," and he said, "Okay," and went to let everyone in.


The rice cooker was making its small clicking sound when Denise came in with the wine, two bottles, both red, because she could never remember which one Marcus said he liked.

"You bought the same thing twice," he said, not looking up from the cutting board.

"I bought two things. They have different labels."

He laughed at that, wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder, and took them from her. He had been chopping cilantro for the better part of ten minutes, which was longer than cilantro required, but he chopped things when he was nervous and she had stopped pointing it out years ago.

"Angela's bringing her sister," Denise said, kicking off her shoes by the door.

"Since when?"

"Since she texted me at four."

Marcus considered this. "Then we need another chair."

"We have another chair."

"We have the one from the bedroom with the wobble."

Denise went and got it anyway, carried it down the hall on her hip like a laundry basket, and set it at the end of the table where the floor was more forgiving. She pressed on it. It held. Marcus watched her do this and said nothing, which was his way of conceding.

They worked around each other after that, the kitchen too narrow for both of them, so there was a rhythm to it — he stepped back, she slid past, she reached over his arm for the colander. The chicken went in. The windows fogged a little at the corners.

At six-forty she changed her shirt twice and he told her the first one was better, and she put the first one back on and said he was only saying that to end the conversation, and he said yes, and they both stood in the hallway laughing when the buzzer went off.


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

"I can go," Marissa said from the bathroom doorway, one earring in, the other pinched between her fingers. "It's four blocks."

"You're not even dressed."

"I'm dressed. This is dressed." She gestured at herself — jeans, a sweater she'd owned since college, hair still damp at the ends. "Chelsea's seen me in worse. Chelsea's seen me with the flu."

Devon was pulling something out of the oven, and the kitchen filled with the smell of garlic and browned butter. He set the dish on the stovetop and stood back to look at it, hands on hips, the way he did with anything he'd made. "Does that look done?"

"It looks incredible."

"You didn't look."

"I looked." She crossed the room, kissed the back of his neck, and looked. "It's done. Get the plates down, I can't reach the good ones."

They'd bought the good plates at an estate sale in March, eight of them, mismatched but all in the same faded blue. Six had survived the move upstairs. Devon handed them down one at a time and Marissa set them out, then rearranged them, then moved the whole table two feet left so nobody would be sitting under the ceiling light that buzzed.

"You have flour on your face," she said.

"Where?"

"Everywhere. It's a look."

He wiped at his cheek with his forearm and missed entirely. She reached up and got it with her thumb.

Downstairs, the buzzer went off — early, of course, because Chelsea was always early and always apologized for it.

"Wine," Marissa said, grabbing her coat.

"Go. I'll stall them."

She was already on the stairs, taking them two at a time, laughing at something he'd said behind her that she hadn't quite heard.


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

"Charred is a flavor," she said, waving a dish towel at the smoke detector until it stopped chirping.

Marcus didn't look up from the cutting board. He was working through a mountain of potatoes with the grim focus of a man defusing something. "It's a flavor people apologize for."

"Then I'll apologize. I'll be very gracious about it." She opened the window over the sink, and cold air rolled in across the counter, carrying the sound of a bus braking on the corner. "Did you text Priya about the thing? The dairy thing?"

"She eats cheese."

"She said she was cutting back."

"She said that in September." Marcus scraped the potatoes into a pot. "She brought a wheel of brie to your birthday."

Dana conceded the point by not answering. She was arranging chairs instead — four of them from the kitchen, one from the bedroom desk that wobbled, and the ottoman, which someone would have to volunteer for. Their table sat six if nobody wanted to move their elbows.

"Put the wobbly one at my end," Marcus said. "I'll get up for things anyway."

"You always do."

"That's because you always forget the serving spoons."

She threw the dish towel at his back. He caught it without turning, which annoyed her enough that she decided not to mention it.

By seven the potatoes were mashed, the chicken was resting under foil, and the burnt rosemary had become a story they'd tell rather than a problem. Dana lit two candles she'd been saving. Marcus dimmed the overhead light, stood back, and squinted at the room.

"It looks good," he said.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's the same thing."

The buzzer went off downstairs. She got the door; he got the wine.


Dana got home first, which meant the music was already too loud when Marcus came through the door with the bags. He set them on the counter, turned the volume down two notches, and she turned it back up one without looking away from the cutting board.

"Compromise," she said.

"That's not what that word means."

They had four coming at seven, which sounded manageable until Dana remembered the folding chairs were still in the storage unit and the storage unit closed at six. Marcus said they'd sit two on the couch and pull the desk chair in. Dana said the desk chair squeaked. Marcus said the squeak would be a conversation piece.

He took over the onions because she'd been crying at them for a full minute and refusing to admit it. She moved to the living room and started shoving mail into a drawer, then took it back out and sorted it properly, because the drawer was already a disaster from the last time they'd hosted.

At six-fifteen the smoke detector went off. Neither of them had put the oven fan on. Marcus stood on a kitchen chair waving a dish towel at the ceiling while Dana propped the front door open with a boot, and their neighbor across the hall stuck her head out to make sure nobody was dying.

By six-forty the apartment smelled like garlic and browned butter instead of panic. Dana lit the one candle they owned that wasn't a birthday candle. Marcus found a bottle of wine somebody had left behind in September and decided it was fine.

"We're actually going to pull this off," Dana said.

"Don't say that out loud."

She looked at him. He was wiping the counter with his sleeve. She decided not to mention it.

The buzzer rang at six fifty-two — always the early one, always the same friend — and they both said a bad word at the same time, laughing, and went to answer it.


The Ford's transmission had been making that noise for a month, so Marisol insisted they take her Corolla instead. Dwayne loaded the cooler into the trunk Friday afternoon, still in his work boots, sawdust in the creases of his neck.

"Did you get the ice?" she asked.

"Two bags. And the good chips, not the store brand."

They were driving three hours north to a state park where his cousin had once camped, though they'd booked a cabin instead of a tent. Neither of them had slept on the ground since their twenties, and Marisol had been clear about that when the idea first came up over dinner two weeks earlier.

The plan had been simple: leave by four, arrive before dark. But Dwayne's shift ran long, and then Marisol remembered they'd promised her sister they'd drop off the borrowed folding table. By the time they hit the highway it was almost six, the sun already sitting low and orange in the rearview.

She drove the first leg. He fiddled with the radio, gave up, and put on a playlist she'd made two Christmases ago. They talked about the neighbor's dog, about whether his hours would get cut in January, about nothing at all for long stretches while the exits thinned out and the billboards gave way to trees.

They stopped once for gas and bad coffee. Dwayne bought a scratch-off ticket and lost.

The cabin smelled like cedar and old smoke. There was a woodstove neither of them knew how to work, so they turned on the space heater and ate sandwiches standing at the counter. Marisol found a deck of cards in a drawer, missing the seven of hearts.

"We can still play," Dwayne said.

They played until eleven, the space heater ticking, the dark pressing against the windows. Tomorrow there was a trail somewhere. Tonight this was enough.


Maritza gets home from the clinic at six-forty, and Dev has already loaded the cooler.

"I put in the good mustard," he says, "and the seltzer you like, and I think I overpacked the ice."

"You always overpack the ice."

They are driving two and a half hours north, to a cabin his cousin rents out cheap in the off-season. It is not a vacation, exactly. Maritza has Saturday and Sunday off for the first time in five weeks, and Dev's shifts at the warehouse got cut, which is bad news dressed up as free time. They decided on Wednesday, over a shared plate of leftover rice, that they were going anyway.

She changes out of scrubs while he checks the tire pressure with the little pen gauge his father gave him. The front left is low again. He fills it at the gas station on Route 9 while she runs in for coffee and comes back with coffee, two bananas, and a bag of sour candy she did not intend to buy.

"Dinner," she says.

"Balanced," he says.

They have been together six years and have talked about getting married twice, both times pleasantly, both times without resolution. Her name is on the lease; his name is on the car. The cat stays with the downstairs neighbor, who has a key.

The traffic thins out past the reservoir. Maritza puts her feet on the dash, which he hates and tolerates. She reads him the cabin listing out loud in a real-estate voice — *rustic charm, wood stove, no cell service* — and he laughs at *charm*.

Somewhere around the second exit for a town neither of them has heard of, the sky goes orange behind the hills. She stops reading. He turns the radio down without being asked, and for eleven miles neither of them says anything at all.


Maya finishes packing at eleven on Friday night, which is later than she promised herself, and Dev is already asleep on top of the comforter with his phone face-down on his chest. She takes the phone, plugs it in, and considers waking him to ask whether he remembered the cooler. She decides against it.

They leave at six-forty in the morning, twenty minutes behind schedule, which Dev points out is actually pretty good for them. The car smells like the gas station coffee he insisted on buying and the bananas Maya packed because she read somewhere that you should eat something before you drink caffeine. He drives the first stretch. She reads him the parts of the cabin listing that seem important — the woodstove, the note about the last mile of road being gravel, the warning that there's no cell service.

"No service at all?"

"That's what it says."

"Huh," he says, and neither of them can tell if the other is pleased.

Somewhere past the second exit she falls asleep against the window and wakes up ninety minutes later with a crease in her cheek and Dev humming along to something she doesn't recognize. They stop in a town with one traffic light and buy firewood from a man selling it out of a truck bed for six dollars a bundle. Dev buys three bundles. Maya says that's too much wood for two nights. Dev says he'd rather have too much.

The gravel road is worse than advertised. The cabin is smaller than the pictures and colder, and the woodstove takes forty minutes and a great deal of swearing before it catches. But by four in the afternoon there's heat coming off it, and Maya has found the one chair that doesn't wobble, and Dev is standing at the window looking at trees, saying nothing, which she has learned means he's happy.


Maya wakes before the alarm on Friday, already thinking about the cooler. She nudges Dev, who groans and pulls the blanket over his head.

"You said you'd pack the car last night," she says.

"I said I'd think about packing the car."

They compromise, as they usually do, by doing it together at seven in the morning, hauling the tent bag and the folding chairs and the cooler down two flights of stairs to the parking lot. Dev insists the tent will fit in the trunk. It does not. It rides in the back seat instead, wedged against a grocery bag of granola bars and a jug of water.

The plan is modest: two nights at a state park about three hours north, near a lake Maya's coworker described as "not fancy, but quiet." They booked the site eleven days ago, on a Tuesday, after a conversation that started as a complaint about the summer and turned into a decision. Dev handled the reservation. Maya handled the food, which meant she stood in the grocery store aisle for twenty minutes debating whether two people could reasonably eat a whole watermelon.

They stop for coffee at the gas station on Route 9. Dev drives the first leg while Maya reads him things off her phone — the weather, a warning about ticks, a review complaining that the bathrooms were "rustic."

"Rustic," Dev repeats.

"I brought hand sanitizer."

The highway thins out past the second exit. Farmland, then trees. Maya rolls the window down and the noise makes conversation difficult, so they stop talking and let the radio fill the car. Somewhere past the county line Dev reaches over without looking and puts his hand on her knee, and she covers it with hers, and neither of them says anything about it.

They arrive a little after eleven. The lake is exactly as advertised.


The Saturday Before

Marcus found the cooler in the garage behind a stack of paint cans, and he hosed the dust off it in the driveway while Danielle stood on the back step with a legal pad, reading out loud.

"Coffee, obviously. The good stuff, not the pods. Eggs — no, we're not cooking eggs, we're not bringing a pan."

"There's a pan there," Marcus said. "Your cousin said the cabin has everything."

"My cousin also said the road was 'mostly paved.'"

They had settled on two nights at her cousin Renee's place outside Hocking Hills, mostly because it was free and because Marcus had a Monday off for the first time since February. They'd been in the apartment on Delaware Avenue for three years now, a lease they resigned each spring without much discussion, and this was the first trip they'd taken that wasn't a funeral or somebody's wedding.

Packing took longer than the drive would. Danielle folded things; Marcus stuffed them. She reminded him twice about his inhaler. He reminded her that she'd forgotten a jacket the last three times they'd gone anywhere in October, and she said that was two times, not three, and got the jacket.

They left at 6:40 a.m. because Marcus insisted on beating the traffic, though there was no traffic, and Danielle fell asleep against the window before they'd cleared the county line. He drove with the radio low, one hand on the wheel, and let her sleep.

She woke up somewhere past Lancaster to fields going gold and a gas station sign advertising fried chicken.

"You hungry?" he asked.

"I'm always hungry."

He pulled off. They ate in the parking lot with the doors open, grease on their fingers, the cooler unopened in the back seat, and Danielle said this already counted as a good trip, and Marcus said they hadn't even gotten there yet.


Maria clipped the last of the coupons to the refrigerator door and looked at the calendar again. Two days. That was all Devon could get, and only because the warehouse shut down for inventory.

"Galveston," he said, coming out of the bathroom with his hair still wet. "Three hours, tops. We stay one night, come back Sunday afternoon."

"Or Fredericksburg." She'd looked it up on her phone at the laundromat. "There's peach stands."

"It's November."

"Fine. Galveston."

They packed on Friday night, which meant Devon threw two shirts and a phone charger into his gym bag while Maria took forty-five minutes deciding whether the good jacket was worth the space. Her daughter, Aliyah, was staying with Maria's sister across town, and there had been a long negotiation about that, too — Aliyah was thirteen and had opinions about being handed off like a package.

"Text me when you get there," Aliyah said at the door, arms crossed, performing indifference badly.

"Text you when we get on the highway," Maria said, and kissed the top of her head.

They left at six in the morning. Devon drove; he always drove, not out of principle but because Maria got sleepy on long stretches and he liked the quiet of the road before the sun came up. She fell asleep somewhere past the refinery flares and woke to him tapping her knee.

"Coffee?"

The gas station coffee was terrible. They drank it anyway, standing by the truck in the cold, watching a gull work over an empty chip bag.

"Seawall first," Maria said. "Then breakfast. Then whatever."

"Then whatever," Devon agreed.

The motel wouldn't let them check in until three, but they'd known that. They drove the length of the seawall with the windows cracked, the Gulf flat and gray and enormous, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was the point.


Maritza got off her shift at the hospital at seven, and by seven-fifteen she was texting Deshawn a photo of a cabin listing she'd found: two hours north, wood stove, a porch with two chairs on it.

"Sixty bucks a night," she wrote. "We could leave Friday after you close."

He wrote back a thumbs up, then, a minute later: *what about the dog*

Her sister would take the dog. That was settled by Wednesday.

Friday, Deshawn locked up the shop at six and drove home with the truck already half-packed — he'd thrown in the cooler, the sleeping bags they didn't need, a bag of charcoal out of habit. Maritza came down the apartment steps with a canvas tote of groceries and a bottle of wine she'd been saving since her birthday.

"You bring the thing?" she asked. "The speaker?"

"It's in the console."

They got on the highway behind a line of taillights, and for the first forty minutes neither of them said much. Maritza put her feet on the dash, which he'd asked her not to do a hundred times, and he let it go. Somewhere past the county line the traffic thinned and the sky opened up orange over the fields, and she reached over and put her hand on the back of his neck.

The cabin was smaller than the photos, the way they always are. The stove took three tries. Deshawn stood there feeding it kindling while Maritza unpacked the cooler onto a counter that sloped visibly toward the sink.

"There's no cell service," she reported, holding her phone up near the window.

"Good."

She found the two chairs on the porch and dragged them closer together. It was cold enough to see her breath. When he came out with the wine, she was already sitting, wrapped in a blanket off the bed, waiting for him.


The Cooler in the Back Seat

Dana got off shift at the plant at six, and by six-forty she was in the driveway with the hatchback open, arguing pleasantly with Marcus about whether two duffel bags counted as overpacking for two nights.

"It's one bag of clothes and one bag of, like, everything else," she said. "Chargers. Aspirin. The good pillow."

"You're bringing the pillow."

"I'm bringing the pillow."

They'd been in the apartment on Reeder Street four years now, long enough that his mail came addressed there and her name was on the lease and neither of them had ever felt an urgent need to sort out whose was whose. The trip had come together the way most of their plans did — a text at lunch, a scroll through cabins, a decision made at eleven at night while the TV played to nobody.

Marcus filled the cooler: sandwiches, two Gatorades, the leftover pasta salad because it wouldn't survive till Monday. He checked the oil, because the car had 140,000 miles and a personality. Dana came out with a paper towel roll and a bag of pretzels and set them on the passenger floor like they were fragile.

They got on the interstate at seven-fifteen, later than planned, which they'd both privately expected. The sun went down orange over the exit signs. Dana ran the playlist and skipped anything slow. Marcus drove with one hand and ate pretzels with the other and made her laugh describing his supervisor's new mustache.

Around nine they stopped for gas and split a coffee neither of them needed. The cabin was still ninety minutes out — a small place near a lake, cheaper on weekdays but they'd taken what they could get.

"You want me to drive the rest?" she asked.

"I got it," he said, and pulled back onto the road.


Maya finished loading the cooler while Devin argued with the GPS about whether the coastal route added forty minutes or ninety. They had two days, one tank of gas money set aside, and a motel reservation in a town neither of them had visited since a wedding four years ago.

"Ninety," Maya said, not looking up. "It always says forty and it's always ninety."

"Then we leave at seven instead of eight."

They had made the plan on a Tuesday, standing in the kitchen of the apartment they'd shared for three years, both of them tired in the specific way of people who work opposite shifts. Devin had said, almost casually, that his sister could take the dog. Maya had said, almost casually, that she had Saturday and Sunday off for the first time since March. Neither of them called it a big deal, which was how they knew it was.

Friday night she packed for both of them because Devin packed like a man being evacuated—one shirt, a phone charger, inexplicable optimism. He made the playlist, which was his contribution and, he insisted, the more important one.

They pulled out at 7:20, which was a victory. The sun was still low and orange over the strip malls, and Maya put her bare feet on the dash even though he hated it, and he said so, and she left them there.

Somewhere past the second exit she fell asleep with her hand resting on his thigh. Devin drove without music for a while, just the road noise, watching the landscape flatten and then start to rise. He thought about how they'd never gotten around to the wedding thing, how their mothers had both stopped asking, how none of it seemed to matter much at 7:40 in the morning with the windows cracked.

She woke near the county line and asked where they were.

"Almost," he said.


Marisol was awake before the alarm, folding a fleece blanket she wasn't sure they'd need. The forecast said fifty-eight and cloudy at the coast, which in her experience meant forty-eight and windy.

"You're packing the blanket," Dev said from the doorway, holding two mugs.

"I'm packing the blanket."

They'd been talking about this trip since February, when Dev's cousin mentioned a cabin two hours north that sat empty most weekends. Marisol had written it on the whiteboard on the refrigerator — COAST? — and neither of them had erased it for four months. Then Dev's shifts finally lined up with her Saturday off, and the question mark came down.

The car needed gas and one of the tires needed air, so they stopped at the station on Cleveland Avenue and Dev crouched by the rear passenger side while Marisol went in for coffee and, because it was a trip, a bag of the salted caramel corn they both pretended not to like.

"Eleven dollars," she said, getting back in.

"Worth it."

The drive out of the city took longer than it should have — a closed lane, a detour through an unfamiliar neighborhood where Marisol pointed out a house with a wraparound porch and said, "That one," the way she always did. Dev said, "Sure, when we win something."

By the time the highway opened up, the radio had lost the station they liked and they let it go to static, then silence. Marisol put her feet on the dash. Dev drove with one hand and ate caramel corn with the other, dropping crumbs he'd have to vacuum later.

Around noon the trees thinned and the light changed — that flat silver you get near water. Marisol sat up.

"Do you smell it?"

Dev cracked his window. Cold air, salt, something like rain coming.

"Yeah," he said. "We're close."


Maritza tapes the grocery list to the fridge on Thursday night, though they both know she'll forget it there. Dev is already pricing gas stations along I-81, phone tilted toward the lamp, reading numbers aloud like they mean something to anyone but him.

"Two nights," she says. "That's all we can swing. I'm on shift Sunday at three."

"Two nights is fine. Two nights is generous, actually." He's been wanting to see the cabin his coworker keeps posting about — cheap, drafty, a wood stove and a creek that supposedly runs loud enough to sleep to. Maritza had said yes without much interrogation, which is how most of their plans get made. Six years in the same apartment and they've developed a shorthand that skips the negotiation entirely.

Friday she gets home at five-forty, later than she promised, and finds him already loading the car — her duffel packed by his hands, which means she'll be missing something crucial and finding four pairs of his socks. She doesn't say anything. She's learned that the socks are a kind of affection.

They stop for tacos at the place off the exit where the parking lot floods. Dev eats his standing up, leaning against the hood, and she watches him do it and feels a small, unremarkable warmth she has never once tried to name out loud. The light goes orange and then gray.

By the time they hit the gravel road it's fully dark and the GPS has given up. Maritza navigates by the photo their friend sent — a mailbox with a rooster on it. Dev drives slow, both hands on the wheel, complaining pleasantly about the potholes.

The cabin smells like cold ash. He builds the fire badly. She fixes it. They sit on the floor because the couch is somehow damp, and outside the creek is exactly as loud as promised.


Maritza had the cooler packed by six-thirty Friday morning, which was two hours before Devin actually got up.

They'd been talking about Galveston since March, and it kept sliding — his overtime at the warehouse, her mother's hip surgery, the transmission on the Corolla making a sound like coins in a dryer. But the transmission held, the mother healed, and the warehouse finally gave him a Saturday.

"You packed the good towels," Devin said, looking into the trunk.

"We have two sets of towels. These are the ones that aren't threadbare."

"So the good ones."

They'd been together four years and had never gotten around to the paperwork, mostly because neither of them cared much and once because the county clerk's office closed early on a Wednesday they'd taken off work. It came up occasionally, usually at other people's weddings, and then didn't come up again for months.

The drive was fifty minutes. Devin drove, Maritza handled the aux cord and vetoed three of his songs. They stopped at a gas station outside Texas City where she bought sunflower seeds and he bought a lottery ticket he immediately lost between the seats.

The motel was two blocks off the seawall, cinderblock painted the color of key lime pie. The woman at the desk gave them a room facing the parking lot instead of the water, and Devin started to say something, and Maritza put her hand flat on his back, and he didn't.

They walked to the beach before unpacking. The water was brown and warm as bathwater and the sky was doing something orange behind the oil platforms out on the horizon. Maritza took off her sandals and carried them.

"Two whole days," Devin said.

"One and a half. We have to be back Sunday by four."

"One and a half," he agreed, and followed her down toward the waterline.


Maya got the text at 2:14 on Thursday afternoon: *cabin's free this weekend if you want it.* Her cousin had bought the place outside Hocking Hills two years ago and rarely used it.

"Two hours away," she told Dev that night, phone tilted toward him while he scrubbed the skillet. "We'd leave Friday after you close, back Sunday."

He considered it. There was the water bill due Monday, and his mother wanted him to look at her laptop. "Does it have heat?"

"Wood stove and a space heater."

"Then yes."

They packed badly, the way they always did. Dev threw four shirts into a duffel and forgot a toothbrush. Maya spent forty minutes assembling a grocery bag—coffee, eggs, a bag of clementines, the good olive oil in a jar because she didn't trust the plastic bottle to survive the trunk—and then left her hiking boots by the front door.

They didn't realize until Logan.

"We can buy socks," Dev said. "You can hike in the sneakers."

"They're canvas."

"So we go slow."

The highway thinned out past Lancaster into two dark lanes, cornfields shorn down to stubble, the occasional gas station lit up like a stage set. Maya drove because Dev's night vision had gotten unreliable. He kept the playlist going and read the directions off his phone in a flat voice, then stopped reading and just watched the road unspool.

They found the turnoff on the second pass. The cabin smelled like cedar and mouse. Dev got the stove lit while Maya put the eggs in the little refrigerator and discovered there was no coffee maker, only a French press with a cracked plunger.

"We'll make it work," she said.

He came over and stood behind her, hands on her shoulders, both of them looking at the cracked plunger like it was a small, funny problem they'd been given on purpose.


The Nguyen-Ortiz apartment smelled like burnt coffee on Friday morning, which Danny took as a sign the trip was already going well.

"Two nights," Priya said, dragging a duffel bag from the closet shelf. "Not three. I have to be back for my mother's thing on Sunday evening."

"Two nights." Danny was on the floor with a road atlas he'd bought at a gas station eleven years ago and refused to replace. "So we skip the caverns."

"We were never doing the caverns."

"You said the caverns sounded interesting."

"I said they sounded like a place where people get lost." She zipped the bag halfway, then unzipped it and pulled out one of his shirts. "This is mine now, apparently."

They'd been living together four years, and the trip had been discussed for two of them—some vague weekend in the mountains, an inn with a porch, a hike that wasn't too ambitious. Danny had finally booked something on a Tuesday afternoon at work, and then spent three days not mentioning it in case she'd wanted a say.

She'd wanted a say. She'd also said yes.

The car was loaded by ten. Priya drove the first leg because Danny got sleepy on highways, and he read aloud from the atlas's tiny italic notes about historical markers until she asked him to stop, kindly, and then he did it once more to be funny.

Outside the city the land opened up. Cornfields, then hills, then something more serious than hills.

"We didn't bring the good jacket," he said.

"You didn't bring the good jacket. I brought mine."

"We'll share it."

"We will absolutely not share it."

They stopped at a diner two hours in and split a plate of eggs neither of them finished, and Priya took a picture of the parking lot for no reason she could explain, and they got back in the car.


Maya notices the tent first, wedged behind the winter coats in the hall closet, and she pulls it down in a small avalanche of dust. Deshaun is at the kitchen table with his laptop, scrolling through campsite listings, and when he hears her cough he laughs without looking up.

"Still smells like that trip to the Poconos," she says.

"Two years ago. We said we'd air it out."

They spread it across the living room floor of their one-bedroom apartment, which takes up most of the living room floor. One pole is bent. Deshaun says he can straighten it; Maya says he says that about everything. She's not wrong. But she also isn't going to argue, because it's Thursday and they leave Saturday morning and there's a shortlist of two campgrounds, both about ninety minutes north, both with a lake.

They pick the one with the lake you can swim in. Deshaun handles the reservation on his phone while Maya makes a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, eggs, that hot sauce he likes, bug spray, the good blanket, firewood — no, buy firewood there, they always say that and then forget.

Friday night they pack the car badly, then repack it, then agree it's fine. Maya can't sleep and lies there listening to Deshaun breathe, thinking about how they've lived together three years now and this is the first time they've planned something more than a week out.

Saturday, they leave at seven-fifteen, later than intended, with gas station coffee and a playlist Deshaun made and won't let her skip through. The highway thins into two lanes. Trees close in on both sides.

"There," Maya says, pointing at a hand-painted sign for a farm stand.

He pulls over. She's out of the car before he's got it in park.


Maritza set the laundry basket on the bed and started sorting: his shirts, her shirts, the socks that always went missing between the dryer and the drawer. Devon leaned in the doorway with his phone out, scrolling.

"Two nights," he said. "The place near the lake still has that cabin. It's not fancy."

"I don't need fancy. I need quiet."

They'd both worked six days that week — she at the clinic front desk, he driving a delivery route that had gotten longer since the company cut a position. They had been together four years, in this apartment for two, and the trip had been discussed since March in the vague way people discuss things they don't quite believe will happen.

Devon booked it Thursday night. Friday after work they loaded the car: a cooler, two duffel bags, the good pillow Maritza refused to travel without. She made a playlist. He checked the tire pressure at the gas station and complained about the price of coffee inside.

The drive was two and a half hours, mostly interstate, then a county road that narrowed and darkened. Maritza fell asleep somewhere past the second exit and woke when the tires changed sound on gravel.

The cabin smelled like cedar and old smoke. There was a woodstove neither of them knew how to use, a couch with a sagging middle, and a window facing water they couldn't see yet. Devon carried the cooler in and set it on the counter. Maritza opened the back door and stood on the step in the cold, listening.

"Anything out there?" he called.

"Frogs. A lot of frogs."

He came and stood behind her, arms crossed over her shoulders, chin on her head. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then she shivered, and they went in, and he started figuring out the stove.


# Two Nights in Ashville

Dana got home first on Thursday and started a list on the back of an envelope: cooler, phone chargers, the good pillow, Marisol's inhaler. She wrote *dog?* and then crossed it out, because Jerry across the hall had already agreed to let Biscuit out twice a day in exchange for a jar of the pickled beans Marisol made in August.

Marisol came in at six-forty, still in her scrubs, smelling faintly of the disinfectant they used on the med carts. "Is the car making that noise?"

"It's making a noise. It's not making *that* noise."

They had been talking about the cabin since February, when Marisol's cousin mentioned it was empty most weekends. It wasn't much — two rooms, a woodstove, a porch with a view of a ridge that turned blue in the evenings. But it was three hours away, which was enough.

They left Friday after Dana's shift ended at two. Marisol drove the first leg because Dana's back had been bad since the inventory week. They stopped at a gas station outside of town and argued pleasantly about jerky, and Marisol bought a bag of the sour candy she pretended was for both of them.

Somewhere past the second exit the radio lost the station and neither of them changed it for a while. Marisol talked about her sister's wedding, whether they'd go, what it would cost. Dana said they'd figure it out, which was what Dana always said, and which Marisol had learned to find comforting rather than evasive.

They got to the cabin at dusk. The key was under a flowerpot exactly where the cousin had promised. Dana carried in the cooler while Marisol stood on the porch a minute longer, looking at the ridge going blue, letting the day drain out of her shoulders before she followed him in.


Maya and Dev had been meaning to see the coast for two years, and on a Thursday night in October they finally booked a room in a motel three hours north, the kind with a vending machine humming in the breezeway.

"We leave at six," Dev said, standing in the kitchen of their apartment with a legal pad, drawing a column for gas and a column for food. He was twenty-nine and worked at a distribution center; he liked lists the way other people liked music.

Maya looked over his shoulder while eating cereal at ten at night. "Six is a lie. We've never left at six for anything."

"That's why I wrote it down."

She amended the list anyway, adding a thermos, her camera, the good blanket. They had lived together four years without marrying, mostly because a wedding cost more than a used transmission, and the subject had settled into a comfortable joke between them. Her mother still asked. Dev's father had stopped.

Friday morning they left at 7:40, which Dev counted as a victory. The car smelled like the coffee Maya had spilled reaching for her seatbelt. For the first hour they didn't talk much, just watched strip malls thin into fields, and she rested her bare feet on the dash until he told her, as he always did, that she'd go through the windshield.

They stopped at a gas station where the attendant let them use the bathroom key without buying anything. Maya took a picture of Dev holding two bags of chips like trophies. Somewhere past the county line the radio lost its station and she plugged in her phone and played the songs from the year they met.

By noon they could smell the salt. Dev rolled his window all the way down, and Maya, laughing, told him to slow down, she wanted to see everything.


The Weekend at Bell Harbor

Denise found the listing on a Tuesday, scrolling on her phone while the rice cooker steamed on the counter. A cabin two hours north, cheap because the season had turned and nobody wanted lake water that cold.

"Sixty-eight a night," she said. "We could leave Friday after your shift."

Marcus looked up from the kitchen table, where he was sorting a month of receipts into two uneven piles. He was forty-three, she was thirty-nine, and they had been sharing this apartment for six years without ever quite discussing whether it was permanent. "Friday I'm off at four."

"Then four-thirty we go."

He didn't answer right away, which was his way of agreeing. She booked it before he could recalculate the gas money.

They packed Thursday night, badly. Denise brought three sweaters and forgot a toothbrush. Marcus brought the toothbrush, plus a cooler he filled with sandwich meat, two bottles of beer, and a Tupperware of the black-eyed peas he'd made Sunday because he refused to pay restaurant prices in a tourist town.

The car was a 2009 Corolla with a cracked taillight they kept meaning to fix. Friday came humid and gray. Marcus drove; Denise ran the radio, hunting through static until she found a station playing old soul, and then she left it there and put her feet up on the dash the way he pretended to mind.

Traffic thinned past the county line. Fields, then pines. Denise fell asleep somewhere around the exit for Marion and woke when the tires changed sound on gravel.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures. One window faced the water, gray and flat and enormous.

"It's not bad," Marcus said, setting down the cooler.

Denise opened the window, and cold air came in smelling like rain and iron.

"It's not bad," she agreed, and started looking for the light switch.


Maria checked the tire pressure while Devin loaded the cooler into the back of the Corolla. Two nights in a rented cabin three hours north — not much, but it was the first time either of them had taken off work since March.

"Did you grab the coffee?" she asked.

"Grabbed the coffee, grabbed the good mugs, grabbed your book off the nightstand." He shut the hatch. "I did not grab the folding chairs because they don't fit."

"They fit last time."

"Last time we didn't bring a cooler the size of a small refrigerator."

They'd been living together four years in a one-bedroom on the east side, splitting rent and arguing pleasantly about whose turn it was to deal with the landlord. The trip had come together on a Tuesday: Devin's shift got cut, Maria had a floating holiday she was going to lose anyway, and a cabin outside a town neither of them had heard of was listed at ninety dollars a night.

They left at seven-forty, later than planned. Maria drove the first leg because Devin was still finishing his breakfast burrito. The highway thinned out past the exurbs, and by the time they hit the two-lane road, there were more hay bales than cars.

"Pull over up there," Devin said, pointing at a farm stand with a hand-painted sign.

They bought peaches they didn't need and a jar of honey neither of them would open for a year. Maria ate a peach leaning against the fender, juice running down her wrist, and Devin took a picture of her doing it, and she told him to delete it, and he didn't.

The cabin turned out to be smaller than the photos suggested, with a porch that faced the wrong direction for sunsets. They didn't care. Devin got a fire going by nine. Maria fell asleep in a chair with her book open on her chest, and he left her there a while before waking her.


Maya got off work at four on Friday, which was earlier than usual, and by four-fifteen she was texting Devon a photo of the cooler already packed with sandwiches and two kinds of seltzer.

He wrote back: *did you remember the good mustard*

She had. She'd also remembered his allergy pills, the phone charger that actually worked, and the aux cord, because the one in the truck had died sometime in October and neither of them had gotten around to replacing it.

They'd been talking about this trip since August — just two nights at a cabin near the lake, nothing fancy, the kind of place with a wood stove and a hand-drawn map of hiking trails taped inside the kitchen cabinet. Devon's cousin knew the owner and got them a rate. Maya had put it in her calendar with three exclamation points.

He got home at five-thirty smelling like sawdust and apologized for it, and she said she didn't care, and then made him shower anyway. While he was in there she carried the bags down, took the trash out so it wouldn't sit all weekend, and left a note for the neighbor about the mail. Small things. She was the one who thought of small things.

They pulled out around six-forty, later than planned, which was fine. Traffic thinned past the county line. Devon drove with one hand and rested the other on her knee, and she scrolled through a playlist she'd been building for two weeks and pretended she hadn't.

"You're going to make me listen to that folk stuff," he said.

"For an hour. Then you get an hour."

Somewhere around Exit 41 they stopped for gas and she bought him a coffee he didn't ask for. The sun was going orange behind the tree line. He said the cabin had a porch, and she said good, she'd brought a book she wasn't going to read.


Marisol wanted to leave by six on Friday, before the interstate clotted with commuters. Dev, predictably, was still on a call at 6:20, pacing the kitchen in socks, saying "right, right, absolutely" in the voice he used when he'd stopped listening.

She loaded the car herself: one duffel, one cooler, the good pillow he couldn't sleep without and pretended not to need. Their apartment was small enough that packing felt like a minor evacuation. On the counter, the note for the neighbor about the cat sat under a mug ring.

"Okay," Dev said, appearing at last, holding his phone like evidence. "I'm free. I'm a free man."

"You said that at four."

"I was aspirational at four."

The cabin was two and a half hours north, borrowed from Dev's cousin, who had described it as "rustic but not, like, feral." They'd been talking about going since March. It was October now, and the leaves had gone the color of old pennies, and Marisol had finally just booked the dates in the shared calendar without asking, which was how most things in their four years together had gotten decided.

They stopped for gas outside Millbrook. Dev bought two coffees and a bag of those terrible orange peanut butter crackers he loved. Marisol drove the first leg because she always did; Dev navigated badly and narrated the scenery.

"There's a llama farm," he said.

"There isn't."

"There was. You missed it. Historic moment, gone."

Somewhere past the second exit the conversation thinned into something comfortable — the radio, the hum of tires, her hand resting on the gearshift and his settling over it without ceremony. The sky went orange, then bruised, then dark.

At the cabin, the key was under the wrong rock, then the right one. Inside smelled like cedar and dust. Dev found the light switch. Marisol found the thermostat.

"Two whole days," she said.

"Two whole days," he agreed, and started unpacking the cooler.


Maritza got the text at 4:47 on Friday, twenty minutes before her shift at the pharmacy ended: *bags in the car, gassed up, i got snacks.*

Dev had been talking about the cabin for three weeks — not a real cabin, just a rental outside Hocking Hills with a hot tub that probably leaked and a wood stove they'd never figure out. Two nights. They'd found it because his cousin canceled and offered them the reservation at cost.

She counted out the last prescription, said goodnight to Renee, and walked out into a parking lot that smelled like rain coming. Dev's Corolla idled by the cart return with the passenger door already open.

"You brought the wrong pillow," she said, getting in.

"I brought both pillows."

"You brought both of *your* pillows."

He looked at her, then put the car in park and got out, and she watched him rummage through the trunk in the drizzle until he came up with hers, flat and yellowed at one corner, and held it up like a trophy. She laughed despite herself.

They stopped at a Speedway outside Lancaster for coffee and a bag of ice, because Dev had packed beer but no cooler ice, which was exactly the kind of thing he did. Maritza paid. He'd get the groceries tomorrow; they kept a loose ledger neither of them ever wrote down.

The last twelve miles were dark two-lane, deer eyes flashing in the ditches. She read the directions off her phone and he drove slower than he needed to. The cabin's porch light was on when they pulled up — the owner had left it, plus a note on the door about the water heater.

Dev carried in the bags. Maritza found the thermostat, then stood a minute in the doorway, listening to the wet trees, before she went inside.


The Weekend at Pine Lake

Marisol found the cabin listing on a Tuesday, scrolling on her phone while the dryer thumped in the next room. "Ninety-four dollars a night," she said. "Two hours away. There's a lake."

Dev looked up from the kitchen table, where he'd spread out the bills into their usual piles. "This weekend?"

"Why not this weekend?"

He did the math the way he always did, silently, his lips moving a little. They'd been living together three years in the apartment above the dry cleaner, and he still hadn't lost the habit of counting before agreeing. "Okay," he said finally. "But we take my car. Yours makes that noise."

They packed Friday night, badly. Marisol threw in four books she wouldn't read and forgot a toothbrush. Dev packed the toothbrush, two, because he knew her. He also packed the cast-iron pan, which she laughed at until Saturday morning, when he made eggs on the cabin's terrible electric stove and they tasted like something.

The drive up took longer than the app promised. There was construction outside Newton, and they sat in it with the windows down, arguing pleasantly about whether the podcast host was smug or just confident. Marisol won by declaring the argument over and putting on music instead. Dev let her.

The cabin was smaller than the photos. The lake was bigger. They walked down to it before unpacking, still in their travel clothes, and stood on the little dock while the water did what water does.

"We should do this more," Marisol said.

"We say that."

"I know."

He put his arm around her shoulders. Somewhere out on the water a fish jumped, or something did, and they both turned to look and missed it, and stood there anyway, watching the rings widen out and disappear.


The Weekend

Marisol found the cabin listing during her lunch break, half-price because of a last-minute cancellation, two hours north where the pines started. She sent Dwayne the link with three exclamation points and waited.

He called instead of texting. "That's Friday to Sunday?"

"Friday after your shift. I already asked Renata to cover Saturday."

He was quiet, and she knew he was doing the arithmetic he always did—the truck payment, the gas, the fact that his hours had been cut back in October and only partly restored. She'd been doing the same arithmetic for three days before she called.

"Okay," he said. "But we're bringing food. Not eating out every meal."

They packed Thursday night in the apartment's small bedroom, arguing amiably over whether the cooler would fit behind the seats. Marisol made a list, lost the list, made another one. Dwayne checked the tire pressure in the parking lot under the sodium lights, then came back up and found she'd already loaded the coffee maker, which struck him as both excessive and exactly like her.

Friday he got off at four. She was waiting downstairs with the cooler and a bag of oranges, wearing the green jacket he liked. Traffic held them up past Route 9, and the light was going purple-gold over the fields by the time they got clear of it.

"We're losing the daylight," she said.

"We'll get there."

She put her feet on the dash, which he pretended to mind, and found a station playing old country until it dissolved into static somewhere past the reservoir. Neither of them turned it off right away.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures and smelled like cedar and dust. Dwayne got the heat going. Marisol stood on the porch in the cold, looking at the dark shapes of trees, and called for him to come see how many stars there were.


Maria set the coffee down on the folding table she and Dev used as a kitchen island and pulled up the tide chart on her phone.

"Low tide's at 6:40 Saturday morning," she said. "If we leave by four, we can be walking the flats by sunrise."

Dev, still in the T-shirt he'd slept in, groaned from the couch. "Four in the morning is not a vacation. Four in the morning is a shift."

"It's two hours of driving. You'll sleep the whole way and I'll be bitter about it."

He got up and looked at the map she'd left open on the counter, a real paper one, folded wrong, that had come with the car when they bought it used. She'd circled a state park campground in ballpoint and written *$28/night?* beside it.

"Twenty-eight is fine," he said. "We've got the tent from Wes."

"It's missing a pole."

"It's missing a pole *sleeve*. The pole's fine. I'll duct-tape it."

They packed Friday after work — her scrubs still in a heap by the washer, his boots by the door. Two sleeping bags that didn't zip together. A cooler with eggs, a block of cheddar, four beers, and a bag of ice that was already sweating. Dev insisted on the camp stove; Maria insisted on the good pillow.

They left at 4:12, which she noted out loud and he chose not to answer. The highway was empty in that particular way it only is before dawn, orange lights strung out ahead of them, the heater ticking as it warmed. Maria drove. Dev held the coffee thermos between his knees and read the exit signs aloud like they were interesting.

Around Millbrook the sky went from black to a bruised blue, and she reached over without looking and put her hand on his leg, and he covered it with his.

"Told you," she said.

"You did," he said. "You told me."


Maria pulled the last of the towels off the line while Devon loaded the cooler into the back of the Civic. It was Friday, almost six, and the traffic report on the kitchen radio said the highway north was already backing up.

"We could leave at five tomorrow morning instead," she said through the screen door.

"Then we lose half of Saturday." Devon wedged a folding chair beside the cooler. "Two hours of sitting in traffic tonight, and we wake up at the lake."

They had booked the cabin three weeks earlier, splitting the cost the way they split everything — she'd covered the deposit, he'd handle gas and groceries. Two nights, a place with a woodstove and a dock that the listing photos showed at sunset, which Maria suspected was the best it ever looked.

She packed her bag last, the way she always did: two shirts, a sweatshirt, the paperback she'd been carrying around unread since March. Devon had thrown his things in a duffel that morning and spent the rest of the day worrying about the car's front left tire.

They stopped for gas at the station on Route 9 and argued mildly about whether to buy the overpriced firewood there or find some closer. Devon won; they bought it there. Maria got coffee and a bag of pretzels and put her feet on the dashboard once they were moving.

The traffic wasn't as bad as promised. By eight-thirty the exits had stopped announcing shopping centers and started announcing towns with lake names. Devon rolled his window down at a stoplight, and the air came in cool and smelling like pine and water.

The cabin key was under a flowerpot, as instructed. Inside it smelled like dust and old smoke. Maria found the light switch; Devon carried in the cooler, set it down, and stood there a moment, listening to how quiet it was.


Maritza got off her shift at the hospital at seven on Thursday and found Danny already at the kitchen table with a legal pad, drawing a little map of the Ozarks with a leaky pen.

"Two nights," he said. "We leave Friday after you sleep a few hours."

She looked at the pad. He'd written *cabin?* and *gas $70* and, inexplicably, *bug spray!!!* underlined twice.

"We're not camping."

"I know. But there's a screened porch. Bugs come through screens sometimes."

They'd been in the apartment four years, long enough that the lease renewal came pre-signed in their heads. His daughter was with her mother that weekend; Maritza's mother had stopped asking, at last, when they were going to make it official, and had started asking instead whether Danny had fixed the passenger-side window.

He had not. Friday morning, he ran a strip of duct tape along the rubber seal and called it weatherproofing. Maritza slept until eleven, woke to the smell of coffee and the sound of him arguing gently with the dog, who understood the suitcase and did not approve. The dog was going to Danny's brother's.

They packed light: her good sweater, his boots, a cooler with sandwiches because the cabin was forty minutes from anything, a paperback she'd started in March. He wanted to leave by one. They left at two-forty, which was fine, which was expected, which she had built into the plan without telling him.

South of the city the highway thinned out and the land started folding. Maritza put her bare feet on the dash and read the exit signs out loud in a bored anchorman voice until he laughed. He drove with one hand and rested the other on her ankle.

"Two whole days," he said.

"Two whole days," she said, and meant it like a promise.


Maritza noticed the gas prices dropping on Thursday and took it as a sign. She was thirty-one, worked the desk at a dental office in Reno, and hadn't left the county since February. Devon, who was thirty-four and drove a delivery route, agreed on the condition that they leave early enough to beat the truck traffic on I-80.

They packed Friday night in the apartment they'd shared for two years, the lease in her name because his credit was still recovering from a car repossession in his twenties. She folded shirts. He argued that folding was pointless for two nights and stuffed his into a duffel. They compromised the way they always did, which was that she folded his shirts anyway while he pretended not to see.

The plan was modest: a motel outside Truckee, a hike Saturday if the weather held, dinner somewhere with a patio. Devon's cousin had recommended a place with good tri-tip. Maritza wrote the address on a receipt and put it in the cup holder, where it slid around all weekend.

They left at six-fifteen Saturday morning, later than intended. Devon drove. Maritza controlled the music and the coffee, handing over the travel mug at intervals she judged appropriate. The Sierra came up out of the dark in stages, gray at first, then gold along the ridgelines, and she made him pull over at a turnout so she could take a picture that wouldn't come out.

At the motel the room wasn't ready, so they walked into town and ate breakfast at a counter, sharing a plate of hash browns neither of them had ordered but which the waitress brought anyway. Devon said they should do this more often. Maritza said they always said that. Then she took his hand across the sticky laminate, and they sat there a while, in no particular hurry, watching the town wake up.


Maritza gets home first on Friday and starts loading the car before Dev even changes out of his work clothes. She's the planner. The cooler goes in the trunk with sandwiches she made at six that morning, plus the good mustard, because Dev complains about gas station mustard the way other people complain about traffic.

"You packed my boots?" he calls from the doorway.

"They're by the spare tire. And your rain jacket, because it's supposed to drizzle Sunday morning."

They've been in the apartment on Third Street two years now, and this is their fourth trip to the cabins near the state park. Not fancy — a one-room place with a woodstove and a porch that faces east. Dev found it the first year, back when they were still figuring out whether they liked each other's silences. Turns out they did.

He comes down with the pillows because he can't sleep on the ones the cabins provide, and a paperback he won't read. Maritza takes the first driving shift. They stop for gas outside of town and split a bag of pretzels, and she lets him pick the music even though he picks the same album every time.

Two hours in, the highway gives way to a two-lane road, and the phone signal drops, which they both notice and neither mentions. Dev rolls the window down. Maritza's hair whips around and she doesn't fix it.

The cabin key is under the same flowerpot. Inside smells like cedar and dust. Dev builds a fire while Maritza puts groceries away, humming, and the light through the east window goes gold, then orange, then gone.

They eat the sandwiches on the porch, sitting on the steps because there's only one good chair. It's colder than expected. Neither goes in for a sweater.


Maritza set the paper cups of gas-station coffee on the dashboard and squinted at the road atlas she'd bought at a truck stop, mostly as a joke, because Dev's phone did all the navigating anyway.

"Three hours if we skip the outlets," Dev said, wedging the duffel behind the seats. He was forty-one and had spent the week hanging drywall in a subdivision that didn't exist yet; his forearms still had a fine white dust in the creases.

"Skip them," she said. "You'll buy shoes."

"I need shoes."

"You need a weekend."

They had settled on the lake because it was cheap and because Maritza's cousin had a cabin standing empty until the ice fishermen came in December. The planning had happened in fragments over four days — a text at lunch, a conversation shouted between rooms while she folded scrubs for the next shift, a Thursday-night argument about whether to bring the dog that ended with the dog going to the neighbor's. They'd been together six years. The apartment lease had both their names on it and so did the electric bill, which they considered, in their private way, more binding than anything else.

Dev pulled out at seven-forty, later than planned, which was also part of the plan. Maritza put her feet on the dash until he glanced at her and she put them down.

Outside town the fields opened up brown and stubbled, and the radio drifted between a country station and a preacher, and neither of them changed it for a while. She read the exits aloud. He told her about the foreman's ridiculous truck. Somewhere past the second rest stop she fell asleep with her hand flat on his thigh, and he drove that way for forty miles, careful with the turns, not wanting to wake her before the water came into view.


**Saturday, Two Tanks of Gas**

Renée found the cabin listing on a Tuesday, half-watching a cooking show with her laptop balanced on the arm of the couch. Two hours north, a wood stove, a lake that was probably still too cold to swim in. She turned the screen toward Marcus without saying anything.

He looked up from his phone. "How much?"

"Less than we spent on that dinner in March."

That was enough. He booked it Thursday during his lunch break, then texted her a screenshot of the confirmation with three exclamation points, which was unlike him.

Friday night they packed badly. Marcus insisted on bringing the good coffee and the burr grinder, which meant an entire tote bag dedicated to caffeine. Renée packed four books she wouldn't read and forgot pajamas. They argued briefly about whether to bring the dog, decided against it, and then Renée called her sister at nine-thirty to ask if she'd take him after all. She would.

They left at six-forty Saturday morning because Marcus believed in beating traffic, a belief Renée found charming in the abstract and unbearable in practice. She slept through the first forty minutes with her jacket bunched against the window. When she woke, he had the radio on low and one hand resting on her knee, and the highway had thinned out into farmland and billboards for fireworks.

They stopped at a diner outside of Millbrook for eggs. The waitress called them both "hon." Renée stole a triangle of his toast; he pretended not to notice.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures and smelled like cedar and old smoke. Marcus figured out the stove after twenty minutes and a certain amount of swearing. Renée stood on the little porch with her hands in her sleeves, looking at the flat gray water, and thought: *this*. Then she went inside, because it was cold, and he had made coffee.


Maritza slid the last of the folded T-shirts into the duffel bag while Dwayne argued with the coffee maker in the kitchen. They'd been putting off this trip since February, when the transmission went out on the Corolla and swallowed the money they'd set aside. Now it was late September, the leaves along the interstate were just starting to turn, and they had a motel reservation in a town neither of them had ever visited.

"Do we need the cooler?" he called out.

"For two nights?"

"For sandwiches. Gas station food costs more than the gas."

She conceded the point. He was the practical one, which surprised people who noticed his tattoos before they noticed anything else. She was the planner — she'd printed a list of three diners with good reviews, a state park with a waterfall, and an antique mall that was probably a disappointment but seemed worth an hour.

They'd been together six years, in the same one-bedroom apartment for four. Marriage came up occasionally, usually at other people's weddings, and got set down again without much fuss. What mattered more, they'd decided, was whether he remembered to change the oil and whether she remembered his mother's birthday.

The car was loaded by nine. Maritza took the first shift driving because Dwayne had worked until midnight and wanted to sleep, though he lasted only twenty minutes before he started narrating the billboards. She let him. There was something about the first hour of a road trip that made him talkative in a way he never was at home, where the television usually filled the silence.

Outside the city the fields opened up, brown and gold. He found a station playing music older than both of them and turned it up.

"Two whole days," she said.

"Two whole days," he agreed, and put his hand on her knee.


Maya got the text from Devon at 4:40 on Friday: *Leaving the shop early. Bag's already in the truck.*

She wrote back with a photo of her own duffel sitting by the door of the apartment, next to the cooler she'd packed with sandwiches, two peaches, and a bag of ice that was already sweating through the seam.

They'd been talking about the cabin since March, when Devon's cousin mentioned it was sitting empty most weekends. Two hours north, a wood stove, a lake small enough that you could see the far shore. Maya had written the dates on the whiteboard on the fridge in September and then rewritten them twice when her shifts got moved.

He came up the stairs still smelling like sawdust. She handed him a glass of water before he could ask.

"Did you call about the key?"

"Under the flowerpot," he said. "The green one, not the blue one. He was very specific."

They loaded the truck in eleven minutes, which felt like a small triumph. Maya took the passenger seat and put her feet on the dash, then took them down when Devon glanced over.

Traffic thinned out past the interchange. The light got long and gold across the fields, and Maya found a station that played the kind of country songs neither of them would admit to liking. Devon drummed the wheel at the chorus.

"We should do this more," she said.

"We say that."

"I know we say that. I'm saying it again."

They stopped once for gas and once because Maya saw a farm stand with a hand-painted sign. She bought three ears of corn they had no real plan for.

The cabin was dark when they pulled in, and the key was under the green pot exactly as promised. Devon carried the cooler. Maya found the light switch on the second try, and the room came up warm and small around them.


Maya got the text at 4:47 on Thursday: *cabin available this weekend, cancellation, $120 total.* She forwarded it to Devon with three exclamation points and no other explanation.

He called her during his break at the warehouse. "Two hours away?"

"Ninety minutes if you don't stop for gas station coffee."

"I always stop for gas station coffee."

So: two hours away. They'd been in the apartment eleven months now, long enough that his boots had a designated spot by the door and she'd stopped apologizing when her mother called during dinner. Long enough to know that packing would be a negotiation.

Friday evening, Devon laid out his approach on the bed — one duffel, rolled clothes, a headlamp for reasons he declined to justify. Maya packed a tote bag, then a second tote bag, then a paper grocery sack containing a cast iron skillet, olive oil, coffee she'd ground that morning, and a bag of limes.

"Limes."

"You'll thank me."

"For what?"

"You'll see."

They left at 6:40, later than planned, because Devon couldn't find his phone charger and Maya remembered halfway down the stairs that she'd left the bathroom window cracked. The highway thinned out past the exurbs. She controlled the music and he didn't complain, mostly. Somewhere around the reservoir the sun went orange and low, and she took a picture through the windshield that came out blurry and posted it anyway.

He stopped for gas station coffee. She got a bag of pretzels and ate three-quarters of it.

The cabin was smaller than the photos suggested, which they'd expected, and the heater worked, which they hadn't. Devon carried both tote bags in one trip to prove a point. Maya found a jar of matches on the mantel and got the woodstove going on the second try.

"Limes," Devon said, from the kitchen doorway, holding one up.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow you'll understand."


Maya got off work at four on Friday, which meant they beat most of the traffic heading out of the city. Devon had already loaded the car — two duffel bags, a cooler with sandwiches he'd made at lunch, and the tent they'd bought last spring and used exactly once.

"Did you grab the sleeping bags?" Maya asked, dropping into the passenger seat.

"They're under the cooler."

"And the thing for the air mattress?"

Devon paused with his hand on the ignition. Maya laughed and unbuckled, and he watched her jog back up to the third floor of their building, her work badge still clipped to her waistband.

They'd been talking about this trip for a month, mostly in the vague way people talk about things they aren't sure will happen. Then Maya's shift got covered and Devon's brother offered to feed the cat, and suddenly there was no reason not to go. They'd found the campground online — two hours north, a lake, sites still available because it was early May and the water would be too cold for swimming.

The drive took longer than the map promised. They stopped at a gas station outside Riverton for coffee and a bag of pretzels, and Devon insisted on a fried pie that turned out to be terrible. Maya ate half of it anyway, out of solidarity.

By the time they found their site, the light was going gold and long through the pines. Devon staked the corners while Maya read the instructions out loud, and they argued gently about which pole went where, and then the tent stood up on its own and they both stopped to look at it.

"That took eleven minutes," Maya said.

"Fourteen."

She sat down in the camp chair and pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands. Devon started gathering sticks. Somewhere across the water, someone was already playing a radio.


Maya got the text at 4:47 on Thursday: *road trip?* Devon had been saying it for weeks, ever since his hours at the warehouse got cut back and Saturdays stopped feeling like a luxury he had to earn.

She wrote back *where* and he wrote back *anywhere with a lake* and that was the whole planning stage, more or less.

Friday night they argued pleasantly about the cooler. Devon wanted to bring everything — the good knife, the cast iron, a bag of charcoal — and Maya kept pulling things out and setting them on the counter of the apartment they'd shared for three years now, the one with the radiator that clanked and the neighbor who played trumpet badly on Sundays.

"We're gone two nights," she said. "Not homesteading."

"I'm not eating gas station food."

"Nobody said gas station food."

He put the cast iron back in. She let him.

They left at six-thirty Saturday morning, before the traffic, with coffee in travel mugs and the windows cracked because the AC in the Corolla had been theoretical since the spring. Maya drove first. Devon controlled the music and did a poor job of it, cycling through four songs before settling into something with a lot of pedal steel, and she teased him for it and then hummed along anyway.

Around eight they stopped at a diner off the highway where the vinyl booths were the color of dried mustard. Devon ordered too much. Maya stole his hash browns. They talked about nothing important — his sister's new job, whether the tomatoes on the fire escape would survive being unattended, a half-serious plan to move somewhere with more trees.

Back on the road, she put her hand on his knee while he drove. Two hours to the lake. The morning was already warm and going warmer, and neither of them was in any particular hurry to arrive.


Maya got off work at four on Friday, which meant she was home before Devin for once. She packed while the light was still good — two changes of clothes each, the good travel mug, the folder of printed directions because the mountains ate cell service.

Devin came in at six smelling like the warehouse, cold air still on his jacket. "You already packed me?"

"I packed you a *suggestion*," she said. "You can veto the green shirt."

He vetoed the green shirt. He also added a fishing rod she hadn't authorized, which she pretended not to see.

They'd been talking about the cabin since February, when a coworker of Devin's mentioned his uncle rented it out cheap in the off-season. Two nights, ninety dollars, wood stove, no Wi-Fi. Maya had done the math three times before saying yes — gas, groceries, the fact that neither of them was getting paid for Saturday.

"We could just go to my mom's," Devin had offered once, and she'd looked at him until he laughed and dropped it.

Saturday morning they left at seven. Devin drove the first hour with the window cracked, Maya asleep against the door with her hood up. When she woke they were past the exits she recognized, and the land had started to fold.

They stopped at a gas station for coffee and a bag of the little powdered donuts, which Devin insisted were a road trip requirement. Maya got powdered sugar on her jeans within four minutes and blamed him.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures and colder, but there was dry wood stacked under a tarp and the stove drew well once Devin got it going. Maya stood at the window with her coat still on, watching the light come down through the trees, and thought: two whole days.

"Hey," Devin said. "Come look at this."


Maritza kept the list on the refrigerator for two weeks. Saturday–Sunday, Cambria. Gas, snacks, motel. Beneath it, Dwayne had added in blocky pencil: coffee thermos, the good blanket, tire gauge.

They left Friday after his shift ended at the distribution center, later than planned because he had to wait for the replacement badge that never came. Maritza had already loaded the car — her duffel, his gym bag, a cooler with sandwiches she'd made at eleven that morning because it seemed cheaper than stopping. She'd texted her sister to check on the mail and the cat.

"You want me to drive first?" she asked.

"I've been sitting all day." He took the keys anyway.

The 101 was thick until Salinas, then loosened. She put her feet on the dash and he told her not to, and she left them there another minute out of principle before dropping them. They argued mildly about the motel — she'd found one two blocks off the water for eighty-nine dollars; he thought they should have booked the place with the hot tub, which was one-fifty.

"For fourteen hours of being awake in it," she said.

"You're the one who wanted an ocean view."

"I want an ocean. The view is free."

They stopped in Paso Robles for gas and he bought her a bag of the sour candy she liked without being asked, which she noticed and didn't mention. Somewhere past Templeton she fell asleep against the window and he turned the radio down.

They reached the motel at 10:40. The clerk gave them a room facing the parking lot. Maritza stood at the open door in her socks and said she could hear the water, or something like it, maybe just traffic. Dwayne came and stood behind her, arms crossed against the cold, listening.

"That's it," he said. "That's the ocean."


Maya got the text from Devon at 4:40 on Friday: *Leaving the shop early. Bag's already packed. You?*

She wasn't. She was still at her desk, half-finished spreadsheet glowing, the last of the afternoon light going gray outside the window of the accounting office. She typed back: *Ten minutes. Don't let me forget the phone charger this time.*

They'd been talking about the cabin for three weeks — a friend of Devon's cousin had a place two hours north, cheap in the off-season, woodstove, no cell service to speak of. Maya had wanted somewhere with a restaurant nearby. Devon had wanted somewhere with nothing nearby. They'd compromised on a town with one diner and a gas station that sold surprisingly good coffee.

By six they were on the highway in Devon's truck, the heater rattling, a grocery bag of eggs and bread and a bottle of wine wedged behind Maya's seat. She read the directions off a printout because she didn't trust the signal to hold, and Devon kept saying he knew the way, and then missing the turn, twice.

"You knew the way," she said.

"I knew the *general* way."

They stopped at the diner because they were hungry and because it was the only lit building on the road. Maya ordered a grilled cheese and Devon ordered the meatloaf and neither of them mentioned the argument they'd had Tuesday about money, which had been small and stupid and still lodged somewhere in the room with them. Instead he told her about the guy who'd brought in a motorcycle with a bird's nest in the airbox, and she laughed harder than the story deserved, and something loosened.

The cabin was cold when they got there. Devon knelt at the woodstove with a fistful of newspaper. Maya stood behind him with her coat still on, watching the first small flame catch, and said, "Okay. This was a good idea."


**Saturday, Two Hours North**

The plan started as a joke, the way most of their plans did. Danielle was scrolling her phone at the kitchen table Tuesday night, and she said, "There's a cabin in the Poconos for eighty-nine a night. It has a hot tub."

Marcus looked up from the dishes. "Eighty-nine? What's wrong with it?"

"It says 'rustic.'"

"That means the door doesn't lock."

But he was already drying his hands, already coming over to look at the pictures. They'd been in the apartment three years now, splitting rent that kept climbing, and neither of them had taken a real vacation since before her mother got sick. Two nights felt manageable. Two nights felt like something they could actually afford to want.

By Thursday, Danielle had made a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, the good blanket, her book, bug spray. Marcus added *speaker* and *cards* and then, because he couldn't help himself, *jumper cables*. His car was fourteen years old and had opinions about cold mornings.

Friday after work, they loaded up in the parking lot behind the building while the sky went orange over the rowhouses. Danielle had packed a cooler with sandwiches so they wouldn't stop, and then they stopped anyway, forty minutes in, because Marcus wanted gas station coffee and she wanted to stretch.

The last stretch of road was dark and narrow and unpaved for the final quarter mile. The cabin was smaller than the photos, which they'd expected, and colder, which they hadn't. Marcus got the heat going. Danielle found the light switch for the porch and stood out there in her jacket, listening to nothing—actual nothing, no sirens, no upstairs neighbor.

"Hey," she called through the screen. "Come look at this."

He came out with two mugs. They didn't say anything for a while.


Maritza slid the last of the folded shirts into the duffel bag while Danny stood at the kitchen counter, arguing with a map on his phone.

"Two hours and forty minutes," he said. "If we leave by six."

"We're not leaving by six. I have to drop the key with Yolanda so she can feed the cat."

They had been talking about the cabin since February, when Danny's cousin mentioned it was sitting empty most weekends. It wasn't much — a rented A-frame with a wood stove and a view of a reservoir — but it was ninety dollars a night and it wasn't the apartment, which in July held heat like a closed fist.

Maritza made a list on the back of an envelope: coffee, the good pan, bug spray, her book, the speaker Danny always forgot. Danny bought firewood at the gas station even though she told him there would be firewood there. He bought marshmallows too, and a bag of limes, unclear on the plan for either.

They left at 6:40. Traffic thinned past the last outlet mall, and the road began to bend upward through pine. Maritza put her feet on the dash, which Danny hated and permitted. She played a podcast for twenty minutes, then turned it off, and they drove in the kind of quiet that had taken them six years to earn.

The cabin key was under a ceramic frog, as promised. Inside, everything smelled like cedar and old smoke. Danny hauled in the cooler; Maritza opened every window.

"There's firewood," she said, pointing to the neat stack on the porch.

"Now we have extra."

They ate sandwiches standing up because neither wanted to wipe down the table yet. Later, on the steps, Danny got the fire going in the ring outside, and Maritza sat close enough that their shoulders touched, watching the reservoir go from silver to nothing at all.


Marisol got off her shift at the hospital laundry at seven, and by the time she climbed the stairs to the apartment, Dev had already spread the road atlas across the kitchen table—an actual paper atlas, because he liked the ritual of it, even though his phone sat right there charging.

"Two hours and forty minutes," he said. "Maybe three with traffic through the pass."

She dropped her bag by the door and looked over his shoulder at the pencil line he'd drawn toward the coast. They'd talked about this for a month, ever since her sister offered them the use of the cabin. Neither of them had taken more than a Sunday off since February.

"We'd have to leave by five," Marisol said. "I'm not leaving by five."

"Six, then."

She made tea while he packed, which meant she came back to find one duffel bag holding a rain jacket, four granola bars, and a paperback he'd already read twice. She added socks, her medication, a sweater for him because he never remembered that coastal towns turned cold after dark. He watched her do it and said nothing, which was his way of saying thank you.

They left at six-forty. The city thinned out into farmland, then into hills the color of wet paper. Dev drove the first stretch with one hand and kept the other on the console where Marisol could reach it if she wanted to, and after a while she did.

Around nine they stopped at a diner with a hand-lettered sign and split an omelet neither of them could finish. Marisol took a photo of the parking lot for no clear reason. Dev asked the waitress about the tide schedule.

Back in the car, the road bent west and the light changed, going pale and salt-washed. Marisol put her feet on the dash.

"Two days," she said.

"Two whole days," Dev agreed, and kept driving.


Maritza pulled the suitcase down from the closet shelf on Thursday night, and Dwayne said, from the doorway, that she was overpacking again.

"It's two nights," he said.

"It's two nights in October," she said. "In the mountains."

They had been together six years, in the same second-floor apartment for four of them, and the argument about the suitcase was really a kind of affection at this point. He took it from her anyway and carried it to the living room, where the dog immediately climbed inside.

The plan was modest. A cabin outside Hocking Hills, booked on a discount site, two nights, checkout Sunday at eleven. Dwayne's cousin would take the dog. Maritza had traded a shift with a coworker, which meant she owed her a Saturday in November, and she'd been quietly annoyed about that all week until Dwayne pointed out that November was still far away.

They left Friday afternoon, later than intended, because he couldn't find the good cooler and she couldn't find her sunglasses, which turned out to be in the car. Traffic thinned once they were past the outerbelt. She drove the first hour; he read her the reviews of the cabin aloud, including a one-star from someone who'd been upset about the lack of cell service.

"Perfect," she said.

They stopped for gas and got the wrong kind of coffee and drank it anyway. The light went orange, then blue. She turned off the radio somewhere around the point where the road began to bend and climb, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was fine.

The cabin key was in a lockbox with a code Dwayne had written on his hand. It took three tries. Inside it smelled like cedar and dust, and the heat took twenty minutes to come on, and Maritza sat on the arm of the couch with her jacket still zipped, laughing at him.


Marisol got off shift at the hospital laundry at three, which meant if Dev finished loading the truck by four they could be past the interstate junction before the Friday traffic thickened. She'd packed the night before: two changes of clothes each, the cooler with sandwiches so they wouldn't have to stop, and the folder of printouts about the state park cabins, which had been the cheaper option by forty dollars.

Dev came up the stairs of the duplex smelling like diesel and apologized for being late. He'd stayed to help Ruben with a pallet that had shifted. Marisol didn't mind. She handed him a clean shirt and told him the ice was already melting.

They'd been in the apartment three years. There was a running argument about whether to sign another lease or finally look at the little houses out past the water tower, and they had agreed, without quite saying so, that the weekend was not for that argument. It was for the lake, and the trail Dev's cousin had described, and sitting somewhere without a television on.

The truck's air conditioning worked in bursts. Marisol rolled her window down and let her arm hang out, and Dev put on the radio station that played the songs they both knew the words to badly. Outside the city the fields opened up, brown and stubbled, and a hawk sat on every third fence post like it had been assigned there.

They stopped once for gas and Dev bought two coffees and a bag of pretzels he ate almost entirely himself. Marisol read the cabin instructions aloud: key in a lockbox, code 4471, firewood extra.

The sun was low and orange when they turned onto the gravel road. Dev slowed down. Neither of them said anything for a while, and it was comfortable.


Maritza set the laundry basket on the couch and said, "If we leave by seven, we beat the tunnel."

Dev was already awake, sort of, hunched over the counter with coffee and his phone, scrolling the cabin listing again like the pictures might have changed overnight. "Two hours forty, it says. But that's assuming nobody's towing a boat."

"Somebody's always towing a boat."

They'd been talking about the Poconos since February, when the heating bill came and Maritza had said, half serious, that they should just spend the money on something they'd remember. It had taken until October to actually book it, and only because Dev's shifts finally lined up with her days off. Two nights, a place with a wood stove and a hot tub that the reviews said was "adequate."

She packed while he made a list, which was how it always went. He wrote *coffee, the good kind* and *cards* and *that blanket*, and she moved through the apartment putting things in a duffel: sweatshirts, her book, the bourbon someone had given them for Christmas and they'd never opened.

"Did you find the cooler?"

"It's under the bed with the Christmas stuff."

"Why is it—" He stopped. "Never mind."

Friday morning they got out at 7:20, which Dev noted and Maritza ignored. The car smelled like the breakfast sandwiches they'd bought at the gas station on Route 22. She drove first. He held the coffees and read her the parts of the listing he found funny — the host's note about the raccoon, the warning that the road got rough past the mailbox.

Outside Easton the traffic thinned and the trees started doing what she'd been hoping they'd do, all that orange coming up over the hills.

"Okay," Dev said. "Okay, this was worth it."

She reached over without looking and he took her hand.