The Friday traffic on I-40 hadn't started yet, which was the whole point of leaving at two.

"Did you pack the charger?" Marcus asked, standing in the kitchen with a grocery bag of snacks he'd assembled without much strategy—pretzels, two apples, a sleeve of chocolate donuts he knew Dana would pretend to disapprove of and then eat half of.

"Which charger?"

"The one for your headphones. Because last time you complained the entire way to Asheville."

"I complained for maybe ten minutes." Dana came down the hall with the duffel, testing its weight against her hip. "Also I packed it. It's in the side pocket."

They'd booked the cabin three weeks ago, half on impulse, after a Tuesday when Dana came home from the clinic and said she needed to be somewhere with no cell service, and Marcus, who worked from the second bedroom and had gotten strange about the sound of his own keyboard, agreed too fast.

He carried the duffel out. She locked the back door, checked it, unlocked and relocked it, then set the thermostat to sixty-eight and stood a moment in the quiet.

In the car, the argument was about the route. Marcus wanted the highway. Dana wanted the smaller road through Hillsborough because of a bakery she remembered, which Marcus pointed out had closed, which Dana disputed, and then confirmed on her phone, and then went silent about for eleven miles.

"We could stop at that place with the pie," he offered eventually.

"It's fine. I wasn't even that hungry."

"Dana."

"Okay, the pie place."

He put his hand on her knee, briefly, and put it back on the wheel. The pines started thickening past Durham. She turned the radio down to something she could talk over, and asked whether he'd remembered to email his brother back, and he said no, and she said that was probably fine for two days.


On Thursday night, Priya spread the road atlas across the kitchen table, even though Daniel had already pulled the route up on his phone.

"Four hours if we leave by seven," he said. "Five if we leave at nine and hit Richmond traffic."

"Seven means packing tonight."

"Seven means packing tonight," he agreed, and neither of them moved. The dishwasher churned through its cycle. Priya turned a page and looked at the little green blot of the state park, the campground symbols, the blue thread of the river.

They compromised on seven-thirty. Daniel took the cooler out to the garage and rinsed it with the hose, and Priya laid out clothes on the guest bed—two sweatshirts, because she knew he'd forget his and take hers. She debated the hiking boots and packed sneakers instead. Their reservation was for a cabin, not a tent. She reminded herself of that twice while looking at the sleeping bags.

Friday morning ran late, as it always did. Daniel couldn't find the good sunglasses. Priya stood in the driveway holding two travel mugs while he checked under the couch cushions, then gave up and wore the scratched pair from the glove box.

They stopped for gas at the Wawa on Route 1. Priya went in for ice and came out with ice, beef jerky, and a bag of sour candy she claimed was for later.

"You said no gas station food."

"I said no gas station *hot* food."

Daniel merged onto the highway and set the cruise control. Somewhere past Fredericksburg, Priya put her feet on the dash, which he hated, and he didn't say anything, which she noticed. The radio faded into static and she scanned for something else and found nothing and turned it off, and they drove a while in the quiet, the fields going yellow-brown outside, the exit signs counting down.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like a question neither of them wanted to answer first.

"Two nights," Dana said. "How many shirts is that?"

"Three," Marcus said from the closet. "One extra in case something happens."

"What's going to happen?"

"Barbecue sauce. Rain. I don't know. That's why it's extra."

She folded a sweater and set it in the case. Outside, the maple in the front yard had started turning, and she'd been the one to point out that they should see it somewhere else, somewhere with actual hills. Marcus had agreed faster than she'd expected. They hadn't left the county since May.

He came out holding two pairs of hiking boots. "Yours have that split in the sole."

"They're fine for a mile."

"It's four miles."

"Then I'll bring the sneakers." She took the boots from him and put them back anyway, because he'd bothered to check.

They argued mildly about the cooler—whether it was worth packing sandwiches when the drive was only three hours and there were exits. Marcus won by pointing out that the exits had gas station sandwiches. Dana made turkey and swiss and cut them diagonally, which he noticed and didn't comment on.

At seven-forty they locked up. She checked the stove twice. He backed the car out, then stopped and went back inside for the phone charger.

"Got it," he said, buckling in.

"Did you lock it again?"

"Yes."

"Marcus."

He got out, checked the door, gave her a thumbs-up through the windshield.

The interstate was clear. Dana put her feet on the dash, which he'd asked her not to do, and he let it go this time. Somewhere past the second toll she found a radio station playing songs from before they'd met, and neither of them changed it for forty miles.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Dana kept walking past it, carrying things she wasn't sure she needed.

"Two nights," Marcus called from the kitchen. "Two nights, Dana."

"I know how many nights it is."

He came in with a travel mug in each hand, one of them already filled. "You're bringing the hiking boots?"

"The trail by the lake. You said you wanted to do the trail by the lake."

"I said maybe." He set the mugs on the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed, pressing his palms flat against the comforter. He'd been up since five-thirty, which was not unusual, and had already checked the tire pressure, which was.

They had booked the cabin in April, when February had felt impossibly far away. Now it was here, gray and unremarkable, and there was a strange awkwardness to actually going, like arriving at a party they'd only half meant to RSVP to.

"Did you cancel the mail?"

"You can't cancel mail for two days, Marcus."

"You can hold it."

"For two days."

He laughed, and something loosened. She threw a sweatshirt at him and he caught it and folded it, badly, and put it in the suitcase anyway.

They left at nine-forty, twenty minutes later than planned. Marcus drove the first hour while Dana read aloud from her phone about a restaurant near the cabin that had closed in 2019, according to a review, and also had excellent trout, according to a different review from last month.

"We'll find out," he said.

At the gas station outside Millersburg she bought sunflower seeds and a bag of the terrible red licorice he liked, and did not mention buying it, just set it on the console between them. He glanced down at it and then at the road and said nothing either, and they drove north into flat, bright, unpromising country.


The forecast said rain Saturday morning, clearing by noon. Dana read it aloud from her phone while Marcus stood at the closet, holding two shirts he'd already decided between.

"So we leave early or we leave late," he said.

"We leave early. Then we're driving through it instead of sitting in it."

They were going to Asheville, three hours northwest, because Dana's coworker had mentioned a bookstore with a cat and Marcus had wanted an excuse to try the barbecue place his brother wouldn't shut up about. Two nights. They'd booked the hotel on Wednesday after twenty minutes of comparing photos of bathrooms.

Marcus packed the car Friday night. He was the kind of person who liked the trunk arranged, duffels flat, the cooler wedged behind the passenger seat where it wouldn't slide. Dana came out in socks and slippers and handed him a paper bag of granola bars and two bananas.

"Bananas will get bruised," he said.

"Then they'll be bruised bananas."

They left at six-fifteen, twenty minutes later than planned, because Dana couldn't find the phone charger that worked and Marcus had to go back inside to check the stove. The rain started outside Charlotte, hard enough that he slowed to sixty and turned the radio down, which he always did in bad weather, which Dana had stopped teasing him about years ago.

She read him the reviews of the barbecue place. Four point six stars. Someone had written a paragraph about the coleslaw.

"That's a lot of feeling about coleslaw," Marcus said.

"People contain multitudes."

They stopped in Marion for gas and terrible coffee. Dana bought a bag of peanut M&M's and didn't offer him any until they were back on 40, and then she held one out on her palm without looking over, and he took it without saying thanks, and the rain thinned out around ten, right on schedule.


The Friday traffic on I-40 hadn't started yet, which was the whole reason Dana had insisted they leave by three.

"You packed the good pillow?" she asked, standing in the doorway with her keys already in hand.

Marcus was in the bedroom, wrestling a duffel bag zipper closed. "I packed *a* pillow. I'm not sure it's the good one."

"It's the one with the blue case. The other one's flat."

He unzipped the bag, checked, and found the blue case. Small victory. He carried it out to the driveway while Dana went back inside twice — once for her phone charger, once because she couldn't remember whether she'd unplugged the iron. She hadn't used the iron in three weeks, but she checked anyway.

The cabin was outside Asheville, a two-night rental Dana had found in February when the winter had gotten unbearable and she needed something on the calendar. It had a woodstove and a photograph of a hot tub that Marcus suspected was several years out of date.

"Do we need to stop for groceries here or up there?" he asked, backing out.

"Here. Everything's a gas station up there."

They stopped at the Kroger on Sixth. Marcus pushed the cart while Dana worked from a list on her phone — coffee, eggs, a package of bacon, bread, the pasta she liked, a jar of sauce, two bottles of wine. Marcus added a bag of pretzels without asking and she gave him a look but didn't put them back.

At the register, she said, "We forgot butter."

"For what?"

"For the eggs. For toast."

He went back and got butter. It took ninety seconds, and when he returned she'd already paid and was loading the bags.

They were on the highway by 3:40. Dana put her feet on the dashboard, which he hated, and he said nothing about it.


The rain started Thursday night, and by Friday morning Dana had already decided it wouldn't stop them.

"We could reschedule," Marcus said, standing in the kitchen with his phone open to the weather app. "Sunday looks better."

"Sunday we have Elena's thing." Dana was pouring coffee into two travel mugs, the ones from the gas station in Flagstaff, mismatched but sturdy. "Besides, it's the coast. It's supposed to be gray."

He conceded with a shrug and went to find the good rain jacket, the one he'd bought after complaining about the cheap one for two winters straight.

Packing took longer than it should have. Marcus wanted to bring the cooler; Dana pointed out they were staying at a place with a kitchen, and that the last time they'd brought the cooler, they'd eaten in the car twice and thrown out most of a rotisserie chicken. He took the cooler out to the garage. Then he brought it back in, empty, and put two waters and a bag of pretzels in it, and she let it go.

They argued mildly about the route. Dana's phone said 101 was faster. Marcus liked the inland road, said the trucks were worse on the highway. Dana didn't care enough to push, so they took his way, and he drove the first two hours while she read street names aloud from signs and asked questions about towns neither of them knew anything about.

Somewhere past Willits they stopped for gas and used the bathroom and bought a coffee neither of them needed. Dana came back to the car with a bag of sunflower seeds.

"You hate those."

"You like them."

He took them, cracked one, and pulled back onto the road. The rain thinned to mist. Dana put her feet on the dash, which he didn't like, and said nothing about, and they drove west toward the water.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Maya kept walking past it.

"You're going to forget your toothbrush again," Daniel said from the doorway. He had already packed—one duffel, rolled clothes, the charger cables coiled with a rubber band. Two years of marriage and she still found this slightly maddening.

"I'm going to forget my toothbrush *on purpose*," she said, "so we have to stop at that pharmacy in Weaverville. I liked the pharmacy in Weaverville."

"It was a CVS."

"It had character."

They were driving up to the lake for two nights. Her sister's cabin, technically, though her sister hadn't used it since August and had told them to just take the key from the planter. Daniel had checked the weather four times. Rain Saturday afternoon, clearing by evening.

The debate about groceries lasted from the bedroom to the car. Daniel wanted to shop up there, at the little market by the marina; Maya pointed out that the market by the marina charged nine dollars for a box of crackers.

"It's two nights," he said.

"It's the *principle* of nine dollars."

They compromised, which meant they stopped at the Safeway on Route 9 and bought coffee, eggs, a loaf of sourdough, and a bottle of wine that Maya chose because she liked the label, and then Daniel bought crackers at the marina anyway, later, and didn't tell her the price.

At 9:40 they pulled out of the driveway. Maya took the first shift behind the wheel because Daniel got sleepy on the highway before ten. He put on the podcast they'd been saving—the one about the shipwreck—and she reached over without looking and turned the volume down two notches, and he let her.

Twenty minutes in, she said, "I did actually pack my toothbrush."

"I know," he said. "I saw it. I put mine in the other pocket."


The forecast said rain Saturday, so Dana pushed the drive up to Friday evening. She texted Marcus from her desk at 4:12: *leave by 6? beat the worst of it.* He wrote back a thumbs-up and then, a minute later, *do we need to stop for gas or did you fill up*.

She had not filled up. She typed *no* and left it at that.

At home, Marcus was already pulling the duffel from the closet shelf, the blue one with the broken zipper pull they kept meaning to replace. He packed the way he always did, in one pass, socks rolled and shoved into shoes. Dana stood in front of the dresser holding two sweaters, trying to remember whether the cabin had a wood stove or just baseboard heat.

"Baseboard," Marcus said, without looking up. "Remember, you were cold."

"That was the one in Virginia."

"Was it?" He considered this. "Bring both."

They argued mildly about the cooler—whether it was worth packing food when there was a Kroger twenty minutes from the rental. Dana won by pointing out the Kroger closed at nine. So they made sandwiches at the counter, turkey and provolone, and Marcus cut them diagonally because that was how his mother had done it and Dana had stopped teasing him about it years ago.

At 6:40 they were in the car. Marcus drove. Dana held the phone up to check the route, then set it in the cupholder and let it talk.

"Did you lock the back door?"

"Yes." He paused. "Probably."

She unbuckled, went inside, came back out. "It was locked."

"I know."

Rain started somewhere past the county line, earlier than promised, and Marcus turned the wipers to intermittent. Dana found a station playing something from the nineties and left it there, and neither of them said much for a while, which was fine.


The Friday Departure

The cooler was the last thing, and Marcus couldn't get it into the trunk sideways.

"Try it the other way," Dana said from the driveway, holding two coffee thermoses and her phone. "Lid facing you."

He rotated it. It slid in with an inch to spare. "You could have just said that ten minutes ago."

"I did say that ten minutes ago. You were busy with the sleeping bags."

They had decided on Wednesday, over reheated lasagna, that they should get out of the house. Dana's sister had mentioned a cabin near Lake Barkley, two hours west, and the October forecast promised low sixties and no rain. Marcus had wanted to leave Friday after work. Dana had wanted to leave Saturday morning, when they'd be less exhausted, but she'd given in because Marcus pointed out they'd lose half a day.

Now it was 5:40 and traffic on the interstate was already thickening.

"Did you unplug the toaster?" she asked.

"The toaster doesn't need to be unplugged."

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true." He merged left. "I turned off the water heater, though. And I locked the back door twice."

She scrolled her phone. "There's a barbecue place in Cadiz that's open till nine. Four point six stars."

"That's a good rating."

"Four hundred reviews, too. Not just a family thing."

They agreed on it without much discussion, which was how most of their agreements happened after eleven years. Dana turned on the radio, then off, then found a podcast about a shipwreck. Marcus said he'd rather have music. She switched to a country station he tolerated.

Somewhere past Hopkinsville the sun went orange and low, right in their eyes, and Dana handed him his sunglasses from the glove box without being asked. He put them on and said thanks. She rested her feet on the cooler and watched the fields go by, mile after mile of harvested corn, and neither of them said anything for a long while.


The Friday-night forecast said rain in Asheville, so Dana pulled up a second tab and started reading about Savannah instead.

"It's eight hours," Marcus said from the kitchen, where he was scraping the last of the rice into a container. "We'd get there at midnight."

"We could leave at six tomorrow morning."

"You will not be awake at six."

She didn't argue, because he was right. They settled on the mountains anyway, rain or not, because the cabin was already paid for and nonrefundable, a detail Dana had discovered while looking for the confirmation email.

Packing took longer than it should have. Marcus wanted to bring the good coffee and the pour-over cone; Dana pointed out that the listing said the kitchen was fully equipped. He brought them anyway, wrapped in a dish towel. She packed three sweaters for two days and one pair of shoes, then went back for boots.

"Do we need the cooler?"

"We're stopping at a grocery store when we get there."

"So no cooler."

"We can bring the cooler," she said, in a tone that meant she'd already decided.

They left at nine-fifteen Saturday morning, twenty minutes later than planned, because Marcus remembered the plants and stood at the sink filling a watering can while Dana waited in the passenger seat with her seatbelt on. He got in, apologized, and put his phone in the cupholder for directions.

The first hour was quiet in a comfortable way. She drank her gas station coffee and complained about it. He merged badly and she said nothing, which he noticed.

Around Statesville the sky went the color of a nickel and stayed that way.

"Rain," Marcus said.

"Told you."

"You wanted to go anyway."

"I did," Dana said, and reached over to turn up the radio, some song neither of them liked but both knew all the words to.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation. Marisol had packed hers Thursday night; Dev's was still empty Friday morning, and he was standing in front of it holding two nearly identical gray sweaters.

"It's the mountains," she said, pulling her hair up. "It'll be forty degrees at night."

"So both?"

"So the fleece."

He put the sweaters down and dug the fleece out of the closet, where it had been since March. It smelled like the closet. He decided that was fine.

They'd chosen Asheville because it was four hours away and because Marisol's cousin had mentioned a bookstore with a cat in it. The cabin was cheaper than a hotel and had a hot tub in the listing photos, though Dev had noticed in the reviews that the hot tub was sometimes "seasonally unavailable," a phrase he found ominous.

At nine they argued mildly about the cooler. Dev thought they should buy food when they got there. Marisol pointed out that they'd arrive at three, starving, and would end up at a gas station eating something beige. She won by packing the cooler herself: two sandwiches, grapes, a bag of pretzels, the good mustard in a small jar.

He carried it to the car. She locked the back door, then unlocked it to check the stove, then locked it again.

"Did you water the fern?"

"The fern is beyond help."

They pulled out at 9:40, which Dev noted aloud was only forty minutes past their target. Marisol connected her phone and put on a podcast about a shipwreck. Twenty minutes in she paused it to say she'd forgotten her book, and he offered to turn around, and she said no, absolutely not, there was a bookstore with a cat.

Outside Greensboro they stopped for gas and he bought her a coffee without asking how she wanted it, and got it right.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, half-filled with clothes Mira kept rearranging.

"Two nights," Daniel said from the doorway. "You've packed four sweaters."

"It's October in Vermont. It could be sixty or it could snow."

He didn't argue. He'd learned, in eleven years, which battles produced results and which produced only a longer conversation about the battle itself. He went downstairs to check the oil in the car, because his father had checked the oil before every trip and the habit had transferred like a birthmark.

The dipstick showed fine. He topped off the washer fluid anyway.

Inside, Mira was writing a note for the neighbor about the cat. *Two scoops, morning and night. She'll pretend she hasn't been fed.* She stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a lobster, from a trip to Maine they'd taken before the kids were a possibility they'd stopped discussing.

"Do we want to leave now or eat first?" she called.

"Now. We can stop at that place off 91, the one with the pie."

"That place closed."

"It did not."

"Danny. It closed in the spring. There was a sign."

He came into the kitchen holding his phone, already looking it up, and she watched him find the confirmation and absorb it with a small nod, the way he took bad news about anything—a resignation so quick it was almost cheerful.

"Then we'll find another place," he said.

They locked the back door, checked it, locked the front. Mira sat in the passenger seat holding two travel mugs while Daniel backed down the driveway, one hand on the wheel, the other braced against her headrest, the way he always did.

"Did I turn off the upstairs light?"

"You did."

"You saw me?"

"I saw you," he lied, and pulled onto the road.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation. Neither of them had put anything in it yet.

"Portland or the coast?" Dana asked. She was standing at the dresser, holding two pairs of jeans and evaluating them against some private standard.

"Coast," Marcus said. "We did Portland in March."

"We did Portland in March because you said you wanted coffee."

"I did want coffee. I still want coffee. There's coffee on the coast."

She put both pairs of jeans in the suitcase, which he noted but did not comment on. He was in charge of the cooler, which felt like the better assignment until he opened the refrigerator and found the deli drawer nearly empty. He held up a package with four slices of turkey left.

"Do we stop at the Safeway in Tillamook or the one here?"

"Here. The one in Tillamook is always out of the good bread."

"You've been to the Safeway in Tillamook once."

"Once was enough."

He took the turkey anyway, plus mustard, plus the block of cheddar that was heading toward the end of its useful life. Dana came in with her toothbrush and a paperback she'd been not-reading since February.

They left at 9:40, which was later than Marcus wanted and earlier than Dana had expected, so it counted as a compromise. He drove. She controlled the radio and settled on a station out of Astoria that faded in and out through the hills.

Around Banks she said, "I forgot my sunglasses."

"There's a pair in the glovebox."

"Those are your sunglasses."

"They're sunglasses."

She put them on. They were too big for her face and she knew it, and she left them on anyway, and he glanced over and saw her looking out the window at the fields going by, and he decided not to say anything about it.


The alarm went off at five-fifteen, which Dana had insisted on and Marcus had argued against, and now that it was ringing he pressed his face into the pillow while she swung her legs out of bed.

"You said you wanted to beat the traffic on 95," she reminded him.

"I said a lot of things at nine o'clock last night."

By six he was carrying the duffel bag down the porch steps while Dana stood in the kitchen debating the cooler. They were only going two nights, up to a cabin outside Luray that her coworker had recommended, but she couldn't decide whether to bring the eggs or trust that the town had a grocery store.

"Bring them," Marcus called through the screen door. "You'll be annoyed if there's no store."

"There's definitely a store. I looked."

"Then don't bring them."

She brought them, packed in the carton inside a plastic bag, which took another four minutes. Marcus checked the back door twice and asked if she'd turned off the coffee maker. She had. He checked anyway.

In the car she took the first shift driving because she liked the early highway, empty and gray, and he liked being allowed to fall asleep. He didn't, though. He scrolled through the playlist she'd made and vetoed three songs, and they talked about whether her brother was actually going to move to Denver or was just saying it again.

At a Sheetz outside Front Royal they got gas and coffee and a bag of pretzels that Marcus opened before they were out of the parking lot. Dana asked for the map on his phone and he read the directions out loud, one turn at a time, which annoyed her but she didn't say so.

The mountains came up green and hazy on their left. She rolled her window down two inches. He turned the volume up.


The suitcase lay open on the bed for two days before either of them put anything in it.

"Do you want the good pillow or should we just use the ones at the cabin?" Nadia asked, holding it under her chin like a violin.

"The cabin ones smell like a basement," Marcus said. He was on the floor testing the flashlight, which worked, and then testing it again, which it also did. "Bring it. Bring both, actually. I'll drive."

They left at four-thirty on Friday to beat the traffic and did not beat the traffic. On I-84 they inched past a jackknifed box truck and Nadia read aloud from the reviews she'd found, the ones that mentioned mice, and the ones that mentioned the hot tub being lukewarm, and the one that just said *fine.*

"Mice are fine," Marcus said. "Mice are honest."

They stopped at a Wawa outside Danbury because Nadia wanted iced tea and Marcus wanted to look at the sandwiches without buying one, which was a thing he did. She bought him a bag of pretzels anyway and set it in his lap, and he ate them one at a time with his left hand for the next forty miles.

The turnoff came up faster than the GPS suggested. Gravel road, no streetlights, the headlights catching the reflective eyes of something in the ditch.

"Deer," she said.

"Possum."

The key was under the flowerpot, exactly as promised, which surprised them both. Inside, the air was cold and smelled like woodsmoke and Pine-Sol. Marcus found the thermostat. Nadia found the light switch, then the second light switch, then a lamp with a shade shaped like a pheasant.

"Oh, that's terrible," she said, delighted.

"We're keeping it on all weekend."

He carried in the bags. She unwrapped the sandwiches they'd bought after all, and they ate standing at the counter, still in their coats.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation. Dana had packed hers Thursday night; Marcus was still standing at the closet with two flannel shirts, weighing them as if the difference mattered.

"It's supposed to be fifty-eight and rainy," she said, not looking up from her phone. "Both of them, then. You'll want a dry one."

He tossed both in. "You booked the place with the woodstove?"

"The one with the woodstove was gone. This one has a fireplace and a hot tub that the reviews say sometimes works."

"Sometimes."

"That's what the reviews said. Two people mentioned it."

They left at nine-fifteen, half an hour later than planned, because Marcus remembered the trash and Dana couldn't find the good travel mugs, the steel ones, and refused to accept the plastic ones with the cracked lids. She found them eventually in the dishwasher, clean, where she'd put them.

Marcus drove the first leg. They argued mildly about whether to take 84 or cut across on the county roads, and settled it by taking 84 because Dana pointed out that scenery was less appealing in rain. At the Cumberland Farms outside Sturbridge they got gas and coffee and a bag of pretzels that Dana said she didn't want and then ate most of.

"We should call your mother from the cabin," she said. "Saturday, though. Not tonight."

"She'll call us first."

"She probably will."

The rain started around eleven, light, the wipers on intermittent. Dana put on a podcast about a shipwreck and then turned it off because Marcus kept asking her to repeat things. They drove the last forty minutes mostly quiet, which was fine. Somewhere past Brattleboro she reached over and put her hand on the back of his neck, and he tipped his head slightly toward it, and neither of them said anything about it.

The key was in a lockbox. The code worked on the second try.


The Thermos

Dana had the map open on the kitchen table, though her phone would have done the job faster. She liked the paper version, the way the mountains showed as brown wrinkles.

"Two hours forty, if we leave by nine," she said.

Ben was standing at the open refrigerator, holding a container of leftover chili and deciding its fate. "Nine's optimistic. You still have to pack."

"I packed last night."

"You put a sweater on the bed."

"That's the beginning of packing." She traced Route 33 with her finger. "There's a diner in Elkins. Or we could just do gas station coffee and push through."

"Diner," Ben said. He set the chili on the counter, then put it back in the fridge. "We're not bringing that."

They divided the work without discussing it much, the way they had for eleven years. Ben checked the tire pressure in the driveway while Dana filled the green thermos and wrote a note for the neighbor about the cat. Halfway through the note she stopped and called out the screen door.

"Did we cancel the plumber?"

"Monday's fine. He's coming Monday."

"You told him Monday?"

"I told him Monday." A pause. "I'll text him again."

They left at nine-twenty, which Dana pointed out and Ben accepted. The cooler went behind the driver's seat, the duffel bags in the trunk, and the thermos in the cupholder where it fit badly and leaned.

Three blocks from the house Ben pulled over.

"The windows," Dana said.

"The back bedroom windows."

She went in. He waited with the engine running, watching a man across the street drag a garbage can to the curb. When Dana came back she was carrying her sweater.

"Open?" he asked.

"One of them."

"Good instinct."

"It was your instinct."

"Then good instinct," he said, and pulled back onto the road.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like a question neither of them wanted to answer first.

"Two nights," Deborah said. "You don't need four shirts."

Ray held one up, a blue plaid he'd owned since before their daughter left for Tulsa. "What if it rains and I get soaked?"

"Then you'll wear the other three in sequence." She took the shirt from him, folded it anyway, and set it in the case. Twenty-nine years had taught her which arguments to lose on purpose.

They were driving to Galena, three hours northwest, because Deborah's coworker had mentioned a bed-and-breakfast with a wraparound porch and Ray had said, without much thought, that they should go sometime. Deborah had booked it that night before he could reconsider.

He carried the bag down while she went through the house doing what she called the sweep: thermostat to sixty-two, coffee maker unplugged, the timer set on the lamp in the front room. She checked the back door twice.

"Did you cancel the paper?"

"It's Saturday and Sunday. We'll be back before Monday's."

In the car he adjusted the mirror she'd moved, and she pretended not to see. They stopped for gas at the Casey's on Route 6, and she went in for coffee while he pumped. She came out with two coffees and a bag of pretzels, the sourdough hard ones he liked, though she hadn't asked.

"You get cash?"

"There's an ATM in town."

"They charge you three dollars at those."

"Then I'll pay the three dollars, Ray."

He merged onto the highway. She found a station playing something from 1974, and neither of them said anything about it. The corn was still short. Somewhere past Princeton she took off her shoes and put her feet on the dash, and he told her not to, and she left them there.


The plan started on Wednesday, over dishes. Renee said she couldn't look at the kitchen for another weekend, and Andrew, drying a pan, said they could drive up to Galena — two nights, nothing fancy. She pulled up a place on her phone with a porch and a claw-foot tub, and he said the price was fine if they ate breakfast at the room instead of going out twice.

Thursday they argued mildly about the car. Andrew wanted the oil changed before they left; Renee thought it could wait until Monday, since it was only three hours each way. He got it done anyway on his lunch break and texted her a photo of the receipt with no caption, which she understood as gentle vindication.

Friday afternoon Renee packed while Andrew finished a call. She laid out two sweaters and then put one back. He came in and asked if she'd packed the good corkscrew, because the last place had one of those cheap ones that snapped. She hadn't. He put it in the side pocket of the duffel along with two paperbacks he wouldn't read.

They left at 4:40, later than they'd said. Renee drove first because Andrew was still wound up from work. He handled snacks — almonds, two bananas, a bag of pretzels he immediately regretted opening because the salt made him thirsty. Somewhere past Rockford they stopped for gas and he bought a coffee he didn't want just to be moving around.

She merged back onto the highway and said she'd forgotten to water the fern. He said the fern had survived worse. The sun dropped behind a line of silos and turned the whole windshield gold, and for six or seven miles neither of them said anything, which was the point of leaving.

At the inn, the key was in a lockbox. The code worked on the second try.


Dana found the cooler in the garage, still smelling faintly of last summer's melted ice. She hosed it out on the driveway while Peter stood in the kitchen doorway, holding his phone at arm's length.

"Two hours forty if we leave by seven," he said. "Three and a half if we leave at nine."

"Seven is aggressive."

"Seven is realistic. Eight, then."

They settled on seven-thirty, which they both knew meant a quarter to eight. Dana wanted to stop at the farm stand near the county line, the one with the hand-lettered sign and the peaches that were never quite ripe but always worth it. Peter wanted to skip it and get to the cabin before the check-in window closed, though there was no check-in window; his cousin owned the place and had left the key in a coffee can on the porch for eleven years running.

Friday night they packed. Dana laid out two sweatshirts, and Peter said it would be seventy-five all weekend, and Dana packed both anyway. He filled a paper bag with granola bars and the good coffee and the small red kettle, because the cabin's kettle whistled like a train and neither of them liked it.

"Did you email Susan about the mail?"

"I texted her. She's watering the tomatoes too."

In the morning Dana drove first. They got onto the highway at 7:52, which Peter noted out loud and Dana ignored. Somewhere past the reservoir he found a station playing old country and left it there, and she didn't complain, which he took as permission.

They stopped at the farm stand after all. The peaches were hard as baseballs. Dana bought six and a jar of blackberry jam, and Peter bought a bag of kettle corn he ate most of before the state line.

"We'll be there by eleven," he said.

"Eleven-thirty," she said, and pulled back onto the road.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Dana kept walking past it.

"You're going to pack at eleven tonight," Marcus said from the doorway. He had a mug of coffee he shouldn't have been drinking at four in the afternoon.

"I pack fast." She was on her laptop at the desk, comparing two motels in Asheville that were seventeen dollars apart. "This one has a pool but the reviews say the pool's been closed since March."

"So the other one."

"The other one's next to the highway."

Marcus came in and sat on the edge of the bed, moving the suitcase over with his hip. "Book the highway one. We're barely going to be in the room."

She booked the highway one. Then she spent ten minutes on the confirmation page trying to figure out whether the rate included tax.

They left Saturday at 6:40 in the morning, later than the 6:00 Marcus had proposed and earlier than the 8:00 Dana had lobbied for. He drove first because he always drove first. Dana had brought a bag of almonds and two bananas and a thermos, and she had forgotten the phone charger, which they realized at the second traffic light.

"Do we go back?"

"It's four minutes," Marcus said, and turned around, and neither of them said anything about it after.

By the time they hit the interstate the sun was fully up and the radio was doing a segment about municipal bonds. Dana turned it down without asking. She put her bare feet on the dashboard, which he hated, and he reached over and squeezed her ankle anyway.

"There's a place in Old Fort," she said. "Sandwiches. My coworker mentioned it."

"How far off the highway?"

"Six miles."

He considered. "Fine. But we're not stopping again until Black Mountain."

"Okay," she said, already knowing they would.


The Thermos Question

Dana found the cooler in the garage on Thursday night, behind the bag of potting soil, and carried it inside to check for mildew. It smelled fine, faintly of old ice.

"We're not driving all the way to Asheville with a cooler," Marcus said from the kitchen table, where he had the road atlas open even though his phone worked perfectly well. He liked the atlas. He said it gave him the shape of a trip.

"It's three hours. I'm not paying nine dollars for a gas station sandwich."

"You always say that and then you buy the gas station sandwich."

She conceded the point by not answering. Instead she asked whether he'd told his mother they'd be gone, and he said he'd text her in the morning, which meant Dana would remind him twice.

They packed Friday after work. Marcus took the duffel; Dana took the tote she'd been given at a conference in 2019 and refused to retire. She put in two books and took one out again. He argued for leaving at five to beat traffic on 85, and she pointed out that leaving at five *was* the traffic, and they settled on 5:40, which turned out to mean 6:15.

The dog went to the neighbor's with a bag of kibble measured into sandwich bags. Marcus double-checked the coffee maker was off. Dana stood in the doorway with her hand on the light switch, doing the thing she did, running through the house in her head, and he waited without saying anything because he'd learned that saying something made it take longer.

On the highway she found the podcast they'd been saving. He drove with one wrist over the top of the wheel. Twenty minutes past the county line she opened the cooler and handed him half a turkey sandwich, and he ate it without comment, which was its own kind of agreement.


The rain started Thursday night, which Priya took as a sign they should leave early.

"Or a sign we should stay home," Daniel said, scrolling through the forecast on his phone. "Look, it clears up by Saturday afternoon."

"So we sit in a motel room Friday night watching the same shows we watch here."

They were in the kitchen, dishes half-done. Priya dried her hands and pulled the atlas off the shelf—an actual paper atlas, a wedding gift from Daniel's uncle that Daniel found charming and Priya found faintly absurd, though she was the one who used it.

"Three hours to Galena," she said. "Four if we stop."

"We always stop."

They booked a room at a place with river views, which Daniel pointed out probably meant a view of a parking lot with a river somewhere beyond it. Priya booked it anyway. Sixty-eight dollars less than the other one.

Friday morning Daniel packed the car while Priya took the dog to her sister's. He put in the cooler, the good pillows, and, at the last minute, his hiking boots, which felt optimistic given the mud. When Priya got back she rearranged the trunk without comment, which was its own kind of comment.

"I put the snacks where you can reach them," Daniel said.

"I saw."

They stopped for gas at the Shell on Route 20 and argued mildly about whether to get coffee there or wait for the place in Rockford. They waited. Priya drove the first stretch, one hand on the wheel, the other tucked between her knees for warmth because the heater took forever.

Around Belvidere the rain thinned to a mist. Daniel found a station playing something from the eighties and neither of them changed it.

"Two days," Priya said. "No email."

"You'll check."

"I'll check less."

He put his hand on her knee. She let it stay there.


The cooler was the problem. Dana wanted to bring it, filled with the good sandwiches from the deli on Fifth, and Marcus said they'd stop somewhere, they always stopped somewhere, and the cooler took up the whole back seat.

"Not the whole back seat," Dana said. She was standing in the kitchen in her socks, holding a bag of ice she'd bought two days early and forgotten about, which had frozen into a solid brick. "It takes up half."

"We're going to Asheville. There is food in Asheville."

"There's food between here and Asheville. That's the part I'm worried about."

He took the ice from her, considered it, and set it in the sink to thaw. It was 6:40 in the morning and neither of them had slept well, which happened before trips, some low-grade excitement that felt indistinguishable from dread. The plan was simple: leave by seven, get to the cabin by two, do nothing for two days.

Marcus loaded the car while Dana went through the house unplugging things. She unplugged the toaster, the coffee maker, the lamp in the guest room that had a frayed cord she kept meaning to replace. She checked the back door twice.

"Did you cancel the—" she called.

"I paused the mail. Yes."

"That wasn't what I was going to say."

"What were you going to say?"

She stood in the hallway with her hand on the light switch and couldn't remember. "Never mind."

They left at 7:20. Marcus drove the first shift. Dana had made a playlist and then apologized for it, preemptively, and he said he liked her playlists, which was mostly true. Twenty minutes out of town, near the exit with the two gas stations facing each other, she said, "We forgot the sandwiches."

He looked at her. She was already laughing.

"Deli's closed till eight anyway," she said, and put her feet up on the dash.


The Friday traffic on I-40 hadn't started yet, which Dana counted as a small miracle. She stood in the kitchen with the cooler open, holding two cans of seltzer, deciding whether they were worth the space.

"Are you bringing the good pillow?" Marcus called from the bedroom.

"I'm bringing my pillow. You can bring yours or suffer."

He appeared in the doorway with a duffel bag and the fleece blanket from the couch, which she hadn't thought of and which was a good idea. He set the blanket on the counter and looked at the cooler.

"We could just stop at the Kroger in Asheville," he said.

"And pay four dollars for a bag of ice." She put the seltzer in. "Did you find the reservation?"

"It's in my email. Cabin's got a wood stove but the guy said there's a space heater under the sink if we need it."

They loaded the car in the driveway while their neighbor's sprinkler ran across the sidewalk in an arc that timed itself perfectly to soak Marcus's ankle. He swore mildly. Dana laughed and got in the passenger side.

The first forty minutes they talked about her sister, who had called twice that week and left no message either time. Then Marcus turned on the radio and found a station playing music neither of them liked, and they let it stay on anyway.

They stopped in Statesville for gas and Marcus went inside for coffee. Dana leaned against the car in the cooling air and texted her sister a single question mark. When Marcus came back he handed her a cup and a package of peanut M&M's.

"You didn't ask for these," he said, "but I know."

She opened them with her teeth. He pulled back onto the highway, and the sun sat low and orange in the mirrors behind them the whole way up.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation. Dana had packed hers Thursday night, folded and zippered, while Marcus kept insisting he'd do his in ten minutes flat.

"Two nights," he said now, Saturday morning, holding up four shirts. "Which of these says 'we're just going to a lake'?"

"None of them. Bring the gray one."

"The gray one has a hole in the sleeve."

"Then bring the blue." She was in the kitchen already, wrapping sandwiches in wax paper because the rest stops on I-81 were a scam. "Did you check the tire?"

"The tire's fine."

"The light was on Tuesday."

"The light is always on. It's a suggestion."

She came to the doorway with a jar of pickles she'd decided at the last second to bring. "If we break down outside Harrisburg I'm going to be insufferable about it."

"You're insufferable about it now, and we haven't left." He kissed her forehead on his way to the closet for the blue shirt.

They got out at 9:40, which was later than Dana wanted and earlier than Marcus had predicted. He drove the first leg. She managed the radio, then gave up on the radio and read him a list of things they might do: the covered bridge, the winery neither of them cared about, the diner with the pie.

"Pie," Marcus said.

"That's not a whole weekend."

"It's a start."

Twenty miles in she remembered the porch light. Marcus said it didn't matter. She texted their neighbor Ruth anyway, asking her to check the back door, and Ruth wrote back a thumbs-up and a photo of her cat, unprompted.

The mountains came up gray-green and unremarkable. Dana put her bare feet on the dash, which Marcus hated, and he said nothing about it, and they drove another hour like that, mostly quiet, the sandwiches waiting in the back.


The Friday afternoon light came in slanted through the kitchen window while Marcus stood at the counter with a legal pad, writing "gas, snacks, dog food" in his careful block letters.

"Nadia, do we need to board Rufus, or is Kelsey still good?"

"Kelsey's good." Nadia came in from the hallway with an armful of towels she'd decided, at the last minute, they might want. "She said she'd come by twice a day. I told her the food's in the bin under the sink."

"We could just take him."

"To a bed and breakfast?"

"Some places allow it."

"Not that one. I checked." She set the towels on a chair, looked at them, and picked one up again. "This is stupid. They have towels."

"Probably nicer than ours."

"Definitely nicer than ours."

They argued mildly about departure time. Marcus wanted to leave at five to beat the worst of it. Nadia pointed out that leaving at five *was* the worst of it, and that if they waited until six-thirty they could eat dinner at home instead of paying eleven dollars for a gas station sandwich. Marcus conceded, mostly because he was hungry.

She made pasta. He carried bags to the car and rearranged them twice, because the cooler didn't fit behind the driver's seat the way he'd imagined it would. Rufus followed him out and back, out and back, tail going, until Marcus knelt on the driveway and held the dog's head in both hands and said, "Two nights, buddy. That's all."

They locked up at quarter past seven. Nadia checked the stove twice. Marcus checked the front door after she'd already checked it, and she let him.

Forty minutes out, on the interstate, she found a country station neither of them liked and left it on anyway, and Marcus reached over and put his hand on her knee, and the sun went down somewhere to the right of them, orange and unremarkable.


The suitcase lay open on the bed all Thursday evening, accumulating things. Dana added her running shoes. Miguel took them out.

"Two nights," he said. "You're not going to run."

"I might run."

"You've never once run on vacation."

She put them back in, then set a paperback on top of them, which was how these things got settled.

They'd chosen Asheville because it was four hours away and neither of them had been. Miguel wanted to leave at six Friday morning; Dana pointed out that his six was really seven-fifteen, and that they should just admit it and plan around the truth. He conceded, grudgingly, and set the alarm for six anyway.

Friday morning they left at seven-oh-five, which he mentioned twice.

The car smelled faintly of the peaches Dana had bought and forgotten in the back seat two weeks ago. She'd cleaned them out but the smell stayed, sweet and slightly wrong. Miguel drove first. She managed the coffee, holding his cup for him at stoplights because the console was too shallow and they'd never fixed that.

Around Knoxville he asked whether she'd remembered to text her sister about the cat, and there was a long pause.

"I'll do it now," Dana said.

"You said you'd do it Wednesday."

"And now it's Friday, and I'm doing it."

Karen wrote back within a minute: *already have the key, relax.* Dana held the phone up so Miguel could see, and he nodded once, satisfied, eyes on the road.

They stopped at a gas station outside Sevierville. Dana bought sunflower seeds and a bottle of water; Miguel got a coffee he didn't want, just to have something to do with his hands while she used the restroom. Standing by the pumps in the flat gray light, he checked the hotel confirmation for the fourth time. Check-in at three. They'd be early.

He decided not to mention it.


The Thermos Argument

Dana had the map open on the kitchen table, though she'd stopped looking at it twenty minutes ago in favor of the weather app.

"It's going to rain Saturday afternoon," she said.

Marcus was pulling things out of the hall closet. "Then we hike Saturday morning."

"You said you wanted to sleep in."

"I want both things." He held up a sleeping bag, considered it, put it back. "We're staying in a cabin. With beds."

They were going to Wisconsin, three and a half hours north, to a place Dana's coworker had recommended. Two nights. Marcus had wanted to leave Friday after work; Dana had argued for Friday morning, using vacation hours, because leaving at five meant arriving at nine and unpacking in the dark. Marcus had conceded, mostly because she was right, partly because he'd remembered the last time they'd arrived somewhere at nine.

"Are we bringing the good coffee or the gas station coffee?"

"There's a version of me that brings the good coffee," Dana said. "She also owns a French press she remembers to pack."

Marcus found the thermos in the back of the cabinet, behind the slow cooker. It still smelled faintly of soup. He rinsed it twice and left it upside down on the drying rack.

They loaded the car Friday at nine-fifteen, later than planned. Dana put the cooler behind the driver's seat, which Marcus moved to the trunk, which Dana moved back, explaining about the ice.

"Did you lock the back door?"

"You locked it."

"I want to hear you say you saw me lock it."

Marcus went and checked. It was locked.

On the highway, Dana ate almonds out of a sandwich bag and read him the descriptions of the hiking trails while he drove. He said the third one sounded fine. She said it was four miles. He said fine was fine.

The sky stayed clear until Milwaukee.


The Friday traffic on I-90 hadn't started yet, which was the whole point of leaving at two.

"Did you pack the phone charger or am I packing the phone charger?" Delia called from the bedroom. She was holding two sweaters, trying to decide which one would look less ridiculous in October photos.

"I packed mine. Yours is still in the kitchen outlet." Marcus came in with the duffel bag they'd bought in 2019 and never replaced despite the broken zipper pull. He'd tied a bread tab through the hole, which she found either resourceful or embarrassing depending on the day.

They'd argued about the destination for a week. He wanted the Finger Lakes; she wanted Montreal, until she remembered her passport had expired in August. So: a bed and breakfast outside Ithaca, three nights, breakfast included, no television in the room according to the website, which Marcus had mentioned four separate times.

"Do we need to do anything about the plants?" he asked.

"They'll survive three days."

"The fern won't."

"The fern is already dying. That's just its personality now."

He filled a mug with water and dumped it into the fern's pot anyway.

Delia went through the checklist in her head the way she did before any trip—stove off, back door locked, the little heater in the bathroom unplugged. She checked the stove twice. Marcus carried the bag out and came back for the cooler with the sandwiches she'd made at noon, turkey for her, ham and too much mustard for him.

In the car he adjusted the mirror she'd moved and she adjusted the seat he'd moved, and neither of them said anything about it.

"Podcast or music?" she said.

"Whatever's easier."

"That's not an answer."

"Music, then."

She put on the playlist from their honeymoon, eleven years old now, and he pretended not to notice, and they pulled onto the highway just as the light started going gold.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation. Dana had packed hers Thursday night; Marcus was still standing in front of the closet in his socks, holding two shirts.

"The blue one," she said, without looking up from her phone. "The other one has that stain from the wedding."

"Nobody's going to see the inside of my collar."

"I will."

He put the striped shirt back and folded the blue one badly, the way he always did, and she let it go, which she counted as generosity.

They were driving to Asheville, three and a half hours if the traffic near Charlotte cooperated, which it wouldn't. The cabin was her sister's friend's, offered casually at a barbecue in June and finally claimed in October, and Dana had spent two nights reading reviews of restaurants they probably wouldn't have the energy to visit.

"Did you cancel the dog walker?"

"She's coming Saturday anyway. I told her Sunday too."

"That's forty dollars."

"It's forty dollars, Marcus."

In the kitchen he made coffee for the road while she wiped the counters, because arriving home to a dirty kitchen ruined the whole thing retroactively. He filled two travel mugs, hers with too much cream, and set them by the door. She checked the stove twice. He watched her do it and said nothing, having learned.

Loading the car took eleven minutes and one small argument about whether the cooler went in the trunk or the back seat. It went in the back seat.

At the end of the driveway he stopped. "Gas or coffee first?"

"Gas. There's a Sheetz by the interstate."

He turned left. She reached over and adjusted the vent so it wasn't blowing directly on her, then put her hand on his knee, absently, and left it there while the neighborhood slid past the windows and the day opened up in front of them, unclaimed.


On Thursday night, Priya spread the road atlas across the kitchen table, even though Dev had already pulled up the route on his phone.

"Three hours forty, no traffic," he said.

"That's assuming we leave by seven."

"We can leave by seven."

They both knew they wouldn't. They never did. But the fiction was part of it, the way pretending they were the sort of people who left at seven made leaving at eight-fifteen feel like a minor triumph rather than a defeat.

The cabin was in the Poconos, a friend-of-a-friend's place, cheap because it was November and nobody wanted to be there in November. That was the appeal. Priya wanted a fireplace and no cell service. Dev wanted to sleep past six for two consecutive mornings.

Friday morning she packed the cooler while he loaded the car. She put in the leftover dal, a block of cheddar, two apples, the bread from the good bakery on Ninth.

"Did you get coffee?" she called.

"There's coffee."

"Ground?"

A pause. "There's beans."

"Is there a grinder up there?"

Another pause, longer. He came back inside, took the beans, and ground them into a bag while she stood there not saying anything, which was its own kind of saying something.

They left at eight-twenty. Dev drove the first leg. Priya put on the podcast about the shipwreck, and he said he'd already heard it, and she said not the new episode, and he said fine.

Outside Stroudsburg they stopped for gas and she bought a bag of pretzels and a lottery ticket, which she did on every trip and had never once won on.

"What are we doing with the eleven dollars?" he asked.

"Two dollars."

"The eleven, when you win."

She scratched the ticket against the dashboard, blew the dust out the window, and said, "Nothing. Same as always."

He pulled back onto the highway.


The forecast said rain after Sunday noon, so Dana wanted to leave Friday right after work instead of waiting for Saturday morning. Marcus argued for Saturday — he had a haircut appointment he didn't want to reschedule — but eventually he called the barbershop and moved it to the following week.

They packed Thursday night in the bedroom, the suitcase open on the mattress between them. Dana counted out socks. Marcus held up two flannel shirts and asked which one, and she said the green one, and he packed both anyway.

"Are we taking the cooler?" he asked.

"For two nights?"

"For the drive. Sandwiches instead of stopping."

She agreed on the condition that he made the sandwiches, which he did at eleven, standing at the counter in his sweatpants, cutting them diagonally the way she liked. He put them in the fridge next to the eggs.

Friday afternoon Dana left work twenty minutes early and hit traffic anyway. Marcus was already home, watering the plants deeply so they'd survive until Sunday, and he'd texted the neighbor about the mail. When Dana came in, he was searching for the phone charger that lived in the car, which was, he discovered, already in the car.

They got on the highway at 5:40. Dana drove the first stretch because she liked the merging and he didn't. Marcus fiddled with the radio, gave up, and put on a podcast about a shipwreck. Somewhere past the second exit he unwrapped a sandwich and held it over so she could take bites without looking away from the road.

"Did you lock the back door?" she asked.

He thought about it. "Yes."

"You're sure."

"I'm eighty percent sure."

They agreed that eighty percent was acceptable, and kept driving. The sun was low and orange in the mirrors, and the rain was still two days off.


The map app said four hours to Asheville, but Dana knew better. "Add an hour," she said, thumbing through the hotel confirmation on her phone. "You'll want to stop at that pie place in Hickory."

Marcus was in the hall closet, wrestling out the duffel bag they'd bought for a trip to Portland six years ago. It still had the tag from the airline wrapped around the handle. "I only stopped there once."

"You talked about it for a month."

They'd decided on Friday, which was unusual for them. Normally a trip required weeks of hedging, checking whether Marcus's mother needed anything, whether the dog-sitter was free. But the fall had been long and gray and Dana had come home Wednesday and said, out of nowhere, that she wanted to see mountains before the leaves were gone.

Packing took less time than either expected. Marcus put in two shirts and then a third, because Dana pointed out that the restaurant she'd found had a dress code, or at least a suggestion of one. She packed the good raincoat and then, after checking the forecast twice, packed it anyway.

"Do we water the plants or does Angela?"

"Angela's got the key. I texted her."

They left at seven-fifteen Saturday morning, which was later than Marcus wanted and earlier than Dana had expected. He drove the first stretch while she held both coffees, taking sips of hers and passing his over at red lights. The interstate was empty enough that they didn't talk much for the first half hour, just listened to a podcast about a bank robbery in 1974 until Dana said she couldn't follow it and put on music instead.

Somewhere past Statesville, the land started to swell up on either side of the road. Marcus glanced over and saw her looking out the window, one foot up on the dash, and he didn't tell her to take it down.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Dana kept putting things into it that Marcus kept taking out.

"You don't need two pairs of hiking boots."

"One's for the trail and one's for after the trail."

"After the trail is a chair on a porch. You can wear the trail boots to the chair."

She took them out anyway, which he noted without comment, filing it under the general category of small victories he pretended not to keep track of.

They were driving up to Galena, three and a half hours, a bed and breakfast Dana's coworker had recommended with an enthusiasm that had seemed slightly excessive. Marcus had wanted to leave at six to beat traffic. Dana had wanted to sleep. They compromised on seven-fifteen, which meant seven-forty, which meant they hit the tail end of the Friday crush on I-88 and sat in it for twenty minutes while Marcus said nothing very loudly.

At the gas station outside Rochelle he filled the tank while she went in and came back with coffee, a bag of pretzels, and a lottery ticket.

"Really."

"It's two dollars. If we win we're not going back to work Monday."

"If we win you'll still go to work Monday. You'd go to work with a broken leg."

"That happened once and it was a sprain."

She scratched the ticket against the dashboard with her thumbnail while he merged. It wasn't a winner. She folded it into the cup holder with the other trash and put her feet up on the glovebox, which he had asked her not to do maybe two hundred times over eleven years.

Around Dixon the corn started, flat and green and endless, and neither of them said anything for a while, and it was fine. She found a station playing something from the nineties. He drove with one wrist on the wheel. The exit sign said forty-one miles.


The Suitcase Rule

Dana had a rule about weekend trips: one bag between them, or they'd overpack.

"That's not a real rule," Marcus said, standing in the bedroom doorway with two pairs of hiking boots. "That's something you invented in 2019 because I brought a blender to Asheville."

"You brought a blender to Asheville."

"For smoothies." He set the boots down anyway and took only the newer pair.

They were going to Galena, three hours northwest, because Dana's coworker had mentioned a bed and breakfast with a decent porch and Marcus had a Friday off he needed to use before it expired. Dana printed the confirmation email even though she didn't need to. Marcus checked the oil, which the car did not need, and then checked the tire pressure, which it did.

The negotiations happened over breakfast. Marcus wanted to leave at six to beat traffic. Dana pointed out that six meant waking at five, and that they'd arrive before check-in and sit in a parking lot for two hours.

"We could get breakfast there."

"We could sleep and get breakfast here."

They compromised on seven-thirty, which meant they left at eight-ten, because Marcus couldn't find the phone charger and Dana had to water the tomatoes.

In the car, Dana drove first. Marcus managed the radio and read the reviews aloud, which he had promised not to do.

"'Beds a little soft.' Four stars."

"Stop."

"'Innkeeper's dog is aggressive—' oh, that's from 2016. Probably a different dog."

Outside Rockford they stopped for gas and Dana bought two coffees and a bag of pretzels she immediately regretted. Marcus took over driving. The corn went on for a long time. Dana fell asleep against the window with her mouth open, and Marcus turned the radio down and didn't wake her, though he wanted to point out the hawk on the fence post.


The Friday afternoon light came in sideways through the kitchen window while Dana packed the cooler. She wedged two bottles of seltzer between the sandwiches, then took one out because Marcus said the ice would melt anyway and they'd just be drinking warm water by Ohio.

"We could stop in Sandusky," he said, thumbing through the road atlas he refused to give up, even though the phone did it better. "There's that diner."

"The one with the pie?"

"The one with the pie."

Dana wrote *pie* on the back of a receipt and stuck it to the fridge, which made no sense but felt like planning. She had already texted her sister about the dog, already put the porch light on a timer, already argued with herself about whether two nights required a second pair of shoes. It did, she decided, and went to get them.

Marcus loaded the car in his usual order — heavy things low, cooler behind the driver's seat where he could reach it, Dana's tote bag on top so nothing crushed her book. He checked the tire pressure with the little pencil gauge from the glove box and found the front left low by four pounds, which he mentioned twice.

"We'll fill it at the Speedway," Dana said. "The one before the highway."

They locked the front door, then unlocked it because she wanted her sunglasses, then locked it again. In the driveway Marcus turned the key and the radio came on mid-song, something from a station neither of them liked, and he let it play.

"Three hours?" Dana asked.

"Three and a half. With the pie."

She rolled her window down two inches. He backed out slowly, watching the mirror, and at the stop sign at the end of their street he asked whether she'd remembered the phone chargers. She had. She held them up. They turned left.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Dana kept walking past it.

"Two nights," Marcus called from the bathroom. "That's four shirts, tops. You don't need four shirts."

"I need options." She dropped a cardigan in anyway. Outside, the Thursday evening light had gone amber against the neighbor's fence, and somewhere down the block a kid was practicing free throws, the ball's dull thud arriving at intervals.

They were driving to Asheville, three and a half hours if the traffic on I-40 cooperated, which it wouldn't. Marcus had found the cabin on some site with too many pop-ups; Dana had booked it, because Marcus never entered his credit card information anywhere and considered this a personality trait rather than an inconvenience.

"Did you cancel the dog walker?"

"I told her Friday and Saturday." Dana zipped the bag. "She's coming at noon both days. I left the key under the frog."

"We should just give her a key."

"We've had this conversation."

They had. Twice. Marcus let it go and came out of the bathroom with his toiletry kit, which was actually a gallon Ziploc, and set it on top of her folded things.

In the kitchen he ate standing up—cold rotisserie chicken pulled off the bone with his fingers—while Dana wrote a list on the back of an envelope. Coffee. Half-and-half. Something for the drive that isn't candy.

"There's a Publix off the highway," Marcus said. "We can stop."

"We'll say that and then we won't."

At six-forty they backed out of the driveway. Marcus drove. Dana held her phone up, hunting a podcast, then gave up and put on the radio, which was playing something from 1997 they both knew every word to and neither of them sang.

The dog watched from the front window until they turned the corner.


They started planning on Thursday night, standing in the kitchen while the dishwasher hummed.

"Two hours to the cabin, or three and a half to the coast," Marisol said, scrolling on her phone. "The coast place has a hot tub."

"The coast place also has that review about the raccoons."

"One review. From 2019."

Derek considered this. He was tired in a way that made three and a half hours feel like a personal insult, but he also knew Marisol had been talking about the ocean since February. "Coast," he said. "But we leave early. I don't want to hit Portland at five."

They left at seven-fifteen on Saturday, which was later than planned because Derek couldn't find the good sunglasses and Marisol had insisted on watering the tomatoes. She'd also insisted on packing a cooler, which Derek thought was excessive for two nights, until they were forty minutes in and she handed him a hard-boiled egg with a little twist of salt in wax paper.

"Okay," he admitted. "The cooler was right."

"I know."

They took turns picking music until Marisol fell asleep somewhere past the reservoir, her head tipped against the window, mouth slightly open. Derek turned the volume down and drove through the tunnel of firs feeling oddly protective, the way he sometimes did watching her sleep at home.

She woke when he pulled into a gas station outside Tillamook. They split a bag of pretzels and used the bathroom and argued mildly about whether to stop for cheese.

"We'll stop on the way back," Derek said.

"You always say that."

"And do we always stop?"

"No," she said. "That's my point."

They stopped for the cheese. It cost eleven dollars and they ate half of it in the parking lot, standing beside the car with the doors open, the air already carrying salt from somewhere they couldn't see yet.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like a question neither of them wanted to answer first.

"Two nights," Priya said. "How many shirts is that?"

Marcus was already folding a flannel he'd worn on their last trip to the coast. "Three. In case something happens to one."

"What's going to happen to a shirt?"

"Clam chowder happened to a shirt in Monterey."

She let that go and went to check the weather again on her phone, though she'd checked it twice since breakfast. Fifty-eight and drizzling in Mendocino, which sounded exactly right for October. She dropped a rain jacket into the suitcase, then her book, then the paperback Marcus had left on the nightstand for six weeks without opening it.

"Do we stop in Cloverdale or push through?" he asked.

"Push through. There's that place near the inn that closes at nine."

"So we're leaving by four."

"Three-thirty," she said. "You always say four and we leave at four-forty."

He didn't argue, because it was true. Instead he went to deal with the plants, filling a pitcher and moving from window to window while Priya texted their neighbor about the mail. The cat watched from the arm of the couch with the flat suspicion of an animal who had seen suitcases before.

At 3:50 they were in the driveway. Marcus backed out, then stopped.

"Did you unplug the iron?"

"I didn't use the iron."

"Somebody used the iron."

He put it in park and went back inside. Priya adjusted the passenger seat, found the podcast they'd been saving, and cracked the window. When he returned he said, "It was unplugged," in a tone that suggested this proved something.

They took the surface streets to the freeway. Somewhere past Petaluma the fog came in low over the hills, and Priya put her hand on his knee, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was the best part of leaving.


The suitcase lay open on the bed for two days before either of them put anything in it.

"We could leave Friday after work," Dana said, scrolling through cabin listings on her laptop while Marcus reheated leftover chili on the stove. "But then we hit Atlanta traffic."

"So we leave Saturday morning and lose half a day."

"Or we leave Friday at three. I have vacation hours I'm going to lose anyway."

Marcus tasted the chili, added salt. "Three works. I can move my two o'clock."

They settled on a place in the North Georgia mountains, two bedrooms they didn't need but it was cheaper than the studios closer to town. Dana booked it while eating standing up at the counter, which Marcus had asked her not to do roughly four hundred times.

Friday morning she packed. Marcus came in holding two flannel shirts.

"It's going to be sixty-eight."

"At noon. It's forty-one at night."

"You wear the same shirt both nights anyway."

"That's why I'm bringing two." He put them in.

The drive out of Charlotte went badly for the first forty minutes—a wreck on 85, everyone crawling. Dana drove. Marcus queued up a podcast about a maritime disaster, then turned it off when she said she couldn't concentrate.

They stopped in Gaffney for gas and gummy worms. Marcus bought a coffee he immediately regretted. Dana texted her sister a photo of the giant peach water tower, which her sister had seen probably eleven times.

By the time they got past Greenville the traffic broke and the light went gold and long across the fields. Dana took her hand off the wheel and rested it on his knee, and he put his hand over it, and neither of them said anything about it.

"There's a grocery store in Clayton," she said eventually. "We should get eggs."

"And coffee. The good kind, not whatever they leave."

"Obviously," she said.


The Thermos Question

The cooler had been sitting in the garage since August, and Dana found a dried-out lime wedge stuck to the bottom of it when she pulled off the lid.

"We're not bringing this," she called.

Marcus came out with the printed directions, which he insisted on despite owning a phone. "We could rinse it."

"It smells like a fraternity."

"Fine." He set the papers on the workbench. "Then we buy ice up there and put drinks in the sink."

They were going to the cabin in Hocking Hills that his cousin rented out, two nights, leaving Friday after Dana got off at three. She'd already asked Renata to feed the cat, which meant leaving the key under the flowerpot and a note about the medication, which she wrote and rewrote because the first version sounded bossy.

Marcus wanted to leave by four to beat the Columbus traffic. Dana pointed out that four was optimistic, given she had to shower off the day, and they compromised on four-thirty, which they both privately understood to mean five.

Packing went as it always did. He took a duffel, she took the rolling suitcase and then apologized for it. He asked twice whether she'd packed something warm; she said yes both times, with increasing flatness, and then went back upstairs for a fleece.

The thermos was the last argument. Dana wanted coffee for the drive. Marcus said they'd stop at the place off 33 with the good donuts.

"That's an hour in."

"So it's an hour of anticipation."

She made the coffee anyway and handed him the cup at the door, and he drank it, and neither of them said anything about it.

At 5:12 they pulled out. Dana adjusted the vent. Marcus turned onto Main and asked whether she'd locked the back door.

She had. She checked her phone photo of it anyway, and then put her feet up on the dash, and the town thinned out into fields.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Deb kept walking past it, adding things.

"You already put in two sweaters," Roy said from the doorway. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, where they'd been since breakfast.

"It's the mountains. It gets cold at night."

"It's May."

"It gets cold at night in May in the mountains." She folded a third sweater anyway, then unfolded it and set it on the dresser as a compromise she wanted him to notice. He didn't.

They were driving to Asheville, three and a half hours if the traffic near Charlotte cooperated, which it never did. Roy had booked the inn back in February when the rate was low, and Deb had been the one to remember it two weeks ago, saying *aren't we supposed to go somewhere*, and finding the confirmation email buried under a hundred messages about a warranty on the dishwasher.

He loaded the car while she watered the ferns on the porch and left the key under the ceramic frog for Lisa next door, who'd agreed to feed the cat. Deb wrote a note anyway. *Two scoops morning, one at night. She'll act like she's starving. She's not.*

At the gas station on Route 9, Roy went inside and came back with coffee for both of them and a bag of pretzels he opened with his teeth.

"I got you the hazelnut."

"I don't like the hazelnut."

"Since when?"

"Since always, Roy." But she drank it, holding the cup with both hands, and after a few miles she said it wasn't bad, which was a lie they both let stand.

Somewhere past the county line the radio found a station playing something from 1974, and neither of them changed it. The fields went by. Deb put her feet up on the dash, which he hated, and he said nothing about that either.


The road atlas was thirty years old, but Dana insisted on spreading it across the kitchen table anyway, next to her phone, which showed the same route in blue.

"Two hours forty," Marcus said, reading over her shoulder. "The app says two-fifteen."

"The app doesn't know about the construction on 40."

He conceded this. She had driven that stretch every week for a year, back when her mother was still in the hospital in Asheville, and she still spoke about the interstate with the authority of someone who had earned it.

They packed Friday after work. Marcus wanted to leave that night and get in around ten; Dana wanted to sleep at home and leave at six, when the roads were empty and the coffee was fresh. They compromised on seven-thirty, which meant, realistically, eight.

"Do we need the good pillows?" he called from the bedroom.

"The place has pillows."

"The place had pillows last time and I woke up like this." He came into the hall with his neck cocked sideways, one shoulder up, doing an impression of himself in pain. She laughed and told him to bring the pillows.

She made a list on the back of an envelope: phone chargers, the hiking boots from the garage, the bag of almonds so they wouldn't stop at a gas station and buy things they regretted. Marcus checked the tire pressure with the little pen gauge his father had given him, crouching in the driveway in the last of the light, and found the rear passenger tire down four pounds.

In the morning she drove first. He put his hand on her knee at the on-ramp, then took it back to hold his coffee. Twenty minutes out he asked whether she'd locked the back door, and she said yes, and then, after a mile, said she was pretty sure. They kept going.


Priya was the one who noticed the long weekend on the calendar, circling it in green marker while Daniel stood at the sink scrubbing the oatmeal pot.

"Three days," she said. "We could actually go somewhere."

They spent Tuesday evening on the couch with laptops open, negotiating. Daniel wanted the coast, the cold gray Oregon kind, but the drive was seven hours. Priya suggested Hood River instead—three hours, wine, a river, a town small enough to walk. Daniel countered with a cabin listing that had a woodstove and no cell service.

"No service means I can't call your mother back," Priya said.

"That's the appeal."

They booked the Hood River place, a rental above a garage, because it had a real bed and Priya's back had been bad since March. Daniel conceded without much fight, which Priya recognized as a kindness and didn't comment on.

Friday afternoon she packed for both of them, which was the arrangement: she packed, he loaded the car and drove the first two hours. She put his good flannel in the bag even though he hadn't asked, and two books she probably wouldn't read.

"Did you get the charger?" he called up the stairs.

"Which one?"

"The one that isn't the bad one."

She found the bad one, then the good one, and brought both.

They left at four-fifteen, later than planned, because Daniel had to take the trash out and then noticed the recycling and then decided to water the tomatoes since nobody else would. Priya waited in the passenger seat with her sunglasses on, not annoyed exactly, just aware of the light going.

On I-84 they split a bag of pretzels and argued mildly about whether to stop for real dinner or eat gas station sandwiches at the rental. Real dinner won. The Columbia opened up wide on their right, brown and glittering, and Priya put her hand flat on Daniel's knee while he drove.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Dana kept walking past it.

"You're going to forget your charger," Michael said from the doorway. He had his own bag zipped already, a canvas duffel he'd owned since before they met, the handle worn shiny.

"I've never once forgotten my charger."

"Providence. Two years ago."

She pointed at him with a rolled pair of socks. "That was your fault. You rushed me."

They were driving to a cabin near Hocking Hills because Dana's sister had recommended it in October and Dana had been holding onto the recommendation ever since, the way she held onto things. Two nights. Michael had wanted to leave Friday afternoon to beat traffic; Dana had a call she couldn't move. They compromised on seven, which meant they'd be pulling in around eleven, headlights sweeping over unfamiliar gravel.

In the kitchen he loaded the cooler: turkey, the good mustard, a bag of pretzels, four beers, the leftover pasta salad that would otherwise die in the fridge. He debated the eggs and left them.

"Did you text the neighbor about the cat?" Dana called.

"I texted her Tuesday."

"Did she answer?"

A pause. "She thumbs-upped it."

"That's not the same as answering."

"Dana, it's Cheryl. Cheryl has fed this cat nine times."

They left at 7:20, which they both privately considered a victory. Dana drove first because she liked the first shift, when the road still felt like an idea. Michael found a playlist, rejected it, found another. Outside Columbus they stopped for gas and he came back with two coffees and a bag of gummy worms she hadn't asked for but ate anyway.

"You brought my charger," she said, checking the console.

"I brought a charger."

She put her hand on his knee and left it there, and the highway unspooled ahead of them, dark and mostly empty.


The suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation, and Priya kept walking past it, doing other things.

"Two nights," Daniel called from the bathroom. "You don't need four pairs of shoes."

"I need two. The boots and the sneakers, in case we walk the trail."

"There's a trail?"

"There's always a trail. That's why people go to Vermont."

He came out with his toothbrush still in hand, foam at the corner of his mouth. "I thought we were going for the bookstore and the place with the cider donuts."

"We can do both." She folded a sweater she wouldn't wear. "Did you email the Kaminskys about the cat?"

"I texted. Ruth said she'd come by Saturday morning and again Sunday."

"She won't scoop the box."

"She scooped it last time."

"She scooped it badly."

By nine they were in the car, coffee in the cup holders, Priya driving because Daniel had been up late with the Slater deposition. He fiddled with the radio, gave up, and connected his phone, and she said nothing about the podcast even though she'd heard the episode already.

Twenty minutes out he sat up straight. "Did you unplug the space heater?"

She thought about it. She pictured the guest room, the cord, the little orange light. "Yes."

"You're sure."

"I'm reasonably sure."

He considered the odds, the mileage, the fire. "Reasonably is fine," he decided, and settled back.

They stopped in Greenfield for gas and a bathroom, and he bought a bag of pretzels she said she didn't want and then ate most of. The leaves weren't turning yet, just a few maples along the highway going rust-colored at the edges, showing off early.

"Check-in isn't until three," she said.

"So we drive slow."

She let the car drift back under seventy. Outside Brattleboro the hills opened up, and neither of them said anything about it, which was its own kind of agreement.


The Cooler Question

Marisol found the cooler in the garage behind a stack of paint cans, which meant it smelled like paint cans. She carried it inside at arm's length.

"This is a problem," she said.

Dev looked up from the kitchen table, where he had spread out a road atlas he'd bought in 2011 and never used, because they always just used their phones. "We could buy ice at the gas station. Skip the cooler."

"Then the yogurt dies."

"Do we need yogurt for two days?"

"I need yogurt for two days." She set the cooler in the sink and ran hot water into it, squirting in dish soap until it foamed over the lip. "You could look up whether the cabin has a fridge."

"The listing said 'kitchenette.'"

"That's not a fridge."

"It implies a fridge."

They had booked the place on Tuesday, after a week of Marisol saying she needed to be somewhere with trees, and Dev saying he could get Friday afternoon off if he moved a call. It was three hours northeast, near a lake he'd been to once as a kid, or possibly a different lake.

By four thirty the car was half loaded. Dev put the bags in and then took them out and put them in again in a better order. Marisol stood in the doorway with her toothbrush still in her hand, mentally walking through the bathroom.

"Did you turn the thermostat up?"

"To seventy-eight."

"Seventy-eight is fine."

"It's fine."

She got in. The cooler sat behind the driver's seat, damp, smelling like lemon dish soap and faintly like paint. Dev backed down the driveway and stopped.

"Did you—"

"I locked it. I watched you lock it, and then I locked it again."

He nodded and pulled into the street. At the corner he turned left instead of right, toward the gas station, because they needed ice either way.


On Thursday night, Dana spread the map across the kitchen table, though they both knew the route by heart. Two and a half hours north, past the outlet mall, past the diner with the peeling rooster sign.

"We could leave at six," she said.

Marcus looked up from loading the dishwasher. "Six is aggressive."

"Six-thirty, then. Traffic."

"Seven. Traffic won't be bad on a Saturday."

They settled on six forty-five, which satisfied neither of them and therefore felt fair. Dana wrote it on a sticky note and pressed it to the coffee maker, where Marcus would see it first.

Packing took longer than the drive would. Marcus kept a duffel in the closet, half-full year-round, and considered this efficient. Dana considered it a hazard, and pulled out a T-shirt from a 2016 charity 5K to prove her point.

"That's a good shirt."

"It has a hole under the arm."

"Which nobody sees."

She put it back. She wasn't going to win that one, and she had already won the alarm clock.

In the morning, Marcus made coffee in the travel mugs and Dana loaded the car, arranging their bags so the cooler wouldn't slide. They pulled out at seven-oh-two, which Dana noted aloud and Marcus declined to acknowledge.

The first hour passed mostly in silence, the good kind. Dana drove. Marcus fiddled with the radio until he found a station playing something from the eighties, then turned it down when a merge got complicated.

At the diner with the rooster, they stopped. Marcus ordered eggs over easy. Dana ordered the same thing she always ordered, which was pancakes, and then ate half of Marcus's home fries.

"You could have gotten your own," he said.

"I don't want a whole order."

He pushed the plate toward her. Outside, the sky was the flat white of early spring, and there was still an hour to go.


The Friday before, Dana had printed out three different routes to Asheville and spread them across the kitchen table like evidence.

"We don't need three," Marcus said, setting down his keys.

"We need one, but I don't know which one yet." She tapped the middle page. "This avoids the interstate but adds forty minutes."

"Forty minutes of what, though? Cows?"

"Barns. Some cows."

They took the interstate.

Saturday morning, packing turned into a small negotiation. Marcus wanted to bring the good camera; Dana pointed out he hadn't touched it since her cousin's wedding. He brought it anyway, wedged between a fleece and the phone chargers. Dana packed two books, knowing she'd read neither, and the travel mugs, and a bag of pretzels because gas station food made Marcus irritable by noon.

"Did you turn off the coffee maker?"

"You watched me turn it off."

"I watched you look at it."

He went back inside. It was off. He came out shaking his head and she said nothing, which he appreciated more than being told she'd been right.

They pulled out at 8:40, twenty minutes later than planned, which Dana had privately accounted for. Marcus drove the first leg. She controlled the music and picked something without lyrics because he said lyrics made him miss exits.

Around Greenville they stopped for gas and she bought a coffee she didn't want just to have something warm to hold. Marcus washed the windshield, badly, leaving a streak across the passenger side.

"You missed a spot."

"I left it for character."

Back on the road, the mountains started showing up in the distance, blue and folded, and neither of them said anything about it for a while. Then Dana said, "There," pointing, and Marcus said, "I see them," and that was enough.

They had a reservation for one night, checkout at eleven. It felt, briefly, like plenty.


The suitcase lay open on the bed for three days before either of them put anything in it.

"We're only going for two nights," Dana said Thursday evening, holding up a second pair of jeans. "Why do I feel like I'm packing for a month?"

Marcus was on the floor with the atlas, an actual paper one, because he'd inherited his father's distrust of anything that recalculated. "There's a diner outside Staunton my cousin swears by. Adds twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes on a Friday means forty."

"Then we leave at three."

"I have the Halberton call at three."

He looked up. "Right." He drew a small circle around Staunton anyway, penciled and hopeful, and she pretended not to see it.

They left at 4:40. Dana drove the first stretch because Marcus's neck had been bothering him since he'd tried to fix the gutter. The dog was at his sister's. The thermostat was set to sixty-two, which they had argued about briefly, Marcus insisting the pipes would be fine, Dana insisting that this was exactly what people said before their pipes weren't.

On I-81 the light went long and amber over the ridgelines. Dana ate pretzels out of the bag wedged between her thigh and the console and Marcus read her the descriptions of three motels, all of which sounded identical.

"The one with the porch," she said.

"They all say porch."

"The one where the guy answered the phone like a person."

He called and booked it. Then he put his hand on the back of her seat, not quite touching her shoulder, and looked out at the barns going gray in the field light.

"We should do this more," he said.

"We say that every time."

"I know. I'm saying it again."

She reached over without looking and took a pretzel from his hand.


They left the packing until Friday night, which was Dana's fault, though Peter had spent the week saying it didn't matter.

"We're only gone two days," she said, standing over the open duffel with three shirts in her hand. "How cold does it get up there at night?"

Peter looked it up on his phone. "Forty-eight."

"That's not cold."

"It's cold if we're sitting outside." He pulled a fleece off the hook by the door and dropped it on the bed. "Bring this."

She brought it. She also brought a second pair of shoes, which he raised his eyebrows at and she ignored.

In the morning they were on the road by eight-fifteen, which Peter considered a small victory and did not mention. Dana had made coffee in the travel mugs, and she'd forgotten the sugar in his, and he drank it black for twenty minutes before saying anything.

"You could have just told me," she said.

"I'm telling you now."

"We can stop."

They stopped in Fredericksburg at a gas station with a bakery attached, which neither of them had planned on. Peter got sugar packets and a cruller. Dana got a coffee she didn't need and a bag of pretzels for later, and they stood by the car in the parking lot for a minute eating, watching a man try to get a golden retriever back into a pickup.

"That dog does not want to go," Dana said.

"That dog knows something we don't."

Back in the car she took over the aux cord and put on a podcast, and he let her, though he'd wanted music. Around eleven the trees started doing what they'd come to see, the whole ridge going orange and rust, and Dana put her hand on his knee without saying anything, and he shifted his leg a little so she'd have a better place to rest it.


The Friday afternoon light came in low through the kitchen window while Dana printed the reservation confirmation twice, because the first copy came out with a streak through the address.

"It's ninety minutes if we leave before four," she said. "Two hours if we don't."

Marcus was in the bedroom, deciding between the fleece and the heavier jacket. He'd checked the forecast three times that morning, and it kept saying the same thing: fifty-two degrees, chance of rain Saturday evening. He brought both jackets to the car and left the heavier one in the trunk, which felt like a compromise with himself.

"Did you feed Otis?" he called.

"I gave him the wet food. Julie's coming Saturday morning and Sunday."

They argued briefly about the cooler—Dana thought it was unnecessary for a two-night trip, Marcus pointed out that the cabin was twenty minutes from the nearest grocery store and neither of them wanted to drive to town at seven in the morning for creamer. He won, mostly because he was already carrying it.

They stopped for gas at the Shell on Route 9 and Dana went inside for coffee and came out with coffee and a bag of pretzels she didn't remember picking up. Marcus was cleaning the windshield with the squeegee, working at a spot that had been there for weeks.

Traffic was heavier than the app predicted. Somewhere past the second exit Dana put on the podcast they'd been saving, then paused it eleven minutes in when Marcus said he'd missed the last part.

"Are we bringing the good pillows next time?" she asked.

"There's no next time yet."

"There's always a next time eventually."

He signaled and moved into the left lane. The sun was going down behind the hills, and the exit for the cabin was still forty minutes out, and neither of them minded much.


Marisol found the cooler in the garage behind a stack of paint cans, and by the time she'd wiped it out, Dev had already printed the reservation confirmation and set it on the kitchen counter like a summons.

"Two nights," he said. "Check-in's at four, so if we leave by ten we can stop in Asheville for lunch."

"Ten is optimistic."

"Ten is a goal."

They argued mildly about whether to bring the good pillows. Marisol said the cabin listing mentioned linens; Dev said listings said a lot of things. He packed both pillows anyway, wedging them into the back seat where they'd block the rearview mirror for the entire drive.

Saturday morning she woke at six out of habit and lay there resenting it. Dev slept until seven-fifteen, then made coffee in the travel mugs, which meant they'd have to wash them at a gas station or drink cold coffee on Sunday. She didn't mention it.

They left at ten-forty. Marisol drove first. Dev had made a playlist and then apologized for it twice before the first song ended.

Somewhere past the state line they stopped for gas and Dev came out of the convenience store with beef jerky, a bag of pretzels, and two bananas, which he presented like an argument for his own reasonableness.

"Bananas," Marisol said.

"Balance."

She ate one. It was slightly green.

The highway opened up and the hills started doing what hills do, folding over each other in blue layers. Dev put his feet on the dash and she told him not to, and he took them down, and ten minutes later they were up again.

"We forgot the corkscrew," he said.

"I put it in the cooler."

He looked at her with genuine admiration, which she enjoyed more than she would admit, and turned the music up.


The suitcase had been open on the bed since Thursday, collecting things Renée thought of at odd hours: sunscreen, the good hairbrush, a paperback she'd been meaning to finish since spring.

"You're bringing three books," Malik said, counting them.

"I'm bringing two. That one's yours."

He picked it up, looked at the cover, and set it back down. "I'm not going to read on a two-day trip."

"You said that in Charleston and then you finished four hundred pages on the porch."

They left at six-forty Saturday morning, later than the six o'clock Malik had proposed and earlier than the eight Renée had privately expected. He drove the first leg because he always drove the first leg, and she managed the coffee cups and the phone mount and the argument about whether the Blue Ridge Parkway was worth the extra forty minutes.

"It's the whole point," she said.

"The point is the cabin."

"The cabin is where we sleep. The point is the drive."

They took the Parkway. At an overlook near Mount Pisgah he pulled off without being asked, and they stood at the stone wall in the cold with their hands in their sleeves, looking at ridgelines stacked into haze. A man with a tripod nodded at them. Malik nodded back.

"Do we need groceries," Renée said, "or are we eating out both nights?"

"Both nights is a lot."

"Then we need eggs. And that bread you like."

They found a Ingles in Waynesville and split up in the store, texting each other about butter. At checkout Malik added a bag of pretzels she hadn't approved and she said nothing about it, which was its own kind of comment. In the parking lot the sun came out and warmed the roof of the car, and they sat a minute before starting it, not talking, the trip finally begun.