Marisol found the calendar note first, though Dev had written it: *5 yrs — do something?? (or nothing, also fine)*

"Nothing is not fine," she said, holding up the calendar in the kitchen doorway. He was scrambling eggs badly, the way he always did, too high a heat.

"I hedged," he admitted. "Last year you said the dinner reservation felt like homework."

She winced, because she had said that. Their anniversary fell in mid-October, the anniversary of the night they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, and every year they'd tried to formalize it into something. Restaurants with tasting menus. A weekend in Asheville where it rained for three days. A cooking class where Dev nearly severed a fingertip.

"What if we just did the party again," she said.

"The housewarming?"

"Not the actual party. Wes doesn't even live there anymore. But that kind of thing. Cheap wine, chips in a bowl, people standing around in a kitchen." She set the calendar down. "That's the part I liked. You were the only person there who'd read the Sears catalog book."

"The Chicago architecture one."

"Nobody else cared."

He turned off the burner and considered the ruined eggs. "So we throw a party for our anniversary and don't tell anyone it's our anniversary."

"We could tell them. I just don't want a toast."

"No toast," he agreed. "I'll make the dip my mom makes."

They sent the invitations on a Tuesday — a group text, nine people, most of whom said yes. Marisol bought a bag of ice and three bottles of something under twelve dollars. Dev spent an hour arranging chairs and then moved them all back.

By ten the kitchen was crowded and loud, and somebody was arguing about a movie neither of them had seen. Dev caught her eye across the counter, raised his cup an inch. She raised hers back. That was the whole toast.


Marisol found the receipt while looking for stamps—a crumpled slip from the taqueria on Fourth Street, dated exactly five years ago. She smoothed it flat on the kitchen counter and laughed.

"Dev," she called. "You kept this?"

He came in from the balcony, still holding the watering can, and squinted at it. "That was our first date. You ordered wrong and I didn't correct you."

"I ordered the tongue tacos on purpose."

"You ordered them because you thought I'd be impressed."

"I *was* impressed," she said. "By myself."

They had talked vaguely about the anniversary for weeks, in the way people do when neither wants to be the one who cares more. Dev had bookmarked a tasting menu place downtown, one hundred and forty dollars a head, and had been quietly dreading the cost since October. Marisol had considered a weekend in Asheville and then remembered her sister's wedding shower fell on the same Saturday.

"We could just go back," Dev said, tapping the receipt. "To the taqueria."

"That's either very romantic or very cheap."

"It's both. That's why it works."

She thought about it. The taqueria had gotten a new awning last year and slightly worse salsa, but the booth by the window was still the booth by the window. "Okay," she said. "But we're getting the good tequila after. And I want to walk down to the river like we did."

"It was August then. It's going to be thirty-eight degrees."

"Then wear a coat, Devendra."

He put down the watering can and came around the counter to kiss the top of her head, which was the height he could reach comfortably without either of them adjusting. "Six o'clock?"

"Six-thirty. I have a call until six."

He wrote it on the whiteboard by the fridge—*Tacos. Anniversary. Coats.*—and underneath, because he couldn't help himself, drew a small lopsided heart she would pretend not to notice for three days.


The apartment smelled like burnt garlic, which was Dani's fault, and neither of them mentioned it.

"Ten years," Marcus said, setting two mugs on the coffee table. "Feels like it should require a permit."

Dani pulled her feet up onto the couch. "My mother keeps sending links to venues. Yesterday it was a barn in Sonoma."

"A barn."

"A very expensive barn."

They'd had the conversation about marriage enough times that it had worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket. Neither of them was against it, exactly. It had simply never risen to the top of the list, above the leaking dishwasher and Marcus's father's surgery and the year Dani spent finishing her certification.

"What do you actually want to do?" Marcus asked.

Dani thought about it. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and then thought better of it.

"I want to go back to the diner," she said. "The one on Fourth."

"It closed."

"It reopened. Different owners, same booths. I drove past it in March."

Marcus laughed. Their first date had been there, both of them too broke for anywhere else, splitting a plate of fries because Dani had claimed she wasn't hungry and then eaten most of them.

"That's it? That's the ten-year plan?"

"I want a booth and bad coffee and I want you to tell me about that documentary you watched, the one about the bees, because I pretended to listen the first time and I've felt guilty for six years."

"You did not listen."

"I did not."

He reached over and pressed his thumb against her ankle, an old habit. "Fine. Diner. But I'm buying my own fries."

"Absolutely not."

They went on a Tuesday, because the wait was shorter. The coffee was worse than either of them remembered. Dani ordered the fries anyway, and Marcus talked about the bees for eleven straight minutes, and she listened to all of it.


Marcus found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated seven years ago that October. He'd bought a doorknob the day they signed the lease on the apartment on Fillmore.

"Look at this," he said, holding it up when Priya came in from the balcony with her cold coffee.

She squinted. "You kept that?"

"I keep everything. You've mentioned."

Seven years. They'd never had a wedding date to anchor themselves to, so they'd always used the lease. It felt honest to Priya—the day they'd decided to be responsible for the same set of rooms, the same electric bill, the same slow drip under the bathroom sink that neither of them had ever fixed.

"So what do you want to do?" she asked. "Somewhere nice? I could get us into Bellweather if I call Tuesday."

Marcus made a face. He hated restaurants where the waiter refolded your napkin.

"Okay, not Bellweather." She sat down on the arm of the couch. "The cabin place? The one with the terrible hot tub?"

"I liked the terrible hot tub."

"You complained about it for four hours."

"That's how I show affection."

She laughed and reached over to take the receipt from him, turning it in the light. The ink had gone brown at the edges.

"What if we just stayed here," she said. "I'll make the lamb. You do the thing with the potatoes."

"The thing with the potatoes takes two hours."

"We have two hours. We have a whole Saturday."

He considered it. Outside, someone was parallel parking badly, edging back and forth with the patience of a person who had nowhere to be.

"Fine," he said. "But we're fixing the sink first. Seven years is long enough."

Priya put the receipt back in the drawer, underneath the batteries, where they'd find it again.


Mira found the receipt tucked in a book she hadn't opened since spring: two tickets to a matinee, the theater downtown that smelled like burnt sugar. Seven years ago that month. She brought it to the kitchen, where Deshawn was standing at the counter with his laptop open, scowling at a spreadsheet.

"Look what I found."

He took it, squinted. "That's the one where you fell asleep."

"I did not fall asleep."

"You put your head on my shoulder and made a noise."

"That's called being comfortable."

He laughed and set the receipt on the windowsill, propped against the little clay pot where the basil had died in July. "So what do we want to do? Seven's a weird number. Not a milestone."

"Every year's a milestone. That's kind of the point of not having a wedding."

They'd had this conversation in various forms. Neither of them was against marriage exactly; it just kept failing to become urgent. Meanwhile there was the mortgage, the dog, her mother's chemo last winter, his brother's kids at Thanksgiving. Life had accumulated around them like snow.

"We could go back to the theater," Deshawn said.

"It's a vape shop now."

"Right." He drummed his fingers. "Okay. What if we don't go anywhere. What if we cook the thing."

"The thing" was a duck they'd attempted their second year together and ruined spectacularly, filling the apartment with smoke, ending up eating cereal at midnight, laughing so hard the downstairs neighbor banged on the ceiling.

Mira considered. "That's either very romantic or a cry for help."

"Both. And this time I'll actually read the recipe."

"I want it on the record that I read the recipe last time."

"Noted." He pulled her in by the belt loop, briefly, the way he did when he was about to go back to work. "Saturday?"

"Saturday," she said, and put the receipt in her pocket.


Marcus found the receipt while looking for a stamp—crumpled in the junk drawer, faded ink from a diner in Wilmington, dated seven years ago that Saturday. He set it on the kitchen counter where Priya would see it.

She noticed it while making coffee. "You kept this?"

"I keep everything. You've seen the closet."

They'd stopped at that diner on the drive back from her cousin's wedding, the first trip they'd taken together, when neither of them was sure yet what they were doing. Priya had ordered pie she didn't want just to stay in the booth longer.

"So what do you want to do?" she asked. "Seven years."

Marcus had thought about it. He'd looked up a restaurant downtown with tasting menus and a wine pairing, then closed the tab. "Honestly? I'd rather not spend two hundred dollars to be uncomfortable."

"Thank God." Priya sat down across from him with her mug. "I've been dreading you booking somewhere fancy."

"Then what?"

She looked around the kitchen—the cabinet door that still didn't close right, the calendar with both their handwriting on it, the plant she'd rescued from his old apartment. "We could drive back to Wilmington."

"That's four hours."

"Six with traffic. We could leave early, get pie, come back."

Marcus considered it. It was absurd. It was also exactly the kind of thing they'd done in the first year, before jobs got serious and the mortgage happened.

"I'll make a playlist," he said.

They left at seven that Saturday. The diner had changed owners and the pie was worse than they remembered, but they sat in a booth by the window for two hours anyway, and Priya took a photo of the receipt next to the old one.

On the drive home, somewhere past Baltimore, she fell asleep against the window. Marcus turned the music down and kept driving.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Casa Duran, dated seven years ago that October. She held it up when Theo came in from the garage, sawdust still on his forearms.

"You kept this?"

"You kept it," he said. "I thought it fell behind the fridge."

They had never agreed on what to call that night. She said first date; he insisted it was two acquaintances splitting enchiladas because both their roommates were having parties. Either way, seven years. The apartment in Cleveland, then the sublet in Pittsburgh, now this narrow house in Lakewood with the crooked back steps he kept meaning to fix.

"We could go back," she said. "Casa Duran's still open. I checked."

Theo washed his hands at the kitchen sink, thinking. "It's a Tuesday."

"It was a Tuesday then, too."

He liked the symmetry of it, but there was something too neat about it, like a photograph staged for other people. "What if we did the thing we actually do," he said. "Order from Casa Duran, eat on the porch. Then walk down to the lake."

Marisol considered. She had wanted an occasion—a reservation, a reason to wear the green dress. But she also knew that the best hours of the last seven years had been unremarkable ones: him reading aloud from the newspaper, her falling asleep against him during movies neither of them finished.

"Both," she said. "Restaurant this year. Porch next year."

"That's a lot of forward planning for someone who won't commit to a dentist."

She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it, grinning, and put it over his shoulder.

They went on the Tuesday. She wore the green dress. The enchiladas were worse than they remembered, which struck them both as funny, and they walked the six blocks home slowly, arguing pleasantly about what to call it.


The Fifth of October

Dana found the receipt in a coat pocket while sorting laundry—a faded slip from Marchetti's, October 5th, five years ago. The night Owen had spilled red wine on her white blouse and she'd laughed so hard the waiter came over to check on them.

"Look what I found," she said, holding it up when he came in from the garage.

Owen took the paper and squinted. "I can't believe you kept the blouse."

"I can't believe you kept the receipt. It was in your coat."

He shrugged, setting down a bag of potting soil. "Seemed important."

They'd talked about the anniversary vaguely for weeks—*we should do something*—but neither had made a plan. Now they stood in the kitchen, the receipt between them, and it felt like a deadline had arrived.

"We could go back," Owen said. "Marchetti's."

Dana wrinkled her nose. "It got bought out. They took the tortellini off the menu."

"So no."

"So no."

She leaned against the counter, thinking. Their house was small and half-renovated, the hallway still missing baseboards. Five years of accumulating things: a dog, a mortgage they'd both signed, her mother's dishes, his terrible record collection.

"What if we just cooked?" she said. "Made the tortellini ourselves. Badly."

Owen considered this. "We'd need one of those pasta machines."

"We'd need a lot of things."

But he was already pulling out his phone, and by evening there was a used Marcato ordered from a woman in Tacoma, and a shopping list on the fridge in two different handwritings.

On the fifth, they made a mess of the kitchen. The pasta came out thick in places, translucent in others. The sauce was too salty. They ate it at the table with the dog begging underneath, and Dana wore the white blouse, and Owen, reaching for the wine, was very, very careful.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries — a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, September 14, 2018. Twelve dollars for a shower curtain rod and a set of hooks, the first thing they'd bought together for the apartment on Rosemont.

"Seven years next Sunday," she said, holding it up when Theo came in from the garage.

He took the receipt, turned it over, laughed at his own handwriting on the back: *ask about the leaky one*. "We never did fix that faucet."

"We moved."

They'd talked about doing something big. Theo's sister kept sending links to a bed and breakfast in Galena with claw-foot tubs and a two-night minimum. Marisol had priced out flights to Santa Fe twice and closed the tab both times, thinking about her mother's hip surgery in October and the water heater making that sound again.

"We could just do dinner," Theo said. "Somewhere with cloth napkins."

"We could." She was quiet a moment, wiping the counter for no reason. "Or we could do the hardware store thing."

He looked up.

"Delgado's is still there. We go, we buy something stupid and useful. Then we cook. I make the thing with the short ribs, you make the drinks you're always bragging about."

Theo considered it. It was cheaper, which mattered, but that wasn't why he liked it. "We'd have to actually install whatever we buy."

"Obviously."

So that Sunday they walked eleven blocks to Delgado's and spent forty minutes debating drawer pulls, and the guy at the register — not Delgado, Delgado had died in 2021 — told them the brass ones would hold up better. They bought brass. Theo hung the last one at four in the afternoon while Marisol browned short ribs and complained about the smoke detector.

They ate late, at the table, with paper towels for napkins. Neither of them minded.


The apartment smelled like burnt coffee, which was Dev's fault, and neither of them said anything about it.

"Ten years," Marisol said, sitting cross-legged on the couch with her laptop balanced on a cushion. "That's a decade. People get plaques for a decade."

"You want a plaque?"

"I want something that isn't a restaurant where they fold the napkins into shapes."

Dev sat down on the arm of the couch. He'd been thinking about this for weeks, actually, in the low-grade way he thought about most things—turning it over during his commute, abandoning it, picking it back up. He had a list on his phone. Item one was *tasting menu*, which he now deleted.

"What about the cabin," he said. "The one near Point Reyes. Where the heater broke."

"That was the worst weekend of my life."

"It was the third night. We got the fire going and you said—"

"I know what I said." She was smiling at the screen, not at him, which he'd learned years ago was still a smile aimed his way. "That place is probably four hundred a night now."

"So we split it."

She looked up. "We could just stay here. Order the Thai place. Watch the whole first season of that show we abandoned."

"On our tenth."

"On our tenth." She shrugged. "Nobody's grading us."

Dev thought about the plaque, and the napkins, and the ten years of Tuesdays that had somehow accumulated into this—her sock feet on his knee, the burnt coffee, the argument about the heater they'd been having since 2016.

"Thai," he said. "But I'm getting the good wine. The one that's twenty-two dollars."

"Big spender."

"Ten years," he said, and reached for the phone.


Marguerite found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from the Thai place on Fourth Street, dated seven years ago that October. She held it up when Danny came in from the garage, sawdust still on his forearms.

"Do you remember what we ordered?"

He squinted. "Pad see ew. And you got that soup you couldn't finish."

"Tom kha. And you finished it."

They'd been debating for two weeks how to mark it. Seven years since that first dinner, six since they'd signed a lease together in Cedar Rapids, three since they'd bought the little blue house with the terrible bathroom tile. Danny wanted to go somewhere—Galena, maybe, or a bed and breakfast up near the Mississippi. Marguerite kept doing math on the back of envelopes and coming up short.

"We could just go back to the Thai place," she said.

"It closed. Became a vape shop, then a nail salon."

She laughed. "Everything becomes a nail salon."

He leaned against the counter, thinking. "What if we cooked it? The whole meal. We've got that wok your mother gave us that we've used twice."

"You'd have to find galangal."

"There's that market on Wilson."

So that Saturday they drove out together, wandering the aisles, arguing pleasantly over whether the recipe really needed palm sugar. Danny bought a bundle of lemongrass and held it like a bouquet. At home they cooked badly and slowly, the kitchen filling with steam, the radio on. The pad see ew came out too salty. The soup was better than either expected.

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room still had drywall dust in the corners. Marguerite pinned the old receipt to the fridge with a magnet shaped like Iowa.

"Eight years," Danny said, "we're doing Galena."

"Deal," she said, and meant it.


Marisol found the receipt from Nguyen's Deli in the junk drawer, folded into a square so small it had gone soft at the creases. Ten years old. The date printed at the top was the same date circled on the calendar hanging above the coffee maker.

"You kept this," she said, holding it up.

Theo looked over from the sink, hands wet. "I kept the sandwich wrapper too, for about a month. Then it started to smell like a crime."

They had met over banh mi, standing in line behind a woman arguing about pickled carrots, and Theo had said something so unfunny that Marisol had laughed out of pity. Ten years later they owned a house together in Sacramento with a lemon tree that produced more lemons than two people could reasonably use.

"So what do we do," Marisol said. "Something big?"

"We could go back to the deli."

"It closed in 2019."

"Right." Theo dried his hands. "Then we do the thing where we drive out to the coast and I complain about the fog."

She considered it. Their friends had done vow renewals, weekend trips to Napa, one couple had gotten matching tattoos of a seagull for reasons nobody had ever satisfactorily explained. None of it fit. She and Theo had never wanted a wedding, and this wasn't a substitute for one.

"What if we made banh mi," she said. "Badly. Here."

Theo smiled slowly. "We'd have to buy a whole daikon."

"We'd have to buy two whole daikons, because you'll ruin the first one."

They went to the Asian market on Stockton Boulevard that Saturday and bought pork belly and cilantro and a baguette that shattered when Theo tried to cut it. The sandwiches were mediocre. They ate them on the back steps under the lemon tree, and Marisol tucked the receipt into her wallet, where she could find it again in another ten years.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that terrible open mic in Somerville, and Priya still couldn't decide what the occasion demanded.

"We could do Alden's," Marcus said from the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "The place with the duck."

"We did Alden's for my promotion. And your birthday." She was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, surrounded by the contents of a shoebox she'd pulled from the closet—ticket stubs, a napkin with his handwriting on it, a photo from the summer they'd driven to Nova Scotia in a car with no air conditioning.

He came and sat down beside her, knees cracking. He was forty-one now. He picked up the napkin. "'Call me, I'm the one in the ugly jacket.' God, that jacket."

"It was very ugly."

"You called."

"I did." She leaned into his shoulder.

They had talked about marriage a few times, seriously twice, and had landed both times in the same place: not opposed, not moved. Her parents had asked. His had stopped. What they had instead was a mortgage in Roslindale, a joint account they were both bad at reconciling, and a dog named Chowder who had opinions about the couch.

"What if we didn't go out," Marcus said. "What if we made the thing we made that first winter. The disgusting stew."

"It wasn't disgusting."

"It was mostly potatoes."

"We were broke." She thought about it. "Okay. Stew. And we watch the Nova Scotia pictures. And you have to tell the story about the ferry, even though I was there."

"I tell it better than it happened."

"That's why."

He got up to check the pantry for potatoes. Priya stayed on the floor a moment longer with the shoebox open in her lap, then started putting the pieces back in, one at a time, in no particular order.


The apartment smelled like burnt toast, which was Danny's fault, and neither of them mentioned it.

"Seven years," Priya said, scrolling through her phone at the kitchen table. "That feels like it should mean something."

Danny scraped the black off with a butter knife. "It means we've outlasted your car."

"My car is still running."

"Barely." He set a plate down in front of her and sat. "So what do you want to do? We could try that Basque place on Fillmore. I could probably get a reservation if I call now."

Priya made a face. She'd made the same face at his last three suggestions, which was how they'd ended up at ten in the morning with no plan and a day off from both their jobs.

"It's not that I don't want to go out," she said. "It's that going out feels like proving something. To who? The waiter?"

"To the waiter, mainly." Danny bit into his toast. "He's been asking."

She laughed and reached across the table to steal his coffee. "What if we drove up to Point Reyes? We haven't been since—"

"Since the thing with the flat tire."

"Since the thing with the flat tire. And we could get sandwiches from that deli in Olema, and just walk on the beach and be cold."

"That's the pitch? Be cold?"

"Be cold together," she said. "That's the whole relationship, honestly."

He considered it. Outside, the fog hadn't burned off, which meant it probably wouldn't. "We'd have to leave in the next hour to beat the traffic."

"So get dressed."

"I'm making a new piece of toast first."

"Fine." Priya stood, kissed the top of his head, and went to find her boots. From the bedroom she called, "Do we have a blanket in the car?"

"We have three blankets in the car. We have a blanket problem."

"Good," she said. "Bring all of them."


The apartment smelled like burnt coffee, which was how Nadia knew Theo had been up since five.

"Ten years," he said, when she came into the kitchen. He was standing at the counter in the gray sweatshirt she'd bought him two Christmases ago, the cuffs gone soft and stringy. "Ten years since the bookstore."

She poured herself a cup and didn't correct him, though technically the bookstore had been the second time they met. The first had been at a party neither of them remembered clearly.

"I thought maybe Perrine's," she said. "That place on Wabash. Erica said the tasting menu takes three hours."

Theo made a face. "Three hours."

"It's a milestone."

"It's a Tuesday."

She sat down at the table, which wobbled because they'd never gotten around to fixing the leg. Ten years of that wobble. "So what do you want to do?"

He turned around and leaned against the counter, holding his mug with both hands the way he did when he was thinking. "I want to go back to the bookstore. And then I want to get sandwiches from that place with the terrible awning, and eat them on the steps of the art museum, and then come home and watch something stupid."

"That's not a milestone."

"It's ten years of exactly that," he said. "That's the milestone."

Nadia looked at him for a moment. Outside, someone was scraping ice off a windshield in long, patient strokes.

"Sandwiches," she said finally. "But I'm getting the one with the pickled onions, and you're not allowed to complain about my breath afterward."

"I'd never."

"You do it every time."

"I complain lovingly."

She stood up and kissed the side of his head on her way to the shower. He caught her wrist briefly, not saying anything, and then let go.

The bookstore opened at ten.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries — a faded slip from Chen's Noodle House, dated seven years ago that October.

"You kept this?" she asked, holding it up when Dev came in from the garage.

He squinted. "That's the night your car wouldn't start and we walked twelve blocks in the rain."

"You kept it," she repeated.

"I keep everything. You've seen the closet."

They'd been arguing gently for two weeks about what to do. Dev wanted to go back to Chen's, which had since changed owners and, according to reviews, changed for the worse. Marisol wanted to drive up the coast to a place with a wine list and a view. Neither had budged, mostly because neither felt strongly enough to push.

"Here's a thought," Dev said, setting down a coil of extension cord. "What if we did nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Not nothing. I mean — we don't leave. I cook. You pick the movie. We put the phones in the drawer."

Marisol considered it. Their house was small and full of things they'd assembled together: the crooked bookshelf, the succulent that refused to die, the couch they'd carried up the porch steps at midnight because the delivery window had been missed. She'd spent seven years choosing this, unofficially, over and over.

"You'd have to make the lemon thing," she said.

"Obviously the lemon thing."

On the night itself, it rained, which felt appropriate. Dev burned the garlic and started over. Marisol opened a bottle they'd been saving without knowing what for. They ate at the kitchen table because the dining table was covered in her half-finished quilting project, and neither of them suggested moving it.

Afterward, she found the receipt again and tucked it into the cookbook, at the lemon chicken page.

"Eight next year," Dev said.

"Eight," she agreed, and turned out the light.


The rain had been falling since Tuesday, which was how Marisol found herself sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with a shoebox of receipts instead of hiking the ridge trail they'd planned.

"Seven years," Dev said from the kitchen doorway, holding two mugs. "We should do something."

"We are doing something. I'm reorganizing our tax documents."

He set a mug beside her and lowered himself onto the rug, knees cracking in a way that made them both laugh. Seven years ago he'd been able to sit down without commentary.

"I found the ticket stub," she said, holding up a faded rectangle. "From the movie."

"The terrible one."

"You cried."

"I had allergies."

She let it go, the way she'd been letting it go since 2018. Outside, the gutter Dev kept meaning to fix overflowed in a steady sheet past the window.

"Okay," he said. "Options. There's that Portuguese place downtown. Reservation's probably impossible, but I could try."

"Or."

"Or?"

Marisol pulled a folded paper from the box — a printout of the first apartment listing they'd looked at together, the one with the crooked kitchen and the landlord who'd smelled like cigars. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"We could drive by it," she said. "It's forty minutes. We could get sandwiches from that deli that's probably still there and eat them in the car like criminals."

Dev looked at the paper for a long moment. "That's very stupid."

"I know."

"I love it."

They went on Saturday. The building had been repainted a color that could charitably be called salmon. The deli had become a vape shop, so they ate gas station sandwiches instead, windows fogging, rain drumming the roof.

"Happy anniversary," Dev said.

Marisol reached over and wiped mustard off his chin, and neither of them said anything else for a while.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for a battery — a faded slip from Hong Kong Palace, dated seven years ago that October. She held it up when Dev came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag.

"You kept this?"

"I kept everything from that year," he said. "There's a movie ticket in there too, I think. And that parking stub from when we got towed."

They had been together seven years, in this house for four, and had never quite settled on how to observe the date. Their friends had weddings to anchor them; Marisol and Dev had a first date at a Chinese restaurant where she'd ordered wrong on purpose to see if he'd laugh at her.

"We could just go back," she said. "Hong Kong Palace."

"It closed. Became a vape shop, then a nail place."

She made a face. "Depressing."

Dev leaned against the counter. "What if we didn't go anywhere. What if we cooked the same thing here. I still remember what you got. The eggplant thing you hated."

"I didn't hate it."

"You ate three bites and then stole my rice."

They negotiated it over the next week in small pieces, the way they decided most things — while brushing teeth, while folding towels. Marisol wanted to invite her sister; Dev wanted it to be just them. They compromised: dinner alone on Friday, brunch with her sister Sunday. He would handle the eggplant. She would find the wine they'd split on the drive home that first night, some cheap Malbec whose label she'd only half-remembered.

On Friday the eggplant came out too salty. They ate it anyway, at the kitchen table, the receipt propped against the pepper grinder like a small monument. Marisol raised her glass.

"Seven years of you not fixing the garage door."

"Eight, if I make it another year," Dev said, and touched his glass to hers.


Marisol found the receipt in a coat pocket in late October—crumpled, faded, from a diner in Bloomington that had closed two years ago. She flattened it on the kitchen counter and stared at the date until Dev came in with the recycling bin.

"Seven years next Thursday," she said.

He set the bin down. "From the pancakes?"

"From the pancakes."

They had never been good at anniversaries. There had been no proposal, no ceremony, just a slow accumulation of shared leases and split utility bills and a cat neither of them had planned on. Their friends had stopped asking when. Marisol's mother had not.

Dev pulled a stool up to the counter. "We could do something," he said, in the careful voice he used when he wasn't sure whether he wanted something or just thought he should.

"Something like what?"

"Dinner somewhere with cloth napkins."

Marisol made a face. She hated the performance of it—the waiter asking if they were celebrating, the assumption of an engagement, the flicker of pity when there wasn't one.

"What if we didn't," she said. "What if we just took the day off."

He considered this. "Both of us?"

"Both of us. No plans. We stay in bed until ten. You make the eggs the way you do when nobody's watching."

"With too much butter."

"With the correct amount of butter."

Dev laughed and reached across the counter for the receipt, turning it over in his fingers like a coin. He remembered the diner—Marisol had ordered coffee and then not drunk it, too nervous, and he'd thought that was the most charming thing he'd ever seen.

"Okay," he said. "Nothing. Deliberately nothing."

She took the receipt back and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like Indiana.

On Thursday it rained. They didn't get out of bed until eleven.


Marcus found the calendar app open on Diane's laptop when he came in from the garage, the fifteenth circled in red like a wound.

"Seven years," she said, not looking up from the counter where she was slicing peppers. "You remembered."

"I remembered in February. I've been quietly panicking since then."

She laughed. The knife kept moving. "We could do the thing where we go to Bernardi's and pretend the prices don't bother us."

"We did that for five. And six." He leaned against the fridge. "What if we didn't go anywhere?"

Diane set the knife down. Outside, their neighbor's dog was losing an argument with a sprinkler. "Meaning what."

"Meaning I have a bottle of that Oregon pinot in the closet and no plans, and the deck still isn't stained, and I thought—" He stopped, aware of how it sounded. "I thought we could stain the deck. Then drink the wine on it."

She was quiet long enough that he started rehearsing a retraction.

"That's the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me," she said. "I love it. But I want the wine first."

"That's structurally unsound."

"Marcus."

"Fine."

They spent the fifteenth in old clothes, arguing mildly about whether to go with the grain or against it, both of them wrong in different ways. Diane got stain on her forearm and didn't notice for an hour. Around six the light went long and gold across the half-finished boards, and Marcus went inside for the bottle and two juice glasses because the wine glasses were somewhere in the box they'd never unpacked from the move.

They sat on the finished half. It smelled like solvent and cut grass.

"Seven years," Diane said again.

"You want to say something profound?"

"No," she said, and put her feet in his lap. "I want to sit here."

He topped off her glass.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated seven years ago that Saturday. She'd bought a doorstop the day she moved her boxes into Ren's apartment on Cortland Street. She brought it to the kitchen and set it beside his coffee cup.

"Seven years," she said.

Ren picked it up, squinting. "You kept this?"

"It was in the drawer with the twist ties and the dead phone chargers. I keep everything by accident."

He turned it over. On the back, in his own handwriting, was a grocery list: eggs, tortillas, the good salsa. He laughed. "We were so broke."

They'd talked about doing something big this year. Marisol had floated a weekend in Asheville; Ren had mentioned a restaurant downtown where the tasting menu ran eleven courses and required a deposit. But the truck needed new brakes, and Marisol's mother was coming in October, and neither of them had said out loud that the numbers didn't work.

"What if we didn't," Ren said.

"Didn't what?"

"Didn't go anywhere. What if we cooked the thing you made that first night. The chicken with the burnt lemons."

"It was burnt because our oven was broken."

"So we burn them on purpose."

She considered this. Outside, a neighbor was running a leaf blower, badly. "We'd have to get the good salsa," she said.

They went to the store together on Saturday morning and argued mildly about cilantro. At home, Ren scorched the lemons in a cast-iron pan while Marisol tacked the old receipt to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like Ohio. They ate at the coffee table because the dining chairs were still holding books.

Later, doing dishes, Ren said, "Eight years, we do Asheville."

"Eight years," she agreed, and handed him a plate.


Marcus found the takeout menus fanned across the kitchen counter when he got home, which meant Priya had been thinking about it too.

"Seven years," she said, not looking up from her laptop. "Do we do something?"

He set his keys in the ceramic dish her sister had made them. "We could go back to Antonio's."

"Antonio's closed in 2022."

"Right." He opened the fridge, considered the leftover rice, closed it again. "There's that place on Delaney with the tasting menu. Kevin at work said it's worth it."

Priya made a face. "A hundred and forty dollars for foam."

"You're the one who brought it up."

"I brought up whether we should do something. I didn't say we had to spend four hundred dollars proving it." She finally closed the laptop. "What did we do last year?"

They both thought. Last year had been the week her father was in the hospital. The year before, they'd moved into this apartment and eaten pizza on the floor because the couch was still on the truck.

"Pizza on the floor was good," Marcus said.

"Pizza on the floor was excellent."

He leaned against the counter. "Okay, but here's what I actually want. I want to drive out to Sandy Point and walk around and then get crab cakes at that shack. The one with the picnic tables."

"It's going to be forty degrees Saturday."

"So we wear coats."

Priya was quiet for a second. Then: "I want to leave early. Like seven. Before the parking lot fills up."

"Seven's brutal."

"Seven or the tasting menu."

"Seven's fine. Seven's great." He pulled the rice out after all, started spooning it into a pan. "Should we get a cake or something? Is that a thing?"

"We can get one of those grocery store ones with the too-sweet frosting."

"Now you're talking," Marcus said, and turned on the burner.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries—a faded slip from Delgado's Hardware, dated seven years ago exactly. The day they'd bought the deadbolt for the apartment on Fremont, the first place they'd shared.

"Look at this," she said, holding it up when Teddy came in from the garage, sawdust on his forearms.

He squinted. "Eleven dollars for a lock. Those were the days."

"Seven years tomorrow."

Teddy set down his coffee. They'd talked around the anniversary for two weeks, both waiting for the other to propose something. He'd assumed she wanted dinner somewhere with cloth napkins. She'd assumed he wanted to stay home and would feel guilty about it.

"I was thinking," he said, "we could do Costa Verde. The place with the plantains."

Marisol made a face. "It's forty minutes each way and we'd be there for two hours."

"You don't want to go?"

"I want to not sit in traffic on a Thursday." She pulled out a chair and sat. "What if we did something with the backyard? You've been saying you want to finish the fire pit."

"That's not a celebration, that's a chore."

"It's a chore we'd do together. With beer. And I could make the shrimp thing."

Teddy considered it. The half-laid ring of pavers had been mocking him since April. "The shrimp thing with the garlic?"

"Obviously."

"And we'd get a cake."

"From the Vietnamese bakery," Marisol said. "The one with the strawberries."

He nodded slowly. "Okay. But I'm buying you something."

"You don't have to buy me something."

"I know I don't have to." He picked up the receipt, folded it carefully, and slid it into his shirt pocket. "I'll frame this. Eleven-dollar gift. That's within budget."

She laughed and went to find the batteries.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a Tuesday matinee, five years ago, the first movie she and Devon had seen together. Neither of them had liked it much.

"You kept these?" Devon asked, coming in with a bag of groceries.

"I keep everything. It's a problem." She smoothed one flat against the counter. "Five years next Saturday."

He set down the bag and leaned against the fridge, thinking. Their apartment in Dayton was small enough that he could see her whole from where he stood: bare feet on the linoleum, her braids piled up, that concentrated frown she got when she was calculating something.

"We could do the fancy thing," he said. "Reservations. I'd wear the jacket."

"You hate the jacket."

"I do hate the jacket."

Marisol laughed and slid the ticket stubs toward him. "What if we saw whatever's playing Saturday afternoon? Doesn't matter what. Whatever's on at two."

"Even if it's terrible."

"Especially if it's terrible. That was sort of the point the first time."

Devon considered this. He'd been saving for something—a weekend in Chicago, maybe, or a ring, though he hadn't gotten there yet and she hadn't asked. There was time. There was, it seemed, a lot of time.

"Deal," he said. "But I'm buying the big popcorn. The obscene one."

"Obviously."

Saturday, the two o'clock was a monster movie with bad reviews and worse dialogue. They shared the obscene popcorn. Devon fell asleep somewhere in the second act, his head tipping onto her shoulder, and Marisol didn't wake him, just sat there in the dark with the buttery smell and the dumb explosions, thinking that this was the whole thing, really—someone falling asleep on you, someone letting them.

Afterward they walked to the diner on Wayne Avenue and argued cheerfully about whether the movie had been bad enough to keep the stubs.

They kept them.


Marcus found the calendar notation in Priya's handwriting on a Tuesday morning: *7 yrs — the diner.*

"You remembered," he said, holding up the phone photo he'd taken of it.

Priya looked up from her oatmeal. "I remembered in February. I've been quietly stressing about it since."

"Stressing why?"

"Because seven is one of those numbers people make a fuss about, and we never make a fuss, and I couldn't tell if that was fine or if it was avoidance."

He sat down across from her. This was how they'd always worked — one of them naming the anxious thing out loud before it calcified. Seven years ago they'd met at a twenty-four-hour diner on Grand Avenue at two in the morning, both of them alone and reading, both of them ordering the same terrible coffee.

"We could go back," he said. "The diner."

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

"That's bleak."

"It's very bleak." She stirred her oatmeal. "Here's what I actually want. I want to do nothing. I want to not go anywhere. I want you to make that lemon chicken, and I want to sit on the floor and look at the pictures from the Utah trip, and I want to go to bed early."

Marcus considered this. He'd been half-planning a reservation somewhere with cloth napkins, mostly out of a vague sense of obligation to the number seven.

"That's it? That's the whole plan?"

"That's the whole plan. Unless you want more."

"No," he said, and found that he meant it. "No, I think that's exactly right."

She smiled and reached across the table, tapping his knuckles twice — a thing she did instead of saying certain sentences.

On Saturday he made the chicken. They sat on the living room floor with the laptop and a bottle of wine, and neither of them mentioned the number once.


Nine years to the day since they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, Priya sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor while Marcus rummaged through the cabinet above the stove.

"I know we have candles," he said. "The tall ones. From Christmas."

"Those are red."

"Anniversaries can be red."

She laughed and pulled her knees up. The original plan had been dinner at the place downtown with the tasting menu, the one they'd been saying they'd try since they moved in together four years ago. Then Marcus's sister had needed the car, and the restaurant had quoted a two-hour wait, and somewhere in the negotiation they'd both admitted they didn't really want to put on hard shoes.

"What if we did the thing," Priya said.

"Which thing."

"The list. Nine things."

Marcus came down off his toes and shut the cabinet. They'd done it on their fifth anniversary, drunk on cheap prosecco, each naming five moments from the years behind them. Some had been obvious—the road trip through Utah, the night his father was in the hospital. Others had surprised them both. She'd named a Tuesday in February when he'd brought home the wrong kind of oranges and they'd eaten them anyway on the fire escape.

"Nine's a lot," he said.

"We've had a lot happen."

He found the candles eventually, in a drawer with the batteries and a phone charger for a phone neither of them owned. They ate reheated dal and rice off the good plates, at the actual table, with the overhead light off. Priya went first. Marcus interrupted her twice to correct details and once to argue that a moment she'd claimed as hers was actually his.

They made it to seven before the wax pooled and the conversation drifted somewhere else, which was, they agreed later, close enough.


The Fifth of October

Marisol found the receipt while looking for a stamp — a crumpled slip from the taco place on Wilshire, dated five years ago almost to the day.

"You kept this?" she asked, holding it up.

Dev looked over from the couch, where he was pretending to read a work email. "That was our first date. You spilled horchata on my shoe."

"You told me it was fine."

"It wasn't fine. Those were new shoes."

She sat down beside him, tucking her feet under his thigh the way she'd been doing since their second apartment, the one with the broken radiator. "So. Five years. What do we do?"

They'd never been good at this. Their third anniversary they'd both assumed the other was planning something, and ended up eating cereal at eleven at night, laughing about it in a way that felt slightly like defeat. Their fourth, Dev had booked a restaurant with tasting menus and small plates that left them hungry and eighty dollars poorer.

"I could cook," he said.

"You could burn something."

"I could burn something with great care and attention."

Marisol pulled her laptop over and opened a browser tab, then closed it. "What if we just went back? To the taco place."

Dev considered this. "It's a strip mall."

"It's our strip mall."

"There's fluorescent lighting."

"Deeply romantic."

He was quiet for a moment, and she watched his face do the thing it did when he was deciding whether to admit he liked an idea. "We could get the same thing we got. If I can remember what I ordered."

"Al pastor. Three of them. You were showing off."

"I was hungry."

"You were showing off."

They went on Saturday. The place had new tile and the same handwritten menu board. Marisol ordered horchata and held it very carefully, and Dev watched her do it, and neither of them said anything about how five years was both nothing and an enormous amount of time.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a mutual friend's disastrous housewarming party, Nadia found Owen in the kitchen with two mugs of coffee and a legal pad.

"I made a list," he said.

"Of course you did." She took the mug he slid toward her and read over his shoulder. *Dinner at Piccolo. Drive to the coast. Do nothing.*

"Do nothing is an option?"

"It's a serious option." He tapped the pen against the counter. "Last year we drove three hours to that inn and you spent the whole weekend answering emails."

"That's fair." She hopped up onto the counter, feet swinging. "But it feels like ten should be bigger than nothing."

"Bigger how?"

She thought about it. Their friends who'd married around the same time had rented a barn upstate for their anniversary, invited forty people. That wasn't it. She and Owen had never wanted the barn.

"What if we did the party again," she said. "Not the party. But Deb's old street. Get takeout from that Thai place on the corner, if it's still there."

Owen set down the pen. "It closed. There's a bank."

"God."

"But the Thai place across the alley is still there, and it was better anyway." He was smiling now, which she took as a good sign. "We could eat it on the hood of the car like idiots."

"Like the idiots we were."

"You were wearing that terrible green jacket."

"I still have that jacket."

"I know you do." He came over and stood between her knees, and she put her hands on his shoulders, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was its own kind of answer.

They went on the Saturday. The house had new siding and a basketball hoop. The Thai place had raised its prices and kept its recipes. They ate on the hood of the car, and Nadia wore the green jacket, and Owen took one photo, badly, on purpose.


Every October, Marisol circled the fourteenth on the kitchen calendar in green marker, and every October, Dev pretended not to notice until she caught him grinning at it.

Six years since the night they'd met at a friend's disastrous housewarming, where the oven caught fire and they'd ended up eating cold pizza on the fire escape.

"We could do the tasting menu place," Dev said, scrolling on his phone while Marisol repotted a spider plant at the kitchen table. Soil dusted the newspaper she'd laid down. "The one with the twelve courses."

"Twelve courses is a hostage situation."

"It got written up in the paper."

"So did the sinkhole on Delmar." She tamped the soil down with her thumbs. "Remember what we did the first year?"

He remembered. They'd had eleven dollars between them and had walked to the reservoir with a bag of grapes.

"You want to walk to the reservoir," he said.

"I want to do something we'll actually talk about later." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "The tasting menu we'd talk about for a week. Then it'd just be a receipt."

Dev put the phone face-down. This was the thing about her—she was right often enough to be annoying, and she never gloated, which was somehow worse.

"Compromise," he said. "We cook. The complicated thing from your grandmother's book, the one with the ninety steps."

"The mole?"

"The mole. And we start at noon, and we don't rush, and we put on the records."

Marisol considered this. The mole took six hours and made an unholy mess of the kitchen, and the last time they'd made it together, they'd had a genuine fight about whether to strain the sauce.

"We're straining it this time," she said.

"We are absolutely not straining it."

She smiled and pushed the spider plant toward him. "Fine. Hold this. I'll make the shopping list."


Marisol found the ticket stubs in a shoebox under the bed while looking for the good extension cord. Five years, almost to the day, since she and Dev had gone to see that terrible sci-fi movie at the Roxy and stayed up until two arguing about whether the ending made sense.

"We should do something," she said that night, holding up the stubs like evidence.

Dev looked up from the sink, hands wet. "The Roxy closed."

"I know. I checked."

They talked about it over the next week, in pieces, the way they talked about most things—while folding laundry, while waiting for the dog to finish sniffing a particular patch of grass. Dev wanted to go somewhere. Not far. He'd been reading about a lake about ninety minutes north with cabins that had woodstoves.

"In November," Marisol said.

"That's the point of the woodstove."

She wasn't sure. Five years felt like it wanted something with more ceremony, though she couldn't say what. A dinner reservation somewhere with cloth napkins. Something they could photograph. But when she imagined sitting across a small table making conversation under recessed lighting, she felt tired.

"Does the cabin have a kitchen?"

"Kitchenette. There's a picture of a two-burner stove."

"Then I want to make the mushroom thing."

Dev put down his book. "That takes four hours."

"We'll have four hours."

They left on a Friday afternoon and hit traffic outside the city, which Dev had predicted and Marisol had said he was being pessimistic about. The cabin was smaller than the photos suggested. The woodstove took forty minutes and three attempts to light, mostly because neither of them had done it before and both had opinions.

The mushroom thing came out well. They ate it late, sitting on the floor because the two chairs wobbled, and Dev said he still didn't understand the ending of that movie.

"Nobody did," Marisol said. "That was the point."


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from Pho Golden Bowl, dated seven years ago to the week.

"Hey," she called toward the living room, where Dev was untangling Christmas lights in March because he'd finally admitted the box needed sorting. "Look what survived."

He squinted at it, then laughed. "You ordered the beef and then didn't eat it."

"I was nervous. You talked about your grandmother's citrus trees for twenty minutes."

"You asked."

They stood in the kitchen a moment, the receipt between them like a small artifact. Seven years since that first dinner. Four since they'd signed the lease on the duplex with the sloping floors.

"So what do we do?" Dev asked. "Something big?"

Marisol considered. Her sister had done a whole weekend in Sonoma for her fifth anniversary — the wine tour, the inn with the claw-foot tub, the photos. It had looked exhausting.

"Honestly? I don't want to drive anywhere."

"Thank God." He set down the lights. "I was going to suggest we just go back to Golden Bowl, but I thought it was too cheap."

"It's not cheap, it's specific." She pinned the receipt to the fridge with a magnet shaped like Oregon. "Okay. Golden Bowl. And then?"

"There's that thing at the botanical garden. The night one, with the lanterns. Tuesday's our actual day."

"Tuesday's a work night."

"We're adults. We can be tired on Wednesday."

She agreed, and they wrote it on the wall calendar in Dev's cramped handwriting — *pho + lanterns* — which felt right, unceremonious, the way most of the important things in their life got recorded. Later, brushing her teeth, Marisol thought about how nobody would send them a card for this. There'd be no toast, no registry, no photographer. Just two people who'd chosen the same address for four years running and would probably choose it again.

She spat, rinsed, and went to bed, where Dev had already claimed too much of the blanket.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that terrible open-mic night in Sacramento, and Renata still hadn't decided what she wanted.

"We could do the thing where we drive to the coast," Desmond said. He was standing at the sink, scrubbing the pan from Sunday's eggs, which meant it was Tuesday and he'd been avoiding it for two days. "Bodega Bay. Get oysters. Come back Sunday."

"That's four hundred dollars we don't have."

"We have it. We just have other plans for it." He set the pan in the rack. "Which is a different sentence."

Renata pulled her feet up onto the kitchen chair. The house was small and had a specific smell she'd stopped noticing years ago, some combination of the neighbor's jasmine and the old carpet in the hallway they kept meaning to replace. Ten years. Her sister had gotten married and divorced in less time.

"What if we did nothing," she said.

Desmond turned around.

"Not nothing-nothing. I mean, what if we stayed here. You make the short ribs. We put on the record player. We don't go anywhere, we don't take pictures, we don't post anything, nobody knows about it but us."

He considered this, drying his hands on the dish towel with the faded lemons.

"That's not nothing," he said. "That's a whole production. Short ribs take five hours."

"You love a five-hour project."

"I do love a five-hour project." He came over and leaned against the counter across from her, arms folded. "Okay. But I'm getting the good wine, and I don't want to hear about the price."

"Deal."

"And I'm putting on the Alice Coltrane."

"Absolutely not."

"Ten years," he said, "and you still have no taste."

She reached over and took the dish towel out of his hands, folded it, and hung it on the oven door where it belonged.


Marisol found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for the good scissors: a diner check from seven years ago, two coffees and one slice of pie, dated March 14th.

"Devon," she called toward the kitchen. "You kept this?"

He came in wiping his hands on a dish towel and squinted at the faded paper. "That was the night your car wouldn't start. We sat there until three because you didn't want to call your mom."

"You paid for the pie."

"I had eleven dollars. It was a real financial decision."

The anniversary was Saturday. They had spent the past week floating ideas at each other in the low-stakes way people do when neither wants to be the one who cares too much. Devon had mentioned a restaurant downtown with a tasting menu and a two-month waitlist. Marisol had suggested a cabin, then remembered the dog, then remembered that boarding the dog cost more than the cabin.

"What if we just went back?" she said, holding up the receipt.

"To Wally's? It's a Denny's now."

"It is not."

"It closed in 2021. There's a vape shop."

She sat down on the arm of the couch, deflated in a way that surprised her. Seven years in the same house, the same mismatched dishes, the same argument about the thermostat, and she'd wanted one specific booth back.

Devon leaned against the doorframe, thinking. "There's that place on Fifth with the pie case in the window. Terrible coffee. Open till two."

"Terrible coffee is important."

"Essential."

So Saturday they drove there at nine at night, ordered two coffees and one slice of pie to split, and Devon put the old receipt on the table between them like a place setting. The waitress asked if they were celebrating something.

Marisol looked at Devon across the sticky laminate. "Sort of," she said. "We're just repeating ourselves."


Maya found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for a phone charger: a diner in Flagstaff, two coffees and a plate of hash browns, dated seven years ago that Saturday.

"You kept this?" she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage.

He squinted at the faded thermal paper. "That's the morning after we drove all night. You fell asleep with your head on the window and drooled on my jacket."

"I did not drool."

"You absolutely drooled."

They'd talked about the anniversary for weeks in vague terms — *we should do something* — without landing anywhere. Desmond had floated a nice dinner downtown, the kind of place with a wine list and a valet. Maya had made a face she wasn't proud of. Money was tight since her hours got cut, and she didn't want to spend two hundred dollars pretending to enjoy foam on a plate.

"What if we cooked," she said now, still holding the receipt. "Hash browns. Terrible coffee. Do it right."

Desmond leaned against the doorframe, considering. "That's kind of sad, though. That's a Tuesday."

"Okay, fair."

They compromised the way they usually did, which was to keep talking until something better appeared. Desmond suggested driving out to the state park, the one with the reservoir, and taking the good cooler. Maya added the camp stove, so they could actually make the potatoes there. They'd bring the bad instant coffee on purpose. He wanted to leave at six in the morning; she negotiated him to seven-thirty.

On Saturday the light came sideways through the pines and the potatoes stuck to the pan. Desmond scraped at them with a spatula, swearing cheerfully. Maya poured coffee into two mismatched mugs from the kitchen and handed him one.

"Seven years," she said.

He tapped his mug against hers. "Still not married."

"Still not drooling, either."

"Sure," he said.


On the third of October, Delia found the receipt tucked in the junk drawer beneath a dead battery and a rubber band ball. Six years ago, that receipt. Two coffees and a scone at the place on Ludlow that had since become a vape shop.

"Look what I found," she said, holding it up when Marcus came in from the garage, smelling like sawdust.

He squinted. "Is that from the first date?"

"You kept it?"

"I kept everything for a while. Then I got over it." He took the paper carefully, the way he handled anything old. "We should do something."

They had, over the years, developed opinions about anniversaries. Marcus liked plans. Delia liked plans to be ruined. Two years ago they'd booked a hotel two hours north and spent the whole weekend arguing about the thermostat, then laughing about arguing about the thermostat.

"Not a restaurant," Delia said. "Everyone does a restaurant."

"We could cook."

"We cook every night."

"We reheat every night. There's a difference." He leaned against the counter. "Okay. What about this. We drive to Ludlow, we get coffee at whatever's there now—"

"It's a vape shop."

"—we get coffee somewhere near the vape shop, we look at the vape shop, and then we do whatever you want."

She considered it. "That's stupid."

"It's a little stupid."

"I like it."

They went on a Saturday. The vape shop had become a nail salon, which felt like a betrayal of the bit, but they stood outside anyway and Marcus took a photo of Delia pointing at the window. Afterward they walked eleven blocks with no destination and ended up buying a wall clock at an estate sale because Delia said the numbers looked friendly.

That night, at home, Marcus hung it in the hallway. Delia watched from the doorway with the receipt back in her hand, deciding where to put it so she'd find it again.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer while looking for batteries: a diner in Sacramento, seven years ago almost to the day, $14.82 for two coffees and a shared plate of fries. She'd kept it without meaning to.

"Look," she said, holding it up when Owen came in from the garage with grease on his knuckles.

He squinted, then laughed. "You told me you weren't hungry and then ate all my fries."

"I was nervous."

They'd been talking around the anniversary for a week. Owen had floated a weekend in Mendocino, which Marisol wanted but couldn't stop calculating against the water heater that was making noises. Marisol had suggested dinner at the place with the tasting menu, which Owen was game for until he looked up the price and made a sound like a punctured tire.

"What if we didn't do a thing," he said now, wiping his hands on a rag. "What if we just went back to the diner."

"It's two hours away."

"So we leave at eight, we're there by ten. Coffee and fries. Then we drive home."

Marisol thought about it. It was absurd, and it was cheap, and it was exactly the kind of plan Owen made — the kind that seemed like nothing until you were inside it.

"I want to bring a camera," she said. "Not my phone. The actual one."

"Fine. But I'm picking the music."

They left Saturday morning with a thermos anyway, because Owen couldn't be trusted to wait two hours for caffeine. The diner had new booths and the same fluorescent hum. Marisol ordered for both of them without asking, and Owen let her, and the fries came out too salty, the way they had before.

She took his picture across the table. He was mid-sentence, gesturing, unaware.

On the drive home he said, quietly, "Same time next year?"

"Obviously," she said, and put her feet on the dashboard.


Ten years to the day since they'd met in the checkout line at a hardware store, arguing over the last box of drywall screws.

Marisol found the anniversary written on the kitchen calendar in Dev's cramped handwriting, circled twice. She'd forgotten. Not the anniversary itself—she thought about it often, the way you think about the foundation under a house—but the specific date had slipped somewhere between a deadline and her mother's hip surgery.

"We should do something," she said that evening, leaning against the doorframe of the room they still called the office even though it held mostly bicycles.

Dev looked up from a tangle of derailleur cable. "I made a reservation at Ferraro's."

"You did?"

"Three weeks ago." He wiped his hands on a rag. "But I'll cancel it if you want. I keep thinking about that, honestly. Whether Ferraro's is what we actually want or just what people do."

Marisol sat down on the arm of the couch, which he hated, and he didn't say anything about it, which was its own kind of anniversary.

"What do you actually want?" she asked.

"I want to drive out to the reservoir and eat sandwiches on the hood of the car. Like when we were broke."

"We're still sort of broke."

"Comparatively broke."

She laughed. "That's it? Sandwiches?"

"And I want to look at that listing again. The blue house on Ridgeway." He said it carefully, the way he said things he'd rehearsed. "Not to buy it tomorrow. Just to look."

Marisol was quiet for a moment. Ten years of leases, of her name second on the utilities, of neither of them asking for the thing that would make it official in the eyes of anyone but themselves.

"Okay," she said. "Sandwiches, the reservoir, and the blue house."

Dev nodded and went back to the cable, but she saw him smiling at it.

They kept the reservation too. Marisol called and moved it to Sunday.


Marisol found the receipt in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. Ten years ago, almost to the day: two tickets to a matinee neither of them remembered liking, and a diner breakfast afterward that cost eleven dollars total.

"We should do something," she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage with sawdust on his forearms.

He squinted at the faded ink. "Ten years is china, I think. Or tin. I never know which ones are real and which ones the card companies made up."

"We're not married, so probably neither applies."

"Then we can pick." He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, taking his time. "I vote for something that isn't a restaurant where the waiter explains the concept of the menu to us."

They had done that on year seven, at a place in Portland, and had spent the drive home agreeing it was a mistake.

Marisol suggested the coast, but October rates were still high, and the water heater was making a sound they'd been ignoring for a month. Desmond suggested a party, then withdrew it before she could answer, because he knew she'd say yes out of generosity and then dread it for three weeks.

What they settled on, sitting on the back steps with the last of the sun on the fence, was this: they would drive to the old diner if it still existed, order whatever eleven dollars bought now, and then go to whatever was playing at one o'clock, no matter what it was. Then home, and Desmond would make the pasta with too much garlic, and they would not answer the phone.

"That's it?" he said. "That's the ten-year plan?"

"It's what we actually like," Marisol said.

He considered that, then leaned back against the doorframe. "Okay," he said. "I'll call about the water heater Monday."


Ten years to the day since they'd met at that miserable office holiday party, and Dana still couldn't decide what she wanted.

"We could just stay in," Marcus said from the kitchen doorway, dish towel over his shoulder. "Order from the Thai place. Watch something terrible."

"That's every Friday."

"Every Friday is pretty good."

She laughed, but she was already opening her laptop, pulling up the website for the inn upstate where they'd gone the first year they lived together, back when the apartment had a broken radiator and they'd needed somewhere warm. "It's booked," she said after a minute. "Of course it's booked. It's October."

Marcus came and sat on the arm of the couch, looking over her shoulder at the photographs of white clapboard and yellow maples. "We could go in November."

"That's not the anniversary."

"Dana." He said her name the way he did when he thought she was being ridiculous but liked her anyway. "Ten years. We're not going to get it wrong by four weeks."

She closed the laptop. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what I want. I want to make the lasagna. The one from your mother's card, the one that takes four hours."

"That's what you want."

"I want to make it together, and I want to eat it late, and I want you to tell me the story about the holiday party again, the version where you were smooth about it."

"I was extremely smooth."

"You spilled wine on my shoe."

"I was making an impression."

She reached up and caught his hand. "And in November we go upstate. Book it now, before someone else does."

He did, on his phone, right there, reading the confirmation number aloud like it was a small vow. Then he went back to the kitchen, and she followed, and they started looking for the recipe card, which was somewhere in the drawer with the batteries and the take-out menus, where everything important ended up.


Marisol found the calendar note first, though she'd known the date for weeks. Five years since the night they'd met at Deion's terrible housewarming party, both of them hiding in the kitchen from the karaoke.

"So," she said, leaning in the bathroom doorway while Theo shaved. "Saturday."

"I know." He rinsed the razor. "I was thinking that place with the tasting menu. The one your sister keeps posting about."

Marisol made a face. "Twelve courses of foam. We'd spend two hundred dollars and leave hungry."

"Okay." He turned, half his jaw still lathered. "What do you want?"

That was the question that always stumped her. Five years, and she still felt strange asking for things outright.

"Honestly?" she said. "I want to not leave the house. I want to make that ridiculous lasagna from the Times, the one with the sixteen steps, and I want you to be my sous chef and not take over."

"I don't take over."

"You reorganized my mise en place last time."

"It was chaos."

"It was my chaos."

They ended up going to the Vietnamese grocery on Saturday morning, which wasn't part of the plan at all, but Theo wanted the good herbs for something else, and then they got distracted by a bin of jackfruit and stood arguing about whether they could finish one.

The lasagna took four hours. Marisol handled the béchamel; Theo, exiled to vegetable duty, sliced eggplant with the grim precision of a man proving a point. Around hour three they gave up and ate cheese and crackers standing at the counter, and Theo put on the playlist from their first road trip, and Marisol laughed at how much they'd both loved a band they now agreed was unlistenable.

They ate at eleven. It was too salty. Neither of them cared.

"Next year," Theo said, "we do the foam."

"Next year," Marisol agreed, "we absolutely do not."


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from Tung Hoy Palace, dated seven years ago that November. She brought it to the kitchen, where Dev was scrubbing the burnt bottom of a saucepan.

"Do you remember what we ordered?"

He squinted at it. "You got the salt-and-pepper tofu. I got something with too much star anise and pretended to like it."

"You said it was 'complex.'"

"It was complex. Complexly bad."

They had never made a ceremony of the date. Their friends who married had photographers and toasts; Marisol and Dev had a lease, a shared savings account labeled ROOF/FURNACE/DOOM, and a cat who had bitten both of them equally. Seven years felt like it warranted something, though neither could say what.

"We could go back there," Dev said.

"It closed. Became a vape shop, then a place that sells stand mixers."

He set the pan down. "Then we cook it ourselves. Whatever we can remember."

So on the Saturday, they went to the Asian market on Rowan Street and argued about which brand of doubanjiang, and Dev bought star anise out of spite. Marisol pressed the tofu under a stack of library books. The kitchen filled with smoke; they opened the windows and put on sweaters. The cat sat on the windowsill judging them.

The tofu came out fine — better than fine, crisp at the edges, too much white pepper. Dev's dish was, again, complexly bad. They ate it anyway, at the table with the wobbly leg, plates on top of the mail.

"Should we do something bigger?" Marisol asked. "Number eight. Take a trip somewhere."

Dev thought about it, chewing. "We could. Or we could get the furnace looked at and then do this again."

She lifted her water glass. He tapped his against it. Outside, the first real cold of the season pressed against the glass, and neither of them moved to get up.


Marcus found the calendar note first, though he pretended he hadn't. Seven years since the Tuesday they'd met at a friend's barbecue in Rochester, where he'd spilled potato salad on her sandal and she'd laughed instead of leaving.

"So," Priya said, folding laundry on the couch that Saturday morning. "Next week."

"I know what next week is."

"Do you, though." She held up one of his socks, hole in the heel, and gave him a look before setting it in the pile she'd mend later, because she was the kind of person who mended socks.

They'd done the big thing on year five — a rented cabin in the Adirondacks, hot tub, too much wine, a bill they'd felt for two months afterward. This year the water heater had died in March and Priya's mother had needed a plane ticket to Ahmedabad in June, and neither of them said the word *money*, but it sat there between them like a third roommate.

"What if we didn't go out," Marcus said.

Priya raised an eyebrow. "That's your pitch?"

"Hear me out. We make the thing you made the first time I came over. The dal with the burnt garlic."

"It was not supposed to be burnt."

"It was perfect burnt." He shrugged. "And I'll get the good bread from Fiorella's. And we put the phones in the drawer."

She considered this, still folding. "The whole night?"

"The whole night."

"Okay," she said. "But I want a cake. Not a homemade cake. A bakery cake, with the plastic ribbon and everything."

"Deal."

They shook on it, ridiculously, over a pile of towels. Then she went back to matching socks and he went to find the bakery's number, and the apartment settled around them, warm and unremarkable, in the way that seven years makes a place.


Maya noticed the date first, on a Tuesday morning while scrolling through her phone at the kitchen counter. Five years since the night they'd met at Dev's cousin's housewarming party in Sacramento, where she'd spilled red wine on his shoes and he'd insisted it was an improvement.

"Saturday's the anniversary," she said.

Dev looked up from the dishwasher he was unloading, a stack of bowls balanced against his chest. "The party one? Or the moving-in one?"

"Party one. Five years."

He set the bowls down. "That's a real number."

They'd let it slide the last two years—once because of her sister's wedding, once because Dev had been in Phoenix for work. This felt different. Five years meant something, even if neither of them could articulate exactly what.

Maya wanted to go back to the Italian place in Midtown, the one with the pressed tin ceiling where they'd gone on their second date. Dev pointed out, gently, that it had closed during the pandemic and reopened as a poke restaurant.

"Then somewhere new," she said. "Somewhere we've never been."

"Or," Dev said, "we do nothing."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Not nothing. I mean we stay home. I'll make the lamb thing. We put the phones in the drawer. No reservation, no traffic, no valet parking that costs more than the appetizer."

Maya considered it. She'd been picturing something with more ceremony—a photograph worth posting, a story to tell her mother. But she thought about their apartment on a Saturday evening, the good light that came through the west windows around seven, the way Dev sang badly while he cooked.

"The lamb thing," she agreed. "And I'm buying an actual cake. Not a grocery store cake. A bakery cake."

"Obviously a bakery cake."

They didn't talk about what came after five years. Not yet. But Maya wrote it on the calendar in pen, which felt like its own small declaration.


The Fifth of October

Dana found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from Marchetti's, dated October 5th, five years ago. She held it up when Rafael came in from the garage.

"You kept this?"

"I kept everything from that year," he said, not looking embarrassed about it. "There's a movie ticket in there somewhere too."

The anniversary was Saturday. They'd been circling the topic for a week, neither wanting to be the one who cared too much.

"We could go back to Marchetti's," Dana offered.

Rafael made a face. "It's forty dollars for pasta now. And the guy who used to seat us moved to Tucson."

"So what, then?"

He leaned against the counter, thinking. Outside, their neighbor's dog was barking at the recycling bins again. "What if we did nothing? Like, actually nothing. No reservations, no plans. We stay home, I make that thing with the peppers, we watch the whole Godfather trilogy."

"Even the third one?"

"Especially the third one. It's underrated."

"It is not underrated."

But she was already warming to it. Five years in this house—the one with the water stain shaped like Florida on the bedroom ceiling, the one they'd almost not been able to afford. It seemed right to spend the day inside it.

"I want one thing," Dana said. "I want to sit on the back steps with coffee in the morning. Just for a while. Like we used to before you got the early shift."

"That's easy."

"And I'm buying a cake."

"From the good bakery?"

"From the grocery store. The one with too much frosting."

Rafael laughed. "God, yes."

Saturday came gray and cool. They sat on the steps until the coffee went cold, not saying much. Later there were peppers, and a sheet cake with blue roses, and Michael Corleone dying alone in a courtyard while Dana fell asleep against Rafael's shoulder.


Miriam found the receipt in a coat pocket while looking for her chapstick: a diner in Barstow, five years ago almost to the day, $18.40 for two breakfasts and a coffee she'd spilled on the vinyl seat.

She brought it into the kitchen where Dev was chopping onions badly, the way he always did, in uneven chunks he insisted were "rustic."

"Look," she said.

He wiped his eyes with his forearm and squinted. "That's the place with the cowboy mural."

"It was a horse."

"It was a cowboy on a horse."

They'd been arguing about the mural for five years. Neither had a photograph.

The anniversary was Thursday. Miriam had assumed they'd do what they usually did—order Thai from the place on Chestnut, watch something, fall asleep before the ending. Dev had assumed the same thing, though he'd been quietly thinking about the wine bar downtown, the one with the little cheese boards, whether it was too much or not enough.

"We could drive back," Miriam said. "It's four hours."

"To Barstow."

"To the diner. Settle it."

Dev put down the knife. He thought about the drive, the flat brown stretch of the 15, the way she always fell asleep around Victorville and woke up insisting she hadn't. He thought about how they'd been living in this house for two years now and had never gone anywhere on purpose, only for weddings and funerals.

"We'd have to leave early," he said. "It's a Thursday."

"You have Thursdays off."

"You don't."

"I have three sick days I'm never going to use."

He picked the knife back up, then set it down again. "Okay," he said. "But if it's a horse, you're buying breakfast."

"It's a cowboy on a horse."

"That's not what you said."

She took the receipt back and put it on the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like Wyoming.


The Fifth of October

Renée found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from Marchetti's, dated October 5th, five years ago. Sixty-two dollars for two plates of gnocchi and a bottle of wine neither of them could pronounce.

"Look at this," she said, holding it up as Dev came in from the garage, hands still smelling of bike grease.

He squinted, then laughed. "You kept that?"

"I keep everything. You know this about me."

They'd talked about the anniversary for weeks in fragments—between shifts, over dishes, in the ninety seconds before sleep. Dev wanted to drive up to the cabin his cousin rented out, three hours north, where the maples would be turning. Renée had done the math on gas and the missed Saturday at the salon, where October was her busiest month.

"We could just do Marchetti's again," she offered.

"That feels like a rerun."

"Reruns are underrated."

He leaned against the counter, considering. In five years they'd gone from a sublet with a broken radiator to this house, a rental with a yard they'd slowly filled—tomato cages, a bird feeder Dev built badly, the fire pit they'd bought on clearance in February and used exactly twice.

"What if we stayed here," he said. "Cook something ambitious. Use the fire pit. I'll get the wood."

Renée thought about it. No driving. No reservation at seven-fifteen with a table by the kitchen door. Just the yard, and the maple in the neighbor's lot that dropped leaves over their fence every year like it owed them something.

"Ambitious how?"

"That mushroom thing you saw. The one with the twelve steps."

"Fourteen steps."

"I'll do half of them."

"You'll do four and open the wine."

"I'll open very good wine," he said.

She put the receipt back in the drawer, in the front, where she'd find it again.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, and Nadia still couldn't decide what to do about it.

"We could just stay in," Marcus said, leaning against the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder. "Order from that Thai place. Watch something dumb."

"That's what we do every Friday."

"Yeah, but we'd be doing it *commemoratively*."

She threw a dish sponge at him. He caught it, mostly.

The trouble was that neither of them liked fuss, but ten years felt like it deserved something. They'd built a life in this narrow rowhouse in Baltimore—replaced the water heater together, argued about paint colors, buried a cat in the back garden. Nadia had a drawer in her nightstand with a photo of them from that housewarming, both looking younger and slightly sunburned.

"What about the mountains?" she said. "That cabin place your sister used."

Marcus made a face. "Booked out through November. I checked in September."

"You checked in September?"

"I think about things," he said, wounded.

They ended up compromising, the way they usually did—not splitting the difference so much as finding a third thing neither had considered. Marcus remembered the diner off Route 40 where they'd gone after that party, three in the morning, eating pancakes and discovering they both hated the same movie. It was still there, somehow. Still open twenty-four hours.

So on the actual night they drove out at eleven, arrived close to midnight, and sat in a vinyl booth under fluorescent lights that made everyone look slightly ill. Nadia ordered the pancakes. Marcus got eggs, then ate half her pancakes anyway.

"Ten years," she said.

"Ten years." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, a thing he did when he was working up to something. "You ever think about—"

"Sometimes," she said. "Not tonight, though."

He nodded, and reached across the table, and stole the last bite.


Ten years to the day since they'd met at a friend's terrible housewarming party, and Marisol still couldn't decide what she wanted.

"We could do the tasting menu place," Dev said, scrolling on his phone at the kitchen island. "The one your sister keeps talking about. Reservations open at nine."

"It's two hundred a person before wine."

"It's ten years."

Marisol turned the coffee grinder on, mostly to buy herself thirty seconds. When it stopped, she said, "I keep thinking about the drive we took. When we moved out here and the U-Haul broke down outside Barstow."

"That was miserable."

"It was," she agreed. "But we got that motel room with the broken AC and ate gas station burritos on the bed and watched that documentary about the guy who built the sculpture out of bottle caps. And I remember thinking, oh. This is going to be fine. Whatever happens."

Dev set the phone face-down. He had a way of doing that when he was actually listening, a small courtesy she'd noticed maybe four years in and never mentioned.

"So you want gas station burritos."

"I want us to go somewhere neither of us has been. Even if it's stupid. Even if it's the county with the weird cheese festival."

"The cheese festival is in October."

"You know what I mean."

He got up and refilled her mug without being asked, which was its own kind of argument, or its own kind of agreement. "There's that state park past Alpine," he said. "The one with the fire lookout you can rent. It sleeps two. I looked at it once, like, three years ago, and then didn't say anything because I assumed you'd hate it."

Marisol laughed. "I might hate it."

"That's the risk."

"Book it," she said. "And we'll get burritos on the way."

He picked the phone back up.


Ten years to the day since they'd first met at a mutual friend's barbecue in Ann Arbor, and Priya still hadn't decided what she wanted.

"We could do Bellamy's," Marcus offered from the kitchen doorway, dish towel over his shoulder. "I'd have to call now, though. They book out."

Priya looked up from the laptop where she'd been half-heartedly scrolling restaurant reviews. "Every year we do a nice dinner. And every year we spend the whole meal talking about whether the food was worth it."

"That's a fair assessment of our behavior."

She closed the laptop. Outside, the maple in the side yard had gone orange almost overnight, the way it did every October, and she'd barely registered it until now.

"What if we drove up to the lake?" she said. "The little place with the cabins. It's off-season, so it'd be empty."

Marcus considered this. He'd been the one pushing for a reservation, mostly because reservations were legible—you made them, you kept them, the anniversary was properly observed. But he also remembered the cabin trip four years ago, the woodstove that smoked, the way they'd played gin rummy until two in the morning because there was nothing else to do.

"We'd have to leave Friday," he said. "I'd need to move the Kowalski call."

"Can you?"

"Probably. Yeah." He folded the towel and set it on the counter. "You want to cook up there, or bring stuff?"

"Bring stuff. I'm not driving three hours to stand in a kitchen."

"Deal." He sat down across from her at the table. "Ten years."

"Ten years," she agreed. "We should probably do something about the guest room before your mother visits."

"Not tonight."

"No," Priya said. "Not tonight."

She opened the laptop again, this time to find the number for the cabins, and Marcus went to check whether the cooler was still in the garage.


Ten years ago, Dana had shown up at Marcus's apartment with a box of records and a rice cooker, and neither of them had ever gotten around to discussing whether she was moving in. It had simply happened, the way weather happens.

Now they lived in a rented bungalow outside Portland with a persistent draft in the back bedroom, and the tenth anniversary of that non-conversation was three weeks away.

"We should do something," Marcus said, standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder. "Something that isn't takeout."

Dana was on the floor with the cat, working a mat out of his fur. "Define something."

"I don't know. My sister keeps saying we should go to the coast."

"Your sister thinks a weekend in Cannon Beach solves everything."

"It solves some things."

She sat back on her heels. "What about the Chinese place on Belmont? The one that closed."

"It closed."

"I know. But there's that new place in the same building. We could go and be nostalgic and complain about how it used to be better."

Marcus laughed. "That's genuinely the most us idea I've ever heard."

"I'm full of them."

They talked it through over the next week, in fragments—while brushing teeth, while driving to the hardware store. Dana wanted something small. Marcus wanted something he could describe to people afterward. They compromised: dinner at the new place, then a night in a hotel downtown, the kind with a bathtub and a view of the river, because neither of them had ever stayed in one in their own city.

"It's stupid to pay for a room ten minutes from our house," Dana said, booking it anyway.

"Completely stupid," Marcus agreed.

On the night, the food was mediocre. They ate it happily, arguing about whether the old owners had used more garlic, and walked to the hotel through a light, ordinary rain.


The rain had been coming down since Thursday, which was how Marisol and Dev ended up on the living room floor with a legal pad between them, arguing pleasantly about their tenth anniversary.

"Ten years since what, exactly," Dev said. He was lying on his back with his knees up, the way he did when he was thinking. "Ten years since the wedding we didn't have?"

"Ten years since you gave me your umbrella outside the Kroger and then walked six blocks in the rain like an idiot."

"I had a hood."

"You did not have a hood. I watched you the whole way."

He laughed. Outside, a car went by slowly, tires hissing. The house they'd bought together four years ago made its small settling noises, the radiator ticking in the hall.

Marisol wrote *Options* at the top of the pad and underlined it twice. She proposed the coast — a rental in Gualala, three nights, the kind of place with a wood stove and no cell service. Dev pointed out they'd both taken time off in March for his mother's surgery and the vacation days were thin.

"Then dinner somewhere absurd," she said. "Somewhere with tweezers involved."

"Or." He sat up. "Or we do the thing where we drive to the Kroger."

She looked at him.

"It's still there. We get a rotisserie chicken and those little potatoes you like and we eat in the car in the parking lot. And then we come home and watch something terrible."

Marisol considered this. She was a person who liked plans, and she recognized, dimly, that she was being handed one that would cost eleven dollars.

"I want a pie too," she said.

"Obviously a pie."

She crossed out everything on the legal pad and wrote *Kroger, 7 p.m.* Dev leaned over and looked at it for a while, then kissed the side of her head and went to find his shoes.


The morning of their seventh anniversary, Naomi found Dev already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with two mugs of coffee and a legal pad.

"You made a list," she said.

"I made three lists." He turned the pad toward her. Option A: the tasting menu place downtown, the one they'd walked past a hundred times. Option B: driving out to the lake where they'd spent a weekend the first summer, before the lease, before the dog, before Dev's mother's illness and the eight months Naomi slept on a hospital cot beside her. Option C was blank.

"What's C?"

"C is whatever you want. I left it open on purpose."

Naomi sat down and pulled the pad closer. She'd been thinking about it too, though she hadn't written anything down. Seven years felt like it deserved something, but she wasn't sure the something was a restaurant. Her sister had gotten married the year before and the whole family had spent a week talking about napkin colors, and Naomi had come home from the wedding exhausted and grateful for the ordinariness of her own life with Dev — the dishwasher that had to be run twice, the dog's vet appointments, the way he read out loud from the news while she made breakfast.

"C," she said. "But specifically: we stay here. We cook the thing we made the first night we lived in this house."

"The disaster risotto."

"The disaster risotto. And we finally hang the photos."

Dev laughed. There was a box of framed pictures in the hall closet that had been waiting fourteen months for a decision about the living room wall.

"That's not romantic," he said.

"It's completely romantic. You just don't know it yet."

They spent the afternoon with a level and a pencil, arguing about spacing. The risotto came out better than the first time. Not perfect. Better.


The morning of their seventh anniversary, Dana found Marisol already awake, cross-legged on the living room floor with a legal pad balanced on her knee.

"Options," Marisol announced. "I've made a list."

Dana sat down beside her, still in the T-shirt she'd slept in. The list had three items: *Nice dinner (the Portuguese place?), Drive up to the lake, Do absolutely nothing.*

"Absolutely nothing is tempting," Dana said.

"I put it there for honesty."

The Portuguese place would require a reservation they hadn't made, and the lake was two hours each way, and it was already nine-thirty. Dana pointed this out gently, the way she'd learned to over seven years — not as a refusal, just as arithmetic.

Marisol tapped her pen against the pad. "What did we do the first year? I genuinely can't remember."

"We ate at that terrible sushi place on Chestnut and you got food poisoning."

"That was the *second* year." Marisol laughed. "The first year we were still pretending we didn't live together, remember? You still had the apartment with the leaky radiator."

"I paid rent on that place for eight months without sleeping there once."

They ended up walking to the diner four blocks away, the one with the vinyl booths and the coffee that tasted faintly of the pot it had been sitting in. Marisol ordered pancakes. Dana ordered eggs and stole three bites of the pancakes.

Afterward they took the long way home, past the community garden where the tomatoes were coming in, and Marisol said, apropos of nothing, "I think I want a real party for ten. Something with a cake."

"Three years to plan it," Dana said.

"I'll start the list tonight."

At home they put on a record and Marisol fell asleep on the couch with her feet in Dana's lap, and Dana let her, and read, and it was, she thought, a fairly good way to mark a thing.


Marguerite found the receipt in a coat pocket, faded to near-illegibility: a diner in Nebraska, two coffees and a slice of pie, dated eleven years ago that Saturday.

"We should do something," she said, holding it up when Desmond came in from the garage with grease on his knuckles.

He squinted. "Is that from the Bluebird? The one with the waitress who called us both 'hon' about forty times?"

"Forty-two. I counted."

They had never married, a decision that stopped requiring explanation somewhere around year six, when both their mothers gave up asking. But they kept the anniversary of that road trip, the week they'd loaded a hatchback and driven west with no particular plan, because it was the first time either of them had thought of the other as permanent.

Desmond wanted to go back. "Two days' drive. We could leave Friday, be there Saturday night."

"With Bea's recital Sunday?" Marguerite meant his niece, who had been practicing the same four measures of Debussy for a month. "You'd never forgive yourself."

He conceded that. They sat at the kitchen table and negotiated, which was how most of their decisions got made — not romantically, but with the patience of two people who had learned each other's stubbornness.

What they settled on was smaller. Saturday morning Desmond made coffee too strong, the way the Bluebird had, and Marguerite baked a sour cherry pie that came out slightly burnt at the edges. They ate it at eight in the morning on the back steps, still in pajamas, the dog nosing hopefully at their ankles.

"Hon," Desmond said, passing her the mug.

"Hon," she agreed.

Later they drove nowhere in particular for an hour, windows down, the radio finding and losing stations. It was not Nebraska. It was, they both privately decided, enough.


Marisol found the receipt tucked in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries — a faded slip from Tortilla Flats, dated seven years ago that week. She brought it into the living room where Dev was untangling the lamp cord.

"Look," she said. "Our first date. You paid eleven dollars for chips and salsa."

"I paid eleven dollars for the privilege of watching you eat all of them," he said, taking the receipt. He held it up to the window light like it might be worth something.

They'd talked vaguely about doing something for the anniversary. Dev wanted to drive up to the cabins on the lake, but the cabins were booked and the drive was four hours each way, and Marisol had a deposition Monday morning she couldn't move.

"We could just go back to Tortilla Flats," she said.

"It closed. There's a vape shop there now."

She sat on the arm of the couch. Outside, a neighbor's dog was losing its mind at a delivery truck. "Okay. What if we cook the thing you made me the first time you cooked for me?"

Dev thought about it. "The chicken that was still frozen in the middle?"

"You've improved."

He laughed. They ended up at the Korean market on Grand, arguing pleasantly about whether the recipe had included scallions. At home Marisol chopped and Dev handled the pan, and they ate at the kitchen table instead of the couch, which felt like effort, which felt right. He'd bought a bottle of wine that cost more than the original date.

Later, doing dishes, Marisol said, "Seven years."

"Seven years." Dev handed her a plate to dry. "You want to do something bigger next year? Ten's coming."

"Ask me in three years."

"That's not a no."

"It's not," she agreed, and put the plate away.