Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled in the linen closet, wedged behind a stack of towels she'd been meaning to fold since March. She shook it out, held it to the window light, and decided the wine stain near the corner could hide under the bread basket.

"Dev," she called. "Did you get the ice?"

From the kitchen came the sound of a cabinet door closing harder than necessary. "I got ice. I got two bags of ice. We could preserve a body."

She came in to find him standing over the stove, sleeves pushed up, stirring something that had gone thicker than the recipe promised. He'd been at it for an hour and a half, longer than he'd admit, and there was a smear of tomato on his forearm.

"It smells good," she said.

"It smells like it's about to break." He tasted it, made a face, reached for the cream. "Kevin's bringing his girlfriend, right? The one who doesn't eat dairy?"

"That was the last one."

"Great. Great." He added the cream.

Marisol went back out and started setting places. Six, then seven when she remembered Anita was coming after her shift. The apartment was small enough that the table had to be pulled away from the wall, which meant the bookcase was now half-blocked, which meant nobody could get to the bathroom without a small negotiation. It had worked before.

At six-fifteen Dev came out with a glass of wine for each of them and stood in the doorway, surveying. Candles, mismatched chairs, the record player already spinning something low.

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

"Don't jinx it."

He handed her the glass. Downstairs, the buzzer went off — early, someone always came early — and she took one long swallow before going to press the button.


The kitchen smelled like garlic and burning butter, which meant Dana had walked away from the stove again.

"Marcus," she called from the bedroom, "is something on fire?"

"Define fire." He turned the heat down and moved the pan off the burner. The garlic had gone a shade past golden, but not ruined. He scraped it into the bowl with the breadcrumbs and started over with fresh butter, because Renata would notice and say something, and he'd rather not give her the opening.

Dana came out pulling an earring in, still barefoot. She'd changed twice. The first shirt had a stain she'd forgotten about; the second one made her feel like she was trying too hard for people she'd known since college.

"Did you text Priya about the parking?"

"I texted her the thing about the permit zone. She sent back a thumbs up, which could mean anything."

"It means she didn't read it." Dana opened the fridge, moved a container, closed it. "We have enough wine?"

"We have four bottles and Theo's bringing more, so we have too much wine."

"That's not a real category."

He laughed. She took the tongs from the drawer and started tossing the salad he'd left half-assembled, adding vinegar without measuring, the way her mother did. Marcus watched her do it and didn't say anything, because the last time he had, it hadn't gone well, and because she was usually right about the vinegar.

At 6:40 the apartment looked reasonable. Candles on the table they'd bought used and refinished badly. The good napkins, which were just the ones without holes.

"Hey." Dana straightened his collar, then left her hand there a second. "This is going to be fine."

"I know."

"You get weird before people come over."

"I get *attentive*."

The buzzer went off. Neither of them moved for a beat, and then both of them did.


Marisol wiped condensation from the kitchen window and watched the parking lot fill with slush. Snow had started around four, which meant everyone would arrive late and apologetic, stamping their boots on the mat by the door.

"The lasagna needs another twenty minutes," she called.

Dev appeared in the doorway holding two wine glasses up to the light. "These have spots. Do we own anything that isn't spotted?"

"We own a dish towel. Somewhere."

He found it hanging on the oven handle, exactly where it always hung, and started polishing. They'd lived in the apartment for three years now — long enough that Dev knew Marisol would rearrange the cheese board twice before she was satisfied, long enough that Marisol knew Dev would insist on lighting candles that nobody would notice.

"Did you text Priya about the nut thing?"

"Her boyfriend's the nut thing. And yes." Marisol slid the salad bowl toward the center of the table, then pulled it back six inches. "Does this look sad? It looks sad."

"It looks like lettuce."

"Thank you, that's very helpful."

Dev came up behind her and looked at the table over her shoulder — mismatched plates, the good napkins her mother had given them, a jar of ranunculus from the grocery store. "It looks nice," he said. "It looks like people live here."

She let herself lean back against him for a second, then straightened. "The bathroom. Did you—"

"Clean towel, new soap, and I hid the laundry basket in the closet."

"Under the coats?"

"Behind the coats. There's a difference."

The buzzer rang at 7:12. Marisol pulled off her apron and threw it into the same closet. Dev turned the music down two notches, then up one, and went to hold the door open while boots came stamping up the stairwell, voices already talking over each other about the snow.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, still creased from the last time they'd used it—Thanksgiving, when Dev's sister had come through Denver on her way to Salt Lake. She shook it out over the dining table and smoothed the wrinkles with her palms, knowing they wouldn't fully surrender.

"Do we have candles?" she called.

Dev was in the kitchen, halfway through a bag of shallots, eyes stinging. "Under the sink. The ones from the power outage."

"Those are emergency candles. They're white and horrible."

"Then we have horrible candles."

She came in and kissed the back of his neck, which made him flinch and nearly slice his thumb. He'd been cooking since four—a braise that needed three hours, which meant everything else had to happen around it. The kitchen smelled like wine reducing and thyme.

"Karen texted," Marisol said. "She's bringing her new boyfriend."

"The one who does CrossFit?"

"That was two ago."

Dev laughed and slid the shallots into the pot. They had a rhythm in the kitchen after four years—he cooked, she cleaned as he went, wiping counters, running the sponge along the stovetop where oil had spattered. It was the only chore division they'd never had to argue about.

At six-fifteen she vacuumed the living room while he showered. At six-thirty he came out in a shirt she liked, hair still damp, and asked if the record player was set up. It wasn't. He put on something instrumental and low.

They stood a moment in the living room, surveying it. Two mismatched chairs pulled from the bedroom to make six seats. The horrible white candles, lit anyway, in jam jars.

"It looks decent," Dev said.

"It looks like us," said Marisol.

The doorbell rang. She went to answer it. He went to check the oven.


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. Outside, the November sky had gone dark by five-thirty, and the kitchen window held her reflection back to her: hair pinned up, flour on her sleeve.

"They're going to be late," Dev said from the living room. "Kyle's always late."

"Kyle's bringing wine, so he's forgiven." She checked the oven. The chicken had another twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five. The apartment smelled like rosemary and hot lemon, which felt like an accomplishment on a Thursday.

Dev came in carrying a stack of mismatched plates, the ones they'd accumulated over four years of moving in together, breaking things, replacing them badly. He set them on the table and started arranging silverware with the seriousness he brought to small tasks.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"Six. We have six people."

"So no."

Marisol laughed. "Get the desk chair. Put it at the end and let Bao sit in it. He likes to spin."

He went to get it, and she heard the wheels catching on the rug, then a muttered complaint. She pulled the salad from the fridge and dressed it, tasting a leaf, adding salt. Through the wall came the neighbor's television, some crowd cheering at something.

"There's a stain on the tablecloth," Dev called.

"Put the bread basket over it."

"That's not solving the problem."

"It's solving tonight's problem."

He appeared in the doorway, sleeves rolled, looking at her the way he sometimes did when she said something he found funny but wasn't going to admit was funny. He crossed the kitchen, tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear, and stole a piece of chicken skin from the pan when she opened the oven.

"Hey."

"Quality control."

The buzzer sounded. They looked at each other. Someone was early, which meant it wasn't Kyle.

"Ready?" she said.

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


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled in the linen closet, still creased from Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table and pressed the folds flat with her palms, which did almost nothing.

"There's an iron somewhere," Dev called from the kitchen.

"There's a candle somewhere too. Nobody's going to be looking at the table."

He came out wiping his hands on a dish towel, surveyed the situation, and agreed the creases gave it character. Then he went back to the stove, where the braise had been going since two and the whole apartment smelled like garlic and red wine. He'd been nervous about it all week. Ellis was bringing his new girlfriend, and Dev had a theory that you could learn everything about a person by whether they ate the vegetables.

Marisol found four matching wine glasses and two that didn't match, decided it was fine, and started on the ice. In the bedroom she changed twice, settled on the green sweater, and came out to find Dev tasting the sauce with a serious expression.

"Verdict?"

"More salt. Or less salt. I've been smelling it too long."

She tasted it. "More salt."

He added salt. She lit the candle, put on a record because Dev thought a speaker looked lazy, and moved the pile of mail off the counter into a drawer, which was where all the mail lived eventually.

At 7:40 the buzzer went. Dev pulled the pot off the heat; Marisol hit the button and left the door open a crack, then stood there a second longer than she needed to, listening to the footsteps coming up.

"You look nice," Dev said behind her, already reaching past her for the wine opener.

"You said that yesterday."

"It was true yesterday."

Then Ellis's laugh came up the stairwell, and the evening started.


They left later than planned, which Dana had predicted on Thursday night while Marcus insisted he could be packed by seven.

"It's seven forty," she said from the driver's seat, watching him jog down the apartment stairs with his duffel unzipped, a sleeve of a flannel shirt trailing out.

"The coffee maker takes time."

"You brought the coffee maker?"

"I brought coffee." He held up a thermos and got in, and she pulled out of the lot before he had his seatbelt on.

They were going to Asheville, two and a half hours, because Marcus's coworker had described a trail there in enough detail that it had lodged in Dana's head for three weeks. They'd booked a motel off the highway, not the nicer place downtown, and Dana had felt fine about that decision until this morning, when she started imagining the parking lot.

At the first gas station, they argued mildly about snacks. Marcus wanted the peanut M&M's; Dana pointed out that he always wanted them and always felt sick afterward. He bought them anyway, plus a bag of pretzels for her, which she hadn't asked for but ate most of before Hendersonville.

He drove the second half. She put her feet on the dash, then took them down when he glanced over, then put them back up ten minutes later.

The motel was fine. The bedspread had a pattern that suggested the 1990s, and the window looked out on a Waffle House sign, but the shower had good pressure, which Marcus reported loudly through the bathroom door.

They ate dinner at a brewery downtown, sharing a pretzel and disagreeing about whether to hike in the morning or sleep in.

"Both," Dana said. "Sleep in a little. Hike at ten."

"Ten's not sleeping in."

"For you it is."

He didn't argue. He was already looking at the beer list again.


Maya found the cooler in the hall closet, behind the vacuum and a box of Christmas lights they hadn't unpacked in two years.

"It smells like a lake," she called out.

Dev was in the kitchen, standing over the counter with his phone propped against the sugar canister. "Baking soda," he said. "Or just leave it open in the car. It'll air out."

They were driving to Asheville, leaving Friday after his last meeting, coming back Sunday night. Two nights at a motel Maya had found for eighty-nine dollars, the kind with exterior doors and a vending machine humming under a stairwell. Dev had wanted to spend more. Maya had pointed out they'd be asleep for most of the time they were paying for, and he'd conceded, mostly because it was true.

She packed sandwiches, turkey for him, hummus and cucumber for her, and cut them diagonally because that was how her mother had always done it. Dev took the trash out and checked the tire pressure, which he did before every trip, and which Maya thought was slightly ridiculous and also reassuring.

"Do you want to drive first or should I?" he asked.

"You. I want to look at my phone and feel guilty about it."

Traffic on 40 was bad until Statesville, and then it wasn't. Maya put on a podcast neither of them was really listening to and turned it off after twenty minutes. They talked about her sister's engagement, whether the dog-sitter would remember the eye drops, and whether it was too early to eat the sandwiches. It was four-fifteen. They ate them anyway, passing the paper towel back and forth.

Somewhere past Marion the mountains started, blue and layered, and Maya said, "Oh," the way she did every time.

Dev looked over. "I know," he said, and moved into the right lane to let a truck pass.


They left later than planned, which surprised neither of them.

Dana had been up since six, packing and repacking a duffel bag on the bedroom floor, while Marcus stood in the kitchen deciding whether the milk would turn over two days. He sniffed it, shrugged, and poured the rest down the drain.

"Do we need the cooler?" he called.

"For what? We're staying at a motel with a vending machine."

"For drinks. For the drive."

"It's two and a half hours."

He put the cooler back in the hall closet anyway, then took it out again and filled it with four seltzers and a bag of baby carrots, because it felt like the kind of thing people did on trips.

Dana had picked the town — a river place in the eastern part of the state with a bookstore she'd read about and a diner that supposedly did good pie. Marcus had wanted to go north, toward the lake, but the forecast said rain up there, and he didn't argue much. He liked being driven places by her decisions.

They fought briefly about the route. She wanted the highway; he wanted the two-lane road that ran along the river and added forty minutes. They took the highway. He looked out the window at the exits and said nothing about it, then fell asleep somewhere past the outlet mall, his head against the seatbelt strap.

She let him sleep. At a gas station outside Millersburg she nudged him awake and he went inside and came back with coffee for both of them and a bag of pretzels he opened with his teeth.

"You didn't have to let me sleep the whole way," he said.

"You snore in the car. It's not terrible."

The motel had a lit sign with one dead letter. They parked, and Marcus carried the cooler in even though neither of them had touched it.


Dana was folding a second sweater into the duffel when Marcus called from the kitchen, "Did you want to leave tonight or early tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," she said. "I don't want to check into a motel at midnight again."

He came into the bedroom with a legal pad, which was how she knew he'd been making a list. "So we leave at seven, we're at the cabin by eleven. That gives us the whole afternoon."

"Seven is aggressive."

"Seven-thirty."

She agreed to seven-thirty knowing it would be eight. They had done this drive before, up through the pine country where the radio stations gave out one by one, and both of them knew the timeline was a formality.

The argument, when it came, was about the cooler. Marcus wanted to buy food at the grocery store up there. Dana pointed out that the store up there was a single aisle of canned goods and a freezer of bait.

"There's a real one in town."

"Town is twenty minutes each way."

They compromised: eggs, coffee, a pound of bacon, bread, and the good mustard from the fridge door, packed in the blue cooler with two bags of ice they'd buy at the gas station on the way out. Everything else they'd get up there.

In the morning it was 8:05 when the car finally pulled out, and Dana didn't say anything about it. Marcus drove the first leg with his window cracked an inch, which she tolerated for forty miles before rolling hers down too, so it wasn't just a draft on the back of her neck.

At the state line they stopped for gas and she went in for coffee, coming back with two cups and a bag of pretzels she hadn't planned on.

"I didn't ask for that," Marcus said, taking a handful.

"I know," she said, and got back in.


They left later than planned, which Nora had predicted and Danny had denied would happen. The cooler took twenty minutes to pack because he insisted on freezing water bottles overnight to use as ice, and then couldn't find the second one behind the bag of peas.

"It's fine," she said from the doorway, keys already in hand. "Check-in's until eleven."

"It's not fine, it's forty dollars of groceries."

She waited. He found it.

The drive to Asheville was four hours if traffic behaved, five if it didn't. Nora took the first shift because she liked the empty stretch of I-40 before the mountains, and because Danny had a habit of narrating other drivers' mistakes. He put his feet on the dash, then took them down when she glanced at them.

They'd booked a cabin off a listing site, one with a woodstove in the photos and a review that said "quirky but clean," which Nora had interpreted generously. Danny had wanted a hotel downtown. They'd compromised by agreeing to the cabin and eating out both nights, which meant Danny had won the argument he actually cared about.

At a gas station outside Statesville they split a bag of peanut M&Ms and argued mildly about whether to stop for real lunch. Danny wanted barbecue. Nora pointed out it was one-thirty and the cabin had a kitchen and the cooler was right there.

"We're on vacation," he said.

"It's two days."

They got barbecue. It took forty minutes and was worth it, and afterward he drove while she dozed against the window with her jacket bunched under her cheek.

The cabin turned out to be down a gravel road with no cell service, which they discovered when the GPS gave up half a mile short. Danny found it anyway, mostly by luck. The woodstove was real. The couch smelled faintly of dog.

"Quirky," Nora said.

"But clean," he said, and started unloading the car.


They left later than planned, which Dana had predicted and Marcus had denied would happen.

The trouble started with the cooler. Marcus wanted to bring one, arguing that gas station food between Nashville and the cabin would cost twice what groceries did. Dana pointed out that the cabin had a kitchen and they were only staying two nights, and that the cooler took up half the trunk. They compromised: a small soft-sided bag with sandwiches, two apples, and a six-pack of the sour beer Dana liked and Marcus tolerated.

"Did you text your sister about the plant?" Marcus asked, backing out of the driveway.

"She's coming Saturday. I left the key under the grill."

"That's the first place someone would look."

"It's a key to an apartment with a broken dishwasher and a TV from 2014."

He conceded the point. They took the interstate for the first hour, and Dana controlled the music because she had gotten to the aux cord first, which was their standing rule. She played a podcast about a fraud case for forty minutes until Marcus said he couldn't follow it, and then she switched to an album they both knew well enough to stop paying attention to.

They stopped in Cookeville for gas. Marcus went inside for coffee and came back with two, plus a bag of peanut M&M's, which he set in the cup holder without comment. Dana ate most of them.

"We should have booked Sunday night too," she said, somewhere past the exit for Monterey.

"You have that meeting."

"It's a Zoom. I could do it from the porch."

"There's no signal on the porch. You said that last time. You complained about it for an hour."

She admitted this was true. The road narrowed and started climbing, and she rolled the window down to see if it was cool enough yet to leave it open.


Maya found the cooler in the garage behind a stack of paint cans, still holding a film of sand from August. She hauled it inside and set it in the kitchen sink to rinse.

"Two nights, right?" Devon called from the bedroom. "Or are we coming back Sunday morning?"

"Sunday afternoon. I told Priya we'd stop by her place on the way home."

He appeared in the doorway holding two flannel shirts on hangers, considering them with more seriousness than the question warranted. "It's supposed to be fifty-two and raining."

"Bring both."

They had reserved the cabin six weeks ago, back when it seemed like an obvious good idea, and now that the weekend had arrived they moved through the packing with the low-grade reluctance of people who would rather be watching television. Devon made a grocery list on the back of an envelope: eggs, coffee, the good bread, hot sauce, something for Saturday dinner they'd argue about later.

At the store he pushed the cart while Maya read labels. She put back a jar of olives when she saw the price, then picked it up again.

"Get it," he said.

"It's eleven dollars."

"It's a weekend."

They left at four fifteen, an hour later than planned, because Maya couldn't find her rain jacket and it turned out to be in the car already. Devon drove. The highway ran flat and gray past outlet malls and a horse farm, and they listened to a podcast about a shipwreck until the signal dropped out somewhere past the second exit for Kingston.

"Do you want to stop for gas now or at the turnoff?" he asked.

"Now. The one at the turnoff is always crowded."

She reached over and adjusted the heat, one notch down, and rested her hand on his knee.


Maya found the cooler in the back of the hall closet, behind the winter coats, and hauled it into the kitchen. It smelled faintly of lake water from August.

"We could just buy ice there," Danny said. He was standing at the counter with his phone, scrolling the weather for Asheville. "Sixty-two and cloudy Saturday. Rain Sunday morning."

"Then we'll leave Sunday morning." She wiped the cooler out with a paper towel. "Are we bringing food or eating out?"

"Both?"

They compromised: sandwiches for the drive, dinner somewhere with a patio if it wasn't too cold. Maya made turkey and provolone while Danny went through the closet looking for the rain jacket he was sure he owned. He came back with a windbreaker instead and said it would be fine.

The car needed gas and the tire pressure light had been on for two days. Danny said he'd handle it Friday after work, and he mostly did—he got gas, forgot the tires, remembered at the on-ramp, and pulled into a Shell where the air pump cost a dollar fifty in quarters neither of them had. Maya found four in the console and two in her coat pocket.

"We're short," she said.

"There's a bank machine."

"For a dollar fifty?"

They drove on the slightly soft tires. Traffic was bad through Charlotte, then loosened. Maya put on the playlist she'd made, which was mostly songs Danny liked, and he noticed and didn't say anything except to turn it up.

At six-forty they passed a sign for Old Fort and Danny asked if she wanted to stop and stretch. She said she'd rather push through and get checked in. He said okay. Twenty minutes later he pulled off anyway, at a gas station with a bathroom, and she was glad he had.


They left later than they meant to, which Nora had predicted on Thursday night and Devin had denied.

"Nine o'clock," he'd said, tossing socks into the duffel. "Out the door."

It was 10:40 when they finally pulled onto the interstate, mostly because Nora had realized halfway to the car that she'd left the coffee maker on, and then Devin had gone back in for the phone charger, and then they'd both stood in the driveway trying to remember whether they'd locked the back slider.

"We locked it," Nora said. "I watched you lock it."

"You watched me close it."

She went and checked. It was locked.

The plan was two nights in a cabin outside Boone, one Nora's coworker had recommended in a way that suggested it was either charming or falling apart. They'd booked it in April, back when September had seemed theoretical.

Devin drove the first stretch. Nora navigated, which mostly meant reading gas prices aloud and deciding they could make it another twenty miles. Around Winston-Salem she started a podcast about a cult, and he let it run for ten minutes before asking if they could listen to something less upsetting.

They stopped at a Sheetz for gas and a bathroom and stood in the aisle debating snacks with more seriousness than the decision warranted. Devin wanted the peanut M&M's. Nora wanted something salty. They bought both, plus a bag of ice for the cooler because she'd read the cabin's fridge was small.

"Do you think there's cell service?" she asked, back on the road.

"Probably some."

"I told my mom I'd call Saturday."

"So call her Saturday."

The mountains came up gradually, the way they do—first hills, then something more insistent. Nora put her feet on the dash and Devin told her not to, and she left them there anyway, and neither of them said anything else for a while.


Dana found the coupon in a drawer while looking for tape—half off a cabin near Blue Ridge, expiring at the end of the month.

"It's forty minutes past Ellijay," she said, holding it up. "We could leave Friday after you get off."

Marcus was rinsing a pan. "Friday traffic on 575 is going to be brutal."

"So we leave at six instead of five. Eat first."

He thought about it and shrugged, which she'd learned to read as yes.

They packed Thursday night, badly. Marcus laid out three shirts and put two back. Dana argued for bringing the good pillow because the cabin reviews mentioned thin mattresses, and Marcus pointed out that the last time they'd brought a pillow they'd left it behind and had to drive back an hour. They brought it anyway, in a garbage bag so it wouldn't get dirty in the trunk.

The grocery decision took longer than the packing. Marcus wanted to buy everything at the Kroger by the house; Dana said there was a store in Ellijay and they didn't need to haul a cooler. They compromised: coffee, eggs, and beer from home, everything else there. He still put ice in the cooler out of principle.

Friday, he got out at 5:40, which he texted her like a victory. She had the car running in the apartment lot with her feet on the dash.

"Did you lock the back door?"

"Yes."

"Did you actually check, or—"

"I checked."

They stopped at the Wendy's on Barrett Parkway and ate in the car because the dining room smelled like bleach. Traffic thinned past Canton. The light went long and orange across the hills, and Dana put her window down two inches, and Marcus said something about the smell of pine, and neither of them said anything for a while after that, which was fine.

At the last turnoff, the GPS lost signal, and Dana pulled up the screenshot she'd taken that morning, because she'd known this would happen.


They left later than planned, which Marisol had predicted at breakfast and Dev had disputed at breakfast, and neither of them mentioned it now.

The car smelled like the coffee she'd spilled on the passenger seat in March. Dev drove the first leg because he always drove the first leg, some unspoken arrangement from their first road trip four years ago that had hardened into law. Marisol worked the phone, scrolling through the cabin listing again.

"It says there's a wood stove," she said. "Do you know how to use a wood stove?"

"I've seen it done."

"That's not the same thing."

"There'll be instructions taped to it. There's always instructions taped to it."

They stopped in Pineville because Marisol wanted a sandwich and Dev wanted to stretch his back, which had been complaining since he'd moved the bookshelf on Tuesday. The deli had one of those cases with the fluorescent light buzzing over the potato salad. She ordered turkey. He ordered turkey and then changed it to roast beef at the last second, which made the woman behind the counter sigh.

"You always do that," Marisol said, outside.

"Do what."

"Panic at the register."

"I didn't panic. I reconsidered."

Back in the car she took over driving. Dev put his feet on the dash and she told him not to, and he took them down without argument, which she noticed. The mountains started showing up around four, blue and unspecific in the distance.

"We forgot the good pillow," he said.

"I know. I thought about it at the exit and then I didn't say anything."

"Why not?"

"Because we were already forty minutes out and I didn't want to hear about it for two days."

He laughed. She turned the radio down to nothing and they drove the last stretch mostly quiet, watching the light go orange over the ridgeline, planning nothing further.


The rain started somewhere past Harrisburg, thin and steady, and Nora turned the wipers up one notch.

"We could still stop in Lancaster," Dev said. He had the map open on his phone even though the GPS was talking. "There's a place with pretzels."

"There's a place with pretzels everywhere in Pennsylvania."

"This one's supposed to be the original."

She glanced over. He had that look, the one he got about roadside attractions and diners with hand-painted signs. They'd left Baltimore at seven that morning, later than planned, because Dev couldn't find the good travel mug and Nora had insisted on running the dishwasher first. Two nights in the Poconos, a cabin she'd found for a hundred and forty a night, booked back in September when the summer had felt endless.

"Fine," she said. "But I'm not eating a pretzel the size of my head."

"You'll eat half of mine."

He was right, and she didn't argue.

They'd packed the night before, which was Nora's system: a list on the fridge, checked off in pencil. Dev's system was to throw things in a duffel at eleven p.m. and then ask, in the car, whether she'd brought a phone charger. She had. She'd brought two.

At the pretzel place, the parking lot was half gravel and the rain had made it soup. Dev came back with a paper bag darkening at the bottom and got salt on the seat.

"Worth it?" she asked.

He chewed, considering. "It's a pretzel."

"So no."

"It's a good pretzel."

She pulled back onto the highway. The mountains started showing up in the distance, blue and hazy, the way they always did about an hour before you actually got anywhere. Dev put his feet on the dash. She told him not to. He put them down and then, twenty minutes later, put them back up, and she let it go.


They left at four-thirty on Friday, which was later than Maya wanted and earlier than Dev thought necessary.

"If we'd gone at three, we'd be past Hartford by now," she said, checking her phone.

"If we'd gone at three, I'd have skipped the standup and Priya would have covered for me again." He merged onto the highway, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching for the coffee he'd set in the cupholder and immediately forgotten.

The plan, such as it was: two nights in a rented cabin outside Great Barrington, a place with a wood stove and photos online that suggested the bathroom had been renovated sometime in the current century. Maya had found it. Dev had approved it in about four seconds, which she interpreted as indifference and he considered trust.

They argued mildly about the grocery stop. Dev wanted to wait until they got up there; Maya pointed out that the nearest market to the cabin closed at seven. They pulled off at a Stop & Shop in Danbury and moved through the aisles in the loose, unspoken division of labor they'd developed over three years of sharing a kitchen—he got coffee, eggs, the specific hot sauce he liked; she got vegetables, pasta, a bottle of wine she held up for his opinion. He nodded without really looking.

"You didn't look."

"I trust you."

"That's the same thing as not caring."

"It's really not," he said, and put a box of Triscuits in the cart.

Traffic thinned after Waterbury. Maya took over the music, and Dev didn't complain, even about the album he'd told her twice he found repetitive. The light went long and gold across the road. She put her feet on the dash and he told her not to, and she left them there anyway, and neither of them said anything else for a while.


They left later than they'd planned, which Nadia had predicted on Wednesday when Theo said they'd be on the road by seven.

"It's eight forty," she said, buckling in.

"But we're going." He backed out of the driveway, then stopped. "Did you lock the deadbolt?"

She had. She'd also watered the pothos, unplugged the space heater, and texted their neighbor about the mail, none of which she mentioned, because Theo had loaded the car and made coffee for the thermos and that was a fair split.

The plan was two nights in a cabin ninety minutes north, a place Theo's coworker had recommended with the caveat that the wifi was bad. They'd debated that for a week. Nadia had a paper to grade; Theo had wanted the excuse to be unreachable. They'd compromised by bringing her laptop and agreeing she'd only work Saturday morning.

At the grocery store outside town they split up with a list written on the back of a receipt. Theo came back with tortilla chips that weren't the brand she liked and a six-pack of a beer neither of them had tried.

"Adventurous," she said.

"It was on sale."

They argued mildly about eggs — she wanted a dozen, he said they'd never eat twelve — and bought the dozen. In the parking lot Theo ate a handful of chips standing up while she reorganized the bags in the trunk so the bread wouldn't get crushed.

The last twenty minutes were gravel road. Nadia read the directions off her phone until service dropped, then off a screenshot. The cabin was smaller than the photos and colder, and the key was under a flowerpot exactly where it was supposed to be.

Theo carried in the cooler. Nadia found the thermostat.

"There's a fireplace," he called from the other room.

"Is there wood?"

A pause. "There's a fireplace."


The Sunday before, Priya had circled the weekend on the kitchen calendar in green marker, which was how Marcus knew she was serious.

They left Friday at four-thirty, which meant traffic, which meant an argument that wasn't quite an argument about whether they should have left at three.

"I couldn't leave at three," Marcus said. "I had the Kowalski call."

"I know." Priya adjusted the vent so it blew on her feet. "I'm not saying you could have. I'm saying if you *could* have."

They'd rented a cabin two hours north, a place with a wood stove and a photo online of a deer standing improbably close to the porch. Ninety dollars a night, which felt like a bargain until they added the cleaning fee.

Packing had taken longer than the drive would. Priya brought three books she wouldn't read. Marcus forgot a towel and remembered at the gas station in Middleton, where they stopped for coffee and a bag of pretzels and stood in the fluorescent light debating whether the cabin provided towels.

"It said linens," he said.

"Linens might just be sheets."

They bought a beach towel with a cartoon shark on it, seven dollars, and Priya said they'd have it forever now, this shark, in the linen closet, a monument to poor planning.

The highway thinned out past the exit for the outlet mall. Marcus put on the podcast they'd been saving. Priya fell asleep during the second segment and he let it run anyway, quietly, watching the sun go orange over a field of something—soybeans, maybe—and thinking he should learn to identify crops.

She woke when they turned onto gravel.

"Are we here?"

"Almost. There's a mailbox shaped like a fish."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not."

There was, in fact, a mailbox shaped like a fish. Priya took a picture of it before they even unloaded the car.


The rental car smelled like someone else's air freshener, pine and something chemical underneath. Dana adjusted the mirror while Mark loaded the trunk with a duffel bag, a cooler, and the tent they hadn't used since the summer before last.

"Did you pack the stove fuel?" she called through the open window.

"It's in the cooler."

"With the food?"

Mark paused. "Is that bad?"

They stood together over the open cooler for a minute, examining the small green canister nestled between a package of hot dogs and a bag of pre-shredded cheese. Neither of them knew, definitively, whether this was a problem. Dana looked it up on her phone and found three conflicting opinions on a camping forum from 2011.

"We'll put it in the back seat," she decided. "Just to feel better about ourselves."

Traffic on I-90 was worse than they'd hoped, which they'd both privately expected. Mark drove the first shift. Dana had made a playlist two nights ago, sitting on the couch with her laptop while he watched a documentary about deep-sea creatures, and now it turned out to be forty minutes long instead of the four hours she'd intended.

"That's fine," Mark said. "We can listen to it three times."

"We could talk."

"We could do that too."

They stopped in Cle Elum for gas and coffee. Dana went inside to use the bathroom and came back with two granola bars and a lottery ticket, which was a thing she did occasionally, one dollar at a time, without any real hope.

"Anything?" Mark asked, back on the highway.

She scratched at it with a penny from the cupholder. "A dollar. So we broke even."

"That's the best possible outcome. No windfall to manage."

She folded the ticket into the door pocket and put her feet on the dashboard, and he didn't tell her not to.


The car was already packed by the time Dana came down with the cooler, which meant Theo had done the tetris wrong again.

"The sleeping bags go on the bottom," she said.

"They were on the bottom. Then I needed the jack."

"Why did you need the jack?"

"I didn't. I thought I might."

They stood in the driveway a moment, coffee steaming in the November air, looking at the trunk like a problem that would solve itself. Then Theo pulled the sleeping bags out, laid them flat, and they both pretended this had been the plan.

The reservation was for a cabin two hours north, one night, checkout at eleven. Dana had found it on a Tuesday during a meeting she wasn't really attending. Theo had said sure without looking up, and then three days later asked whether there was a hot tub, and there wasn't, and he said that was fine, and mostly it was.

On the highway she drove and he handled the music, which was the arrangement. He put on something instrumental for the first twenty minutes, then switched, unprompted, to the album she liked and wouldn't ask for.

"We forgot eggs," she said, somewhere past the second exit.

"We have eggs."

"We have four eggs. We wanted French toast."

"Four is enough for French toast."

"Not the way you make it."

They stopped at a grocery store in a town whose name neither of them registered. Inside, they split up out of habit and reconvened at the register with a dozen eggs, a bag of pretzels, a bottle of wine Theo picked because the label had a bird on it, and a lighter, because Dana said you always think you have one.

Back in the lot, he took the driver's seat without discussion. She reclined hers four inches and put her feet on the dash.

"Two more hours," she said.

"One and a half."

"Two."

He didn't argue. It was two.


Maya found the cooler in the back of the hall closet, behind a box of Christmas lights they'd never gotten around to hanging.

"It smells like feet," she called out.

Devon came in from the kitchen holding a bag of ice he'd already opened, which meant they were committed. "Rinse it with vinegar. That's what my mom does."

They had two nights at a cabin outside Blue Ridge, booked six weeks ago when the rate was low and October had seemed abstract. Now it was Friday afternoon, and the drive was three and a half hours if traffic behaved, which it wouldn't.

"Are we bringing the good pillows or the guest pillows?"

"The listing said linens provided."

"That doesn't mean good pillows," Maya said, and took the good pillows.

Devon packed the car the way he always did, which was to say badly, wedging the cooler behind the passenger seat where it would have to be moved every time anyone wanted anything. Maya rearranged it while he was inside looking for his charger. She didn't mention it. He noticed and didn't mention it either.

They stopped at the Kroger on Ponce for coffee, eggs, a rotisserie chicken, and a bottle of wine Maya picked because the label had a fox on it. Devon added a bag of pretzels at the register.

"You're going to eat those in the car and then complain you're thirsty."

"Correct," he said.

They got on 400 at 4:40, which was the worst possible time, and sat in the left lane past Sandy Springs listening to a podcast about a shipwreck. Somewhere around Cumming the traffic loosened and the light turned gold across the pine trees, and Maya put her feet on the dashboard, which Devon hated, and he looked over and decided not to say anything about it this time.

"We should do this more," she said.

"We say that every time."

They said it every time.


The Friday traffic on I-84 hadn't started yet, which was the whole point of leaving at two.

Dana had packed the night before, which meant her bag had been sitting by the door since Thursday evening, half-unzipped, accumulating last-minute additions: sunscreen, a paperback she probably wouldn't read, the good headphones. Marcus packed the way he always did, which was to say twenty minutes before departure, standing in front of the open dresser as though the drawers might suggest something.

"Do I need a jacket?"

"It's Vermont."

"It's July in Vermont."

"Bring the jacket."

He brought the jacket. He also brought, without mentioning it, the small blue cooler, because he knew she'd want iced coffee somewhere around Sturbridge and would refuse to stop for it, on principle, having declared that morning that they were going to make good time.

The cabin they'd rented was a two-hour drive plus a two-hour drive, with a Cumberland Farms in between. Dana drove the first leg. Marcus controlled the aux cord and played a podcast for eleven minutes before she asked, politely, if they could have music instead. He put on the playlist she'd made in 2019 and had never updated.

At the gas station she bought gum and a bag of pretzels and he pumped the gas and washed the windshield with the squeegee, which was mostly dry.

"There's a farm stand near the exit," she said, getting back in. "Blueberries."

"We have to check in by six."

"It's four-fifteen."

They stopped at the farm stand. The blueberries were four dollars a pint and slightly warm from sitting in the sun. Marcus ate them out of the container while she drove the last twenty minutes, and when she held out her hand at a red light, he tipped a few into her palm without looking away from the road.


They left later than planned, which Nadia had predicted on Wednesday when Theo said they'd be on the road by seven.

"It's eight-forty," she said, buckling in.

"Eight thirty-eight." He backed out of the driveway, one hand on her headrest, squinting past the recycling bins. "And I found the tire pressure gauge, so."

The trip had come together in a week. A friend of Theo's had a cabin outside Great Barrington and wasn't using it, and Nadia had two vacation days she'd lose at the end of the quarter. They'd argued mildly about whether to go somewhere with a real hotel, then agreed the cabin was free, which settled it.

She'd packed the night before: two sweaters because the forecast couldn't decide, the good coffee because Theo's friend's coffee situation was unknown, a book she wouldn't read. He'd packed that morning in eleven minutes and forgotten a towel.

At the gas station on Route 9 they split up — she went in for coffee and he pumped, and when she came out he was standing by the pump reading the label on a bag of ice like it was interesting.

"They have those little cheese things," she said.

"The ones in the jar?"

"No. The stick ones."

He got two. They ate them in the car before they'd gone a mile.

Somewhere past Springfield the conversation went quiet in the comfortable way. Nadia put her feet on the dash and then took them down because he'd asked her not to, once, a year ago, and she'd never fully stopped.

"We should get groceries before we're up there," she said. "There's nothing but a general store, right?"

"There's a Big Y in Lee."

"Okay. List."

She typed it into her phone while he drove: eggs, bread, something for tonight, ice. He said wine. She said obviously wine, and added it anyway.


Maya was already awake when the alarm went off, mentally reviewing the cooler situation. They owned two: a soft-sided one that leaked and a hard plastic one that took up half the trunk.

"Just bring the big one," Devin said from the bathroom, toothbrush in his mouth. "We're not fitting that much anyway."

"We have to fit your camera bag."

"The camera bag is small."

"The camera bag has never once been small."

They were driving to Asheville, three and a half hours if the traffic near Charlotte cooperated, which it wouldn't. Maya had found a cabin rental for a hundred and forty a night, which felt like a lot until Devin pointed out they'd spent nearly that on takeout the previous week without noticing.

He packed the car while she made coffee for the road, filling two travel mugs and then wondering whether she should have made a third, since Devin always drank his too fast and then complained. She poured the rest into a mason jar and screwed the lid on tight.

"Do we need to stop for gas?"

"Half a tank. We can make it to that place off exit 19 with the good bathrooms."

"Every bathroom is fine, Maya."

"That is objectively untrue."

They left at 8:40, twenty minutes later than planned, which Devin considered a personal victory and Maya considered proof they should always aim for an hour earlier. She controlled the music for the first hour, which was the arrangement, and put on a podcast instead, which technically violated it.

Somewhere past the state line, the highway opened up and the hills started stacking behind each other in that hazy way. Devin reached over and put his hand on her knee without saying anything. Maya turned the podcast down two notches and left it there, and neither of them mentioned the cooler again.


The forecast said rain Saturday afternoon, so Priya wanted to leave Friday right after work. Daniel argued for Saturday morning — he had a call at four he couldn't move, and the cabin was only two and a half hours away.

"Two and a half without traffic," Priya said. She was standing in the kitchen with her laptop open on the counter, comparing the reservation email to the map. "It's Friday. It'll be three and a half."

They compromised: Daniel would take the call in the car, muted, nodding at nothing while Priya drove. He'd unmute if someone said his name.

She packed Thursday night, which he found unnecessary and she found obvious. Two pairs of jeans, the fleece she'd had since college, her book from the library that was due Tuesday. He threw things in a duffel Friday at 3:50 — a hoodie, phone charger, the wrong charger, then the right one.

The cooler was the real negotiation. Priya wanted to stop at the grocery store near the highway exit and buy everything there. Daniel pointed out they had half a rotisserie chicken in the fridge that would go bad by Monday.

"So we bring the chicken and buy the rest."

"And eggs. There's a carton with four left."

They brought the chicken and the eggs and bought bread, coffee, a bag of clementines, and, at Daniel's insistence, a frozen pizza in case they got back late from the hike and didn't want to cook. Priya said they'd never eat it. Daniel said that was the point.

They left at 4:12. Traffic on the interstate was as bad as she'd predicted, and he said his name twice on the call in a voice that sounded like someone else's. When they merged onto the smaller highway the sun was low and orange behind the trees, and Priya turned the radio up.


The car was packed by seven, mostly because Dana refused to let Marcus load anything the night before. "Someone breaks the window and takes your good boots," she said, "and then what."

He didn't argue. He'd learned that arguing about theoretical car burglars was a losing proposition, and besides, she was right often enough that it wasn't worth the accounting.

They were going to Asheville, two and a half hours if the traffic held, staying at a place Dana had found that had a photograph of a claw-foot tub and a review that said the innkeeper made an excellent scone. Marcus had wanted to camp. Dana had pointed out that it was March and that he complained about his back on a mattress.

"Do we need to stop for coffee," he asked, backing out of the driveway, "or is that a decision we make in twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes. There's the place off the exit."

"The one with the parking lot."

"They all have parking lots."

"The one with the bad parking lot."

She admitted it was the one with the bad parking lot.

The interstate was fine until Hendersonville, where it wasn't. Dana put her feet on the dash and then took them down when Marcus glanced over. She read him three things off her phone: a text from her sister about a dog, a headline about a bridge closure that turned out to be in Ohio, and the weather, which was going to be fifty-one and cloudy both days.

"That's fine," Marcus said. "That's hiking weather."

"That's sitting-inside weather."

"It can be both."

They stopped at the bad parking lot. Marcus got a large coffee and Dana got a small one and half of a muffin she didn't finish, and they stood by the car for a minute in the cold before getting back in, neither of them in any particular hurry.


They left Thursday night instead of Friday morning, which had been Priya's idea, argued over dinner while she scraped the last of the rice from the pan.

"Traffic," she said. "We'd sit on I-80 for two hours."

Danny had wanted the extra night in their own bed. But he checked the map on his phone, saw the red line thickening even at eight p.m., and conceded. He packed while she cleaned up, which was their usual arrangement, and he did it badly — three shirts for two days, no toothbrush, the good hiking socks left in the dryer.

She caught the toothbrush. She always did.

The car was a 2014 Corolla with a check-engine light they had learned to ignore since October. Priya drove first because she liked the dark highway and Danny liked to sleep in the passenger seat, mouth slightly open, which she found ridiculous and also, privately, endearing. They stopped in Vacaville for gas and he bought two coffees and a bag of the sour gummy worms she pretended not to want.

"I told Marcus we'd feed the cat," she said, back on the road.

"You told him or I told him?"

"I told him you'd told him."

Danny laughed. "So nobody told him."

She handed him her phone and he texted Marcus one-handed while eating a worm, and Marcus wrote back a thumbs-up and a photo of the cat asleep in a laundry basket.

The cabin was two hours further, a place her coworker's parents owned and rented cheap to people they sort of knew. Neither of them had seen a picture beyond three blurry listings photos. The road up was unlit and Priya slowed to thirty, then twenty-five.

"If there's no cell service," Danny said, "I'm going to be insufferable."

"You're already insufferable."

He put his hand on her knee. She left it there, and drove.


They left later than planned, which surprised neither of them.

Dana had wanted to be on the road by seven, but Marcus couldn't find the phone charger that worked in his car—the good one, not the frayed one that only held a connection if you propped it at a certain angle. He found it eventually in the pocket of a jacket he hadn't worn since March.

"We're not going to hit traffic anyway," he said, tossing the duffel into the back seat. "Everybody left Friday."

Dana had made a list, which Marcus had teased her about and then quietly consulted twice while packing. Sunscreen. The book she'd been reading for six weeks. A bag of pretzels because the gas station ones were always stale. She checked the stove twice before locking the door, the way her mother used to.

The cabin belonged to Marcus's coworker, who rented it out cheap to people he liked. Two hours north, past the outlet malls and then the long stretch where the radio stations went fuzzy. They played a podcast for a while, then turned it off because neither of them was really listening.

"Do we need groceries or are we doing the restaurant thing?" Dana asked somewhere around the halfway point.

"Both? Coffee at least. And breakfast stuff."

They stopped at a Hannaford outside Keene and split up in the aisles, which was more efficient and also something they both enjoyed—the small reunion at the register, comparing what they'd found. Marcus had gotten a rotisserie chicken nobody had asked for. Dana had gotten wine and two kinds of cheese and a package of the seeded crackers he liked.

The cabin key was under a ceramic frog, as promised. Inside smelled like woodsmoke and dust. Dana opened the windows. Marcus figured out the water heater.

It was a little after noon.


They left later than they meant to, which Nadia had predicted on Wednesday and mentioned twice on Friday night while folding shirts into the duffel.

"It's not a criticism," she said. "It's just weather forecasting."

Theo was in the kitchen deciding about the coffee. There was half a bag of beans that would go stale over three days, but grinding it now meant packing the little travel press, which meant remembering the mugs, which meant a whole apparatus for something they could buy at any gas station in Pennsylvania.

"Leave it," Nadia called. "There's a place in Jim Thorpe with actual espresso."

He left it. He did bring the beans, in a ziplock, because throwing them out felt worse.

The car was a 2013 Civic with a check-engine light they had both agreed was philosophical rather than mechanical. Nadia drove first. They had a system that had emerged over four years without anyone proposing it: she took the highway, he took anything with switchbacks, and they traded near Allentown at a Wawa where he always got the same sandwich.

Around Bethlehem she asked whether he'd texted his sister back.

"I will."

"You said that Tuesday."

"I know what I said Tuesday."

She let it sit. Outside, the industrial ruins along the river went past in their orange evening light, and Theo thought about how his sister always asked questions that took forty minutes to answer honestly and eight seconds to answer badly.

"I'll do it at the hotel," he said, and meant it more than the last time.

The inn had a gravel lot and a woman at the desk who apologized twice for the stairs. Their room had a quilt that neither of them would have chosen and both of them liked. Nadia sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off her boots and said, "Dinner in an hour?" and he said, "Forty-five minutes," and she said, "An hour," and that was the plan.


The forecast said rain Saturday, so Dana suggested they leave Friday after work instead. Marcus agreed, then spent twenty minutes arguing with the rental car website, which kept insisting his last name had too many characters.

"Just use mine," Dana said from the couch, where she was making a list on the back of an envelope.

"It's four letters."

"It's the site. Use mine."

He did, and it worked, which he found personally insulting.

They packed light. Dana had a duffel she'd owned since college with a broken zipper pull she'd replaced with a paperclip. Marcus brought too many shirts, as he always did, and she didn't say anything about it, as she always didn't. He noticed her noticing and put two back.

The cabin was two and a half hours north, near a lake with a name neither of them could pronounce confidently. Dana's coworker had recommended it. They'd looked at photos on a Tuesday night in bed, phones angled toward each other, and booked it before either of them could think too hard about the price.

Friday came. Marcus got out early; Dana didn't, so he sat in the parked rental outside her office building and listened to a podcast about a shipwreck. When she came out she was still on the phone with her mother, holding up one finger, and he popped the trunk without getting out.

They stopped for gas and snacks forty minutes in. Dana wanted the sour candy. Marcus wanted jerky and got a coffee he didn't need at six p.m.

"You'll be up all night," she said.

"I'll be up anyway. New bed."

Outside town the highway narrowed and the light went orange over fields. Dana put her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he said nothing about that either. She found a radio station playing something from 1997 and turned it up.


They left later than planned, which Dana had predicted out loud on Thursday night and again Friday morning, so that by the time Marcus finally zipped the duffel at 4:40 she felt entitled to a small, unspoken victory.

"Do we need the cooler?" he asked from the doorway.

"For two nights?"

"For the drive. So we don't stop."

They packed the cooler. Four seltzers, a bag of baby carrots that would come home untouched, string cheese, the leftover chicken salad Dana made Wednesday. Marcus added two beers, then took one out, then put it back.

The cabin was in the Poconos, three hours if traffic cooperated, which it did not. Somewhere past Allentown they had the argument they always had about whether to take the exit for gas or push another twenty miles, and Marcus took the exit, and Dana looked at her phone and said nothing about the prices.

She drove the last hour. He fell asleep with his head against the window and woke when she turned off the highway onto a road with no shoulder.

"Are we close?"

"Two miles. There's supposedly a key box."

The key box was on a post by the porch and the code worked on the second try. Inside smelled like woodsmoke and old carpet. The photos had made the living room look bigger, and the second bedroom was really a landing with a futon, but there was a wood stove and a view of trees going dark.

Marcus carried in the cooler. Dana found the thermostat.

"There's a grocery in town," he said. "Or we could just eat the chicken salad."

"We could just eat the chicken salad."

They ate it standing at the counter, out of the container, sharing one fork because neither of them wanted to open the dishwasher yet.


Maya found the cooler in the back of the hall closet, behind the vacuum and a bag of winter coats she'd been meaning to donate. It smelled faintly of last summer's lake trip.

"Do we need it?" Daniel called from the kitchen. "There's a grocery store, like, eight minutes from the cabin."

"We need it for the drive." She dragged it out. "You get hangry around hour two. It's not a criticism, it's a fact."

He conceded the point by not answering. She heard him opening cabinets, then the crinkle of a chip bag.

They'd booked the cabin six weeks ago, on a Tuesday night when March had felt endless and Daniel's job had been particularly stupid. Two nights, three hours north, a place with a woodstove and a photo online of a deer standing in the yard, which Maya suspected had been staged somehow.

By nine-forty they were still loading. Daniel wanted to bring his good coffee setup — the grinder, the pour-over cone, the scale.

"It's two mornings."

"It's two mornings I have to drink coffee."

"There's a Mr. Coffee in the listing photos."

He looked at her the way he looked at people who merged without signaling. She let it go. He put the grinder in a tote bag and packed the paper filters with an air of vindication.

She drove the first leg because she liked the on-ramps. Daniel handled the music and read the road signs out loud when they were funny. Somewhere past the second toll they argued mildly about whether they'd remembered to take the trash out, then agreed they had, then went quiet in a comfortable way.

At the halfway point they stopped for gas and split a bag of pretzels. The parking lot smelled like rain coming. Maya leaned against the car while Daniel worked the pump, and neither of them said anything about how nice it was, which was fine.


Nadia had the map open on the kitchen table, the paper kind, because she said her phone always died in the mountains. Theo stood at the counter making coffee, listening to her list the towns along Route 9.

"Two nights," she said. "Friday after work to Sunday afternoon. If we leave by five we hit the lodge before dark."

"Five's optimistic. I have a call at four-thirty."

"Then five-thirty. I'll pack the car."

He brought her a mug and looked over her shoulder. The lodge she'd circled was forty dollars cheaper than the one with the hot tub, and closer to the trailhead. He said that seemed fine. She said she'd already emailed them.

Thursday night they argued mildly about the cooler. Theo wanted to bring food; Nadia thought they'd want to eat in town, try the diner she'd read about. They compromised: sandwiches for Friday's drive, dinner out both nights. He bought turkey and provolone. She bought a bag of pretzels and, at the last second, a bar of chocolate she didn't mention.

Friday he got out at five-forty. She was already in the passenger seat with her boots on the floor mat and the map folded to the right panel.

"Did you lock the back door?"

"Yes."

"The one to the porch?"

He got out, went and checked, came back. "It was locked."

"Okay."

They took the highway for the first hour and hardly spoke, which was comfortable. She ate half a sandwich and put the other half back in the bag for him. Around Millbrook the light went orange over the fields and she rolled her window down two inches.

"This was a good idea," he said.

"You said that last time and then it rained."

"It's not going to rain."

She looked at the sky, then at the map, and didn't say anything, and he took the exit she pointed to.


They left later than planned, which Nora had predicted and Dev had denied was likely.

The bag situation was the first negotiation. Dev wanted to take the big duffel because it was easier to throw in the trunk. Nora pointed out they'd be at the cabin for two nights and she wasn't digging through his socks to find her toothbrush. They took two bags. Dev carried both down the stairs anyway, one on each shoulder, which she found faintly ridiculous and also nice.

"Did you unplug the space heater?"

"I never plugged it in."

"You did, Tuesday, when it got cold."

He went back up. It was unplugged. He did not report this.

At the gas station on Route 9 they split up—Dev pumping, Nora inside for coffee and whatever looked acceptable. She came out with two coffees, a bag of pretzels, and a package of red licorice she knew he didn't like.

"You bought those for you."

"I bought them for the car."

The first hour was easy. Nora drove because Dev got sleepy on highways and admitted it. He handled music and read the exits aloud when she asked. Around Kingston they got into a low, circling argument about whether they should have invited Priya and Tom, which was really an argument about whether Dev had said yes to something without checking. It resolved the way most of theirs did—not with an apology, exactly, but with Dev saying "okay, that's fair" and Nora letting it go and turning up the volume.

The cabin was smaller than the photos and smelled like cold woodsmoke. There was a key under a flowerpot, as promised. Dev got the woodstove going on the second try. Nora unpacked the groceries into a fridge that hummed too loud and found that the owner had left a half bottle of red wine and a note that said *help yourselves.*

They did.


They left at six on Friday, later than planned, because Nadia couldn't find the phone charger and Theo insisted on washing the dishes first.

"They'll just be there Sunday," she said, standing in the doorway with her duffel.

"They'll be crusty Sunday." He dried his hands on the towel that hung from the oven handle and looked at her. "Do we have the bin of snacks?"

"It's in the trunk. Under your jacket, because you put your jacket on top of it."

The drive north out of the city took forty minutes of stoplights and merges before it opened up. Nadia drove first. Theo controlled the music and the temperature and read aloud the descriptions of the cabin they'd rented, which he'd already read to her twice.

"'Rustic charm,'" he said.

"That means no dishwasher."

"'Cozy sleeping loft.'"

"That means a ladder."

They stopped at a gas station in Bellingham that also sold fireworks and jerky. Theo pumped and Nadia went in for coffee and came back with coffee, two bananas, and a bag of sour candy she didn't offer to share until they were back on the highway, when she held it toward him without looking over.

They talked about her sister's new job, and whether the neighbors' dog barked more or less than last year, and whether they should have brought the good pillow. Around eight the sky went orange over the water and then gray, and Nadia turned on the headlights and Theo stopped talking and watched out the window.

The last four miles were gravel. The cabin was smaller than the photos and colder, and the key was in a lockbox that took Theo three tries.

Inside, Nadia found the thermostat. Theo carried in the bags, both trips, and set the snack bin on the counter.

"Ladder," she said, pointing up.

"I'll take the couch."

"You will not."


They left later than planned, which Dana had predicted out loud twice.

"I said nine," she said, wedging her duffel behind the driver's seat. "It's nine forty."

"You said nine-ish." Marcus locked the apartment door, checked it, then checked it again. "Ish is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

The trip had come together on Tuesday, when Dana found a cabin two hours north for eighty-six dollars a night, cancellation free. They'd argued mildly about whether to bring groceries or buy them there. Marcus wanted to stop at the store near the lake, on principle—he liked small-town markets, the way they carried three kinds of everything instead of thirty. Dana pointed out that they'd get there hungry and buy nothing but chips. They compromised: a cooler with eggs, coffee, and a rotisserie chicken from home, plus a stop for whatever looked good.

On the highway, Dana drove and Marcus handled the aux cord, which meant twenty minutes of a podcast neither of them followed closely, then silence, then a playlist he'd made in 2019 and never updated.

"We should have brought the good pillows," he said, somewhere past the second toll.

"You said the cabin has pillows."

"It has pillows. It doesn't have good pillows."

They stopped in a town with a hardware store and a bakery attached to a gas station. Dana got coffee that turned out to be terrible and drank it anyway. Marcus bought two apple fritters and ate most of both.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures, the way they always are, with a woodstove neither of them knew how to use and a view of the lake through what Dana generously called a corridor of trees.

Marcus set the cooler on the counter. "This is good," he said.

Dana was already opening windows. "Ask me tomorrow," she said, but she was smiling.


They left later than planned, which surprised neither of them.

Dana had packed the night before, one duffel bag by the door, while Marcus insisted he'd throw things together in the morning. At 8:40 he was still standing in front of the closet in a towel, holding two flannel shirts.

"It's supposed to be sixty-two and rainy," Dana said from the hallway. "Take both. It's a two-hour drive, not a flight."

They loaded the car in a light drizzle. Marcus put the cooler behind the passenger seat where Dana could reach it, then moved it to the trunk when she pointed out that she'd be reaching backward the whole time. He'd bought sandwiches at the deli on Grand — turkey for her, the Italian for himself — and a bag of pretzels that he opened before they hit the on-ramp.

The cabin belonged to Dana's coworker Priya, who was letting them use it for the cost of restocking the firewood. They'd never been. The listing photos showed a woodstove, a screened porch, and a kitchen with a chipped enamel sink.

"Did you text her about the key?" Dana asked.

"Under the ceramic frog. She sent a picture of the frog."

"That's very trusting."

"It's rural Pennsylvania."

They argued mildly about the route — Marcus liked the highway, Dana liked the two-lane that went through Milford — and settled it by stopping in Milford anyway, for gas and coffee, then getting back on the highway. Dana drove the second half. Marcus fell asleep against the window and woke up embarrassed, wiping his mouth.

The cabin was smaller than the pictures suggested, and colder. Dana found the thermostat; Marcus found the frog. They carried in the bags, and the cooler, and stood for a moment in the main room, listening to the rain on the roof.

"Okay," Marcus said. "This is good."


They left later than planned, which surprised neither of them.

Dana had packed the night before—two shirts, one dress she probably wouldn't wear, the paperback she'd been carrying around since March. Marcus packed at 8:40 that morning, throwing things into a duffel while the coffee maker gurgled. He forgot socks. He would discover this in Asheville.

"Do we need to stop at your mom's on the way?" he asked, backing the Corolla out of the apartment complex lot.

"She'll want us to stay for lunch and then it's two hours gone."

"So no."

"So no. I'll call her from the road."

They argued mildly about the route. Dana wanted the interstate; Marcus liked the two-lane through the small towns, the produce stands, the churches with the changeable-letter signs. They took the interstate because Dana was driving first, and the person driving got to pick. That was a rule they'd made in year one and had never once revisited.

At a gas station outside Greenville, Marcus bought boiled peanuts and a Diet Coke and asked if she wanted anything. She said no, then took half his peanuts anyway.

The hotel was a Hampton Inn because Dana had points. The room smelled faintly of chlorine from the pool below. Marcus lay on the bed with his shoes still on, which she hated, and she said so, and he took them off without comment.

"Dinner where?"

"There's the place with the good trout. The one Kelsey mentioned."

"That's an hour wait on a Saturday."

They ended up at a brewery three blocks away, sharing a pretzel, deciding whether to hike the next morning or just drive out to the parkway and look at things from the car. They landed on the parkway. Marcus said he'd set an alarm.

He didn't. It didn't matter much.


They left later than planned, which surprised neither of them.

Dana had wanted to be on the road by seven. She'd said so twice on Thursday and once again while brushing her teeth Friday morning, but by the time Marcus finished the last of his emails and found the phone charger that lived, inexplicably, under the passenger seat, it was almost nine.

"Two hours," Dana said, not really angry. "We could have been at the halfway point."

"There's no traffic now, though." Marcus tossed his duffel in the back. "That's the trade."

They took his car because hers made a noise. The plan was Asheville, two nights at a place Dana had found with a decent cancellation policy and a photo of a porch that looked, in the listing, larger than it probably was. Marcus had suggested camping. Dana had suggested he go camping alone sometime, and they'd laughed, and that had been the end of it.

Somewhere past Charlotte they stopped for gas and Marcus came out with a bag of peanut M&M's and a bottle of the iced tea Dana liked, the too-sweet kind she pretended not to want. She took it without comment and put her feet on the dash, which he'd asked her not to do, and he didn't say anything about that either.

They argued mildly about the exit for lunch. Dana wanted the sandwich place with reviews; Marcus wanted to keep driving and eat later. They kept driving. By two they were both irritable and ate at a Wendy's outside Hickory, sitting across from each other under fluorescent light, not talking much.

"This is fine," Dana said.

"It's fine."

Back in the car, she found the playlist she'd made and didn't mention making it. He noticed the songs were all ones he liked. The mountains started showing up around three.


They left later than planned, which was fine, because they had planned to leave late.

Maya had wanted to get on the road by nine. Devon had wanted to sleep until nine. They compromised at 10:40, which was the time it actually took him to find the good phone charger, the one with the cable that didn't fray at the base.

"It's under the couch," she said from the kitchen, packing sandwiches she'd insisted they didn't need to buy.

"It's not under the couch."

"It's under the couch because that's where you left it Tuesday when you were watching the game."

It was under the couch.

The trip was three hours north to a rental cabin Maya's coworker had recommended, two nights, nothing fancy. They'd argued mildly about whether to bring the good pillows. Devon said the place would have pillows. Maya said the place would have pillows the way a motel has pillows. They brought the good pillows.

At the gas station outside town, Devon filled the tank while Maya went in for coffee and came out with coffee, a bag of pretzels, and a scratch-off ticket she bought "as a joke." It lost. She kept the penny she'd scratched with in the cupholder.

Somewhere past the second exit for a town neither of them had ever visited, Maya put on the playlist she'd made and then apologized for it twice, and Devon said he liked it, and meant it, mostly. He drove with one hand. She put her feet on the dash and he told her not to, and she took them down, and then put them back twenty minutes later, and he let it go.

The cabin key was supposed to be under a ceramic frog. It was under a ceramic turtle. Close enough. Inside smelled like cedar and dust.

"Pillows," Maya said, dropping them on the bed. Devon didn't say anything, which was its own kind of agreement.


Maya found the cooler in the garage on Thursday night, still holding a lake's worth of sand from August. She dragged it into the kitchen and started rinsing it in the sink while Dev sat at the table with his laptop, comparing two cabins outside Big Bear.

"This one's forty dollars cheaper," he said, "but there's a review that just says 'the futon.' No other words."

"What does that mean?"

"I think it means the futon."

They booked the other one. Maya made a list on the back of a grocery receipt: coffee, the good blanket, Dev's inhaler, the aux cable that actually worked. Dev added *cards?* and she crossed it out because they never played cards, they only brought them.

Friday afternoon he got out of work at three and she was still on a call, so he loaded the car alone, arranging bags in the trunk with more care than the trip required. When she came out at three-forty with her hair up and her laptop bag still on her shoulder, he'd already reversed halfway down the driveway.

They stopped at the Chevron on Foothill because Maya wanted iced tea and Dev wanted to fill up before the grade. She came out with the tea and a bag of sour gummy worms, which she opened while he was still holding the pump.

"Those are for the drive," he said.

"It is the drive."

Traffic thinned past San Bernardino. She put on the playlist she'd made and skipped three songs in a row until he laughed at her. The sun went orange behind the ridge and the temperature gauge on the dash dropped eleven degrees in twenty minutes.

Around six she said, "We forgot the blanket."

Dev thought about it, checking the mirror. "There'll be blankets."

"There might be the futon."

"We'll survive the futon," he said, and took the exit.


The rain had stopped by the time Marisol finished loading the cooler. She wedged it behind the driver's seat, next to the tote bag of granola bars and the two-liter of ginger ale that Devon insisted they'd need.

"You packed the good pillow," he said, appearing in the doorway with his duffel.

"I packed my pillow. You can have the flat one."

"The motel might have decent ones."

"The motel is forty-one dollars a night, Dev."

He conceded the point and went back inside to check the stove twice, which was his ritual. Marisol adjusted the passenger seat and pulled up the directions on her phone. Three hours and change to the lake, assuming they didn't hit traffic getting out of the city, which they would.

They'd been debating this trip for two weeks. She wanted to leave Friday after work; he wanted to sleep in and leave Saturday morning. They'd compromised on Friday at seven, which meant they were actually leaving at seven-forty, and that neither of them mentioned it.

"Did you text your mom?" she asked when he got in.

"I'll call her from the road."

"You always say that."

"And then I always do it."

Somewhere past the second exit, the sky went a bruised purple and the streetlights came on early. Devon drove with one hand and ate a granola bar with the other, dropping crumbs into the console. Marisol found a station playing something with too much reverb and left it.

At the gas station outside Middletown, she bought two coffees and a bag of pretzels, and he stood by the pump scrolling through pictures of the cabin they hadn't booked because it cost too much.

"Next year," he said, showing her the screen.

She looked at it longer than she needed to. "Next year," she agreed, and handed him his coffee, which was already too cool to burn.


They left later than planned, which was, Dana pointed out, exactly what always happened.

"Ten was aspirational," Marcus said, wedging the cooler behind the driver's seat. "Ten-forty is realistic."

The apartment had been a small argument all morning — not a real one, just the friction of two people packing in a one-bedroom. Dana had wanted to bring the good pillows. Marcus said the cabin had pillows. Dana said the cabin had *pillows*, in the tone she used for things she'd already decided, and now the good pillows were in the back seat in a garbage bag.

They stopped at the Wawa on Route 9 because Marcus wanted coffee and Dana wanted to pee, and then they were on the highway with a two-and-a-half-hour drive ahead and a playlist Dana had made two nights ago while pretending to watch television.

"Did you turn off the space heater?"

"Yes."

"Did you actually check, or —"

"I actually checked." He glanced over. "Did you text your mom?"

"I'll text her when we get there. If I text her now she'll call."

They talked about nothing for forty minutes. Whether the neighbor's dog barked more or less than last month. Whether they should get a second monitor for the desk they shared. Dana ate almonds out of a bag and put the shells — there were no shells, they were shelled almonds — put the empty bag in the door pocket, where it would live for three weeks.

Around noon the trees got taller and the gas stations got farther apart. Marcus said something about how he always forgot Pennsylvania was pretty, and Dana said mm, and put her feet on the dash, and he told her not to, and she left them there for a minute before taking them down.

They found the turnoff on the second try.


The forecast said rain until Sunday, so Marisol suggested they leave Friday afternoon instead of Saturday morning.

"That means I'd have to swap with Dev," Cole said, scrolling through his work calendar at the kitchen table. He was still in his socks, one heel worn thin. "He owes me from Thanksgiving."

"So text him."

He did, and Dev said fine, and just like that they had an extra evening.

The cabin was three hours north, a place Marisol's coworker had rented in October and wouldn't shut up about. Two hundred a night, wood stove, a hot tub that may or may not work. Marisol had booked it in January during a slow afternoon and then mostly forgotten about it until the reminder email arrived.

Packing took longer than it should have. Cole kept adding things — a second flannel, the good coffee, a deck of cards nobody would use.

"We're gone two nights," Marisol said.

"I know how long two nights is."

She let it go. She was guilty of the same thing with books; she'd already put three in her bag knowing she'd finish none of them.

They fought briefly about groceries in the Safeway parking lot — whether to buy dinner ingredients or just eat at the diner they'd passed on the map — and settled it by getting eggs and bread and bacon for breakfast and leaving dinner undecided. Cole pushed the cart. Marisol read labels on hot sauce and picked the one with the rooster.

The car smelled like the pine air freshener his sister had given them as a joke. Traffic held them on the highway for twenty minutes outside the city, long enough for Marisol to fall asleep against the window with her mouth slightly open.

Cole turned the radio down. He didn't wake her until they crossed the county line, where the trees started and the rain, finally, let up.


They left later than planned, which Dana had predicted out loud twice.

"You said nine," she pointed out from the passenger seat, watching Ben back the Corolla out of the driveway with the careful slowness of a man who had once clipped a mailbox.

"I said nine-ish. The 'ish' was doing a lot of work."

The trip had been her idea, hatched two weeks earlier over cheap wine on the couch. Somewhere with trees. Not far. They'd landed on a rental cabin outside Hocking Hills, two nights, cheaper on a Sunday checkout. Ben had booked it while brushing his teeth, then spat and asked if she wanted the one with the hot tub or the one with the better kitchen. Kitchen, she'd said, because they were trying to spend less on restaurants, and because Ben got weird about hot tubs.

Now the cooler sat in the back seat instead of the trunk, wedged behind Dana's seat, because the trunk had the folding chairs and the bag of firewood Ben insisted on bringing despite the cabin listing saying firewood provided.

"Provided means they leave you four damp logs," he said.

"You're going to be so smug if you're right."

"I'm always smug. Rightness is incidental."

Forty minutes in, they stopped at a gas station outside Lancaster. Dana went in for coffee and came out with coffee, a bag of pretzels, and a lottery ticket, which she did roughly once a year, for no reason she could articulate. Ben pumped gas and cleaned the windshield with the squeegee, which he considered one of life's underrated pleasures.

They got back on the road. She read the ticket's rules aloud in a game show voice. He put on the playlist she'd made, which was mostly songs he already knew she liked, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was fine.


They left later than planned, which Nora had predicted and Dev had denied was likely.

The trip had come together on Tuesday over dishes. Dev mentioned that his cousin had a cabin near Hocking Hills sitting empty, and Nora said, "So let's go," in the flat, decisive way she used when she wanted something and didn't want to discuss wanting it. By Wednesday they had a text thread with the cousin, a gate code, and a warning about the septic system.

Friday afternoon Nora packed in fifteen minutes: two sweaters, jeans, the book she'd been failing to read since March. Dev packed for an hour, then unpacked the cast iron skillet when she pointed out the cabin would have pans. He put it back in the trunk anyway when she went inside for the cooler.

They stopped at the Kroger on Reynoldsburg-New Albany Road because it was on the way and because Dev insisted the small-town grocery near the cabin would be expensive. In the aisles they split up, then reconvened at the register with overlapping items — two loaves of bread, no eggs. Nora went back for eggs. Dev bought a bag of gummy worms without comment, which she considered a small tax on the whole enterprise.

On 33 the light went long and orange across the fields. Dev drove. Nora managed the aux cord and the navigation and read him the cousin's texts about which turn came after the church. They talked about whether to renew the lease, which they'd been not-talking about for weeks, and got about four minutes into it before agreeing to shelve it until Sunday.

The cabin was smaller than the photos, colder, and smelled like woodsmoke and mouse. Dev found the thermostat. Nora put the eggs in the refrigerator and stood a moment in the yellow light of the open door, tired and glad.


The rain hadn't started yet when Maya pulled the duffel bag down from the closet shelf, sending a small avalanche of winter hats onto the floor.

"We're only going for two nights," Devon called from the kitchen. "You don't need the big one."

"I know how long we're going for." She was already folding a sweater. "But it's supposed to be forty degrees at night, and I'm not sleeping in a cabin with no heat wearing a T-shirt."

"There's heat. The listing said woodstove."

"A woodstove is not heat. A woodstove is a project."

He came in holding two travel mugs, one of which he set on the dresser near her, coffee with too much milk in it, the way she liked it and he found insulting. They'd been together six years and had lived in the apartment on Fremont for four of them, long enough that the argument about the duffel bag was really just something to say.

They left at nine-fifteen, twenty minutes later than planned, because Devon couldn't find his sunglasses and then found them in the car. Maya drove the first leg. At the gas station outside Reading she bought a bag of pretzels and a lottery ticket, which she never did, and he made a joke about their cabin fund.

The highway thinned into two lanes past Hamburg. They talked about her sister's engagement, then didn't talk for a while, and Devon put on a podcast neither of them was listening to. Somewhere around eleven the clouds broke apart over the ridge and the fields went gold and stubbled, and Maya said, "Okay, that's nice," and he agreed that it was.

They stopped at a farm stand for apples they wouldn't finish. The woman running it told them the turnoff was easy to miss. It was.


Maya found the cooler in the back of the hall closet, behind the vacuum and a box of Christmas lights they'd never unpacked.

"It smells like something died in here," she called.

Devon came out of the bedroom holding two flannel shirts. "That's the sponge. I left a sponge in it after Thanksgiving." He took the cooler from her and carried it to the sink, running water into it while she stood in the doorway.

"Which one," he said, holding up the shirts.

"The green. The other one has a hole in the elbow."

"That's the charm."

"It's a hole."

They'd booked the cabin three weeks ago, when a cold snap had made the apartment feel small and Maya had said, half joking, that she wanted to be somewhere with a porch. It was two and a half hours north, near a lake that would be too cold to swim in. Ninety dollars a night, plus a cleaning fee that Devon had complained about for two days.

He wanted to leave by four to beat traffic. She had a call that didn't end until four-fifteen. They compromised on four-thirty and left at ten after five.

At the grocery store she pushed the cart and he walked ahead, adding things without asking: coffee, eggs, a bag of the pretzels he liked, a six-pack.

"Do we need bread?"

"We have bread at home."

"Did you put it in the bag?"

He turned around. "No."

They bought bread.

On the highway she drove and he handled the music, skipping songs after ten seconds until she told him to stop. The sun went down somewhere around Exit 41 and the fields on either side turned blue, then black.

"There's a diner up here," Devon said, looking at his phone. "Open till nine."

Maya put on her turn signal.


They left Friday at four, which meant they left Friday at four forty-five, because Dana couldn't find the phone charger and Marcus insisted on watering the tomatoes even though it had rained Tuesday.

"You put it in the bathroom bag," he said from the doorway, keys already in hand.

"Why would I put a charger in the bathroom bag?"

But it was in the bathroom bag. She held it up without comment and he had the grace not to say anything either, just took the duffel from her shoulder and carried both bags down to the car.

The plan was Asheville, two nights, a motel Dana had found for eighty-nine dollars because the good places were full and neither of them wanted to spend two hundred to sleep. They'd argued about it Wednesday, mildly, over dishes. Marcus thought if you were going to drive four hours you should stay somewhere decent. Dana pointed out they'd be hiking all day and drinking all night and the room was essentially a place to put their bodies. She won, mostly by being right.

Traffic was bad until Hickory. He drove the first half; she'd take over after they stopped. She controlled the music, which was the agreement, and she played the same three albums she always played, and he complained about it in the way that had stopped being a complaint years ago.

They stopped at a gas station outside Marion. She got a coffee and a bag of peanut M&M's; he got a Gatorade and used the bathroom and came back with beef jerky he immediately regretted buying.

"You want to eat when we get in, or find something on the way?"

"On the way," she said. "I'm already hungry."

He looked at the clock. Six-fifteen. Two hours of light left, maybe. He pulled back onto the highway and she put her feet on the dash, and he told her not to, and she left them there.


The Friday traffic on I-70 hadn't started yet, which Maya considered a small miracle. She stood in the kitchen with her phone propped against the fruit bowl, scrolling through cabin listings while Dev packed the cooler.

"Do we need ice, or does the place have a fridge?" he asked.

"It has a fridge. But the drive's three hours, so."

"Ice, then." He wrote it on the back of a receipt, beneath *coffee filters* and *that hot sauce you like*.

They'd been talking about this trip since February, when Dev's cousin mentioned a place near Hocking Hills that slept four and cost less than a decent hotel. Now it was October and they had exactly two days, because Maya had a client presentation Monday and Dev's mother was flying in the following weekend.

"Are you bringing the good camera?" Maya asked.

"I was going to. Is that annoying?"

"No. Just means we'll stop every four minutes."

"Twelve minutes, minimum," Dev said. "I've matured."

She packed her own bag in eleven minutes, mostly flannel, and then spent twenty deciding whether to bring the book she'd been failing to read since August. She brought it. Dev packed a portable speaker, two decks of cards, and a jacket Maya pointed out was too thin.

At the grocery store they disagreed briefly about eggs — she wanted them for Saturday breakfast, he thought it was too much equipment for one meal — and settled on breakfast sandwiches from the deli case instead. In the parking lot, Dev held the cart while she loaded the trunk, arranging the cooler so it wouldn't slide.

The sun was low and orange when they finally merged onto the highway. Maya had aux privileges. Dev drove with one hand and ate pretzels out of the bag between the seats.

"We forgot ice," she said, forty minutes in.

"There's a gas station in Lancaster."

She put on the playlist she'd made. Neither of them said much for a while, which was fine.


The rain had stopped by the time Nadia finished loading the cooler. She wedged it behind the driver's seat, on top of the folded blanket they'd been meaning to wash since August.

"Did you get the coffee?" Dev called from the porch, still in his socks.

"It's in the tote. Put shoes on."

He disappeared inside and came back with sneakers half-laced, carrying the tote and a plastic bag of granola bars she hadn't asked for. They had booked the cabin three weeks ago, arguing mildly about whether two nights was too short to justify the four-hour drive. Nadia had said yes, Dev had said the drive was the point, and then he'd found a place with a woodstove and a discount for Sunday checkout, which settled it.

At the gas station on Route 9, she filled the tank while he went in for ice. He came out with ice, a bag of sour candy, and a scratch ticket.

"Really?"

"Two dollars," he said. "It's tradition."

"It's a tradition you invented last spring."

They took turns driving. Dev put on a podcast about a shipwreck, and Nadia fell asleep somewhere past the state line, waking when the road turned to gravel. The trees were mostly bare, the light going gray-gold and low.

The cabin was smaller than the photos suggested and smelled like cedar and old smoke. Dev knelt at the woodstove with the instructions taped inside the door while Nadia unpacked, putting the eggs and cheese in the mini fridge, setting the coffee beside the electric kettle. She found only one wine glass and a jelly jar.

"You're the jar," she said.

"Obviously."

The fire caught on the second try. They sat on the floor in front of it with their coats still on, waiting for the room to warm up, deciding whether to cook or just eat crackers and go to bed early.


They left Thursday night instead of Friday morning, which had been Priya's idea and Marcus's reluctant concession. "Traffic," she'd said, and he couldn't argue with traffic.

The car smelled like the coffee he'd spilled two weeks ago. Priya had made a list on her phone — sunscreen, the good hiking socks, the charger for the camera nobody had used since August. Marcus had packed by dumping a drawer into a duffel bag.

"Did you get the reservation confirmation?" she asked, somewhere past the county line.

"It's in my email."

"Can you find it? I want to know if check-in closes at ten."

He held the phone at arm's length, squinting. "Says eleven. But there's a lockbox."

"Okay." She adjusted the vent. "I still think we should have booked the place with the kitchen."

"We're there two nights."

"That's two breakfasts."

He didn't say anything, because she was probably right, and because the exit was coming up and he needed to merge. She turned the radio down without being asked, which was the closest thing they had to a ritual.

The rental was a converted garage behind a house in a town with one stoplight. The lockbox code worked on the second try. Inside, the bed took up most of the room and there was a laminated card on the counter explaining the recycling.

Priya sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled off her boots. "It's smaller than the pictures."

"They always are."

"I like it, though." She lay back, still in her jacket. "There's a diner. I saw it coming in."

"We could go now."

"In a minute."

Marcus set the duffel down and looked out the small window at the dark yard, the neighbor's porch light, the shape of a grill under a tarp. Behind him, she was already half asleep. He decided to wake her in ten minutes, and then didn't.


Maya found the cooler in the hall closet, wedged behind a box of Christmas lights they hadn't touched in two years. She dragged it out and wiped the lid with a paper towel.

"It smells like the lake," she said.

Devon looked up from his phone. He was on the couch, comparing gas prices along Route 9. "It always smells like the lake. That's its whole thing."

They had decided on Thursday, over reheated pad thai, that they needed to leave the apartment. Not a vacation—two nights at his cousin's cabin in the Catskills, which was free if they brought their own sheets and didn't complain about the water pressure.

Maya packed the cooler with ice, two bottles of white wine, a block of cheddar, and the good mustard. Devon argued for hot dogs. She said hot dogs were a whole ordeal, buns and condiments and the pot of boiling water, and he said that was what a weekend was for, ordeals. She put the hot dogs in.

They left Saturday at 8:40, twenty minutes later than planned, because Devon couldn't find the aux cable and then found it in the car, in the glovebox, where it lived.

The drive out of the city took an hour just to feel like driving. Maya kept the map open on her knees even though the GPS was talking. She liked seeing the shape of where they were going.

At the second rest stop, Devon got coffee and she got a coffee and a sleeve of powdered donuts, and they ate them leaning against the hood, watching a family unload three dogs from a minivan.

"We forgot pillows," Maya said.

"There are pillows there."

"There are pillows there that Ray's friends have slept on."

Devon considered this. He brushed sugar off his sleeve, opened the passenger door, and said, "There's a Target in Kingston."


Maya found the cooler in the back of the hall closet, behind a box of Christmas lights they'd never gotten around to hanging.

"It smells like a lake," she said, carrying it into the kitchen.

Danny looked up from the map on his phone. "That's because it is a lake cooler. That's its whole personality." He'd been trying to decide whether to take the interstate or the state highway, which added forty minutes but went through a town with a bakery he remembered from childhood. He hadn't mentioned the bakery yet. It seemed like a lot to ask.

They were driving to a cabin two and a half hours north, a place Maya's coworker rented out for cheap in the off-season. Two nights. They'd been talking about it since February and had finally just booked it, mostly because Maya said if they waited for a perfect weekend they'd wait forever.

"Are we bringing the good pillows or the bad pillows?"

"Bring the bad ones," Danny said. "If they get gross I won't be sad."

She packed the bad pillows. He filled the cooler with ice from the machine at the gas station down the block, because their freezer only made a dozen cubes at a time and he'd learned that the hard way in July.

At 4:40 they were in the car. Maya had the tote bag with the snacks on her lap and was going through it like an inventory.

"You got the almonds."

"I got the almonds."

"There's a bakery," Danny said, pulling onto the street, "if we take 31 instead. I don't know if it's still there."

Maya considered the clock, then the almonds, then him.

"Take 31," she said.

He did. The light was long and yellow across the dashboard, and neither of them turned on the radio for the first twenty minutes.