The Fifteenth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *Don't stop for takeout* — and felt suddenly unsure whether that had been charming or bossy.

She hung up the coat and started the sauce. Fifteen years ago, in a rented apartment in Cleveland with a stove that only had two working burners, she had made the same thing badly, and Mark had eaten all of it.

He came in at six-forty, later than he'd promised, carrying a paper bag.

"I said don't stop."

"It's not food." He set the bag down and pulled out a bottle of the cheap Chianti they'd drunk that first year, the kind with the straw basket. "They had it at the Giant Eagle. I nearly cried in the aisle."

"You did not."

"I nearly did. That's different."

She let him kiss her, and then handed him the garlic to mince, because he was better at it and they both knew it. He put on the radio instead of anything from a phone, and they worked around each other in the small kitchen the way they had learned to over fifteen years, hip to hip, one stepping back as the other reached.

They ate at the table instead of in front of the television. Mark told her about the argument he'd almost had with his brother; she told him about the woman at work who kept microwaving fish. Neither of them made a speech. Around nine, Dana put her feet in his lap and he rubbed the arch of her right foot, the one that always ached.

"Fifteen," he said.

"Fifteen," she agreed, and did not open her eyes.

The wine was terrible. They finished it anyway.


The Twentieth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *Don't eat, I mean it* — and felt a small, ridiculous flush of accomplishment.

She had the chicken out of the fridge before she took her shoes off. Twenty years ago tonight, in a rented apartment in Bloomington with a radiator that clanked like someone was trapped inside it, Michael had made her roast chicken and undercooked potatoes and asked her to marry him somewhere around the second glass of wine. She'd said yes with her mouth full.

He came in at six-forty, snow on his shoulders, holding a paper bag.

"You cooked," he said.

"Don't sound so shocked."

"I'm not shocked. I'm strategizing." He set the bag down and pulled out a bottle of the same terrible Chianti they'd drunk that night, the kind with the straw basket. "I had to go to three places."

Dana laughed. "That's disgusting. We're drinking all of it."

They ate at the kitchen table instead of the dining room, because the dining room had become a staging area for their daughter's college boxes. Michael carved badly, the way he always had. Dana told him about the woman at work who'd tried to microwave a hard-boiled egg. He told her the transmission was making a noise again.

Afterward he washed and she dried, hip to hip at the sink, and he said, "Twenty."

"Twenty," she agreed.

"You want to watch something?"

"I want to sit down."

So they sat on the couch with the lamp on and the television off, and Dana put her feet in his lap, and Michael held her ankle absently the way he'd been doing for two decades, and neither of them said anything else for a long while.


The rain started around four, which meant the grill was out. Dana stood at the kitchen window watching water bead on the patio umbrella and reconsidered the whole plan.

"We could do the oven," Marcus said, coming in with the grocery bag still hooked on his wrist. "Broil them. It's not the same, but."

"It's fine. It was always about the potatoes anyway."

He laughed. Ten years ago, on their second date, she'd made him a baked potato at eleven at night because it was the only thing in her apartment, and he'd eaten it standing up at the counter and said, unwisely and truthfully, that he could see himself doing this for a long time. She had not let him forget it. Every anniversary, potatoes.

She scrubbed them while he pulled the steaks out and salted them heavily, the way his father had taught him, and they moved around each other in the small kitchen without collision, a choreography twelve years in the making. The oven ticked as it heated.

"Your mother called," Marcus said. "She wanted to know if we were going out."

"What did you tell her?"

"That we were staying in. She said that was sad."

"It's not sad."

"I know it's not sad."

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room table had a jigsaw puzzle on it, half finished, a lighthouse. Dana had opened a bottle of wine that had been in the cabinet since her promotion and it turned out to be nothing special, and they drank it anyway. Outside the rain kept on steadily.

Later Marcus washed and Dana dried, and she leaned against him for a moment, her forehead between his shoulder blades, and neither of them said anything, which was the point. Then she went to the dining room and found, after some searching, a piece of the sky.


Marguerite came home with the good bread, the kind with the hard crust that shattered when you cut it, and found Dev already at the counter with the shallots half-diced.

"You're early," she said.

"I left at four. Nobody noticed." He tipped the shallots into the pan and they went quiet, then loud. "Did you get the cheese?"

"I got two. The one you like and the one I like."

Twenty-two years ago that night, they had eaten at a diner on Route 9 because it was the only place open after the movie, and Dev had said something about how he didn't want to date anyone else, and Marguerite had said okay in a voice so flat he asked her twice if she meant it. They had not gotten married until four years later, but this was the anniversary they kept. The wedding one belonged to their families. This one was theirs.

She set the table with the cloth napkins, which meant something, and lit the two squat candles from the hall closet. Outside the kitchen window the neighbor's motion light kept clicking on for nothing.

"Do you want music?" she asked.

"Not really."

"Good. Me neither."

They ate slowly. Dev had overdone the garlic and said so before she could, and she said she liked it that way, and it was half true. He asked about her sister. She asked whether he was going to take the job in Albany, and he said he was leaning toward no, and she said she'd figured, and neither of them pushed further, because there was time.

Later he washed and she dried, standing close in the narrow galley, bumping hips, not apologizing for it.

"Twenty-two," he said.

"Twenty-two," she agreed, and hung the towel on the oven door.


The Twelfth Year

The reservation had been canceled two weeks ago, when Dana realized she'd rather not spend their anniversary shouting over a bistro's espresso machine.

"You're sure?" Michael had asked. "Twelve years feels like a restaurant year."

"Twelve years feels like a stay-home year," she'd said, and he'd been quietly relieved.

Now it was Saturday, six-fifteen, and their kitchen in the rented half of a duplex in Grand Rapids smelled like garlic and scorched butter. Michael was hunched over the stove in a t-shirt, poking at scallops with the intensity of a man defusing something.

"They're supposed to be golden," he said. "These are the color of a manila envelope."

"That's a color." Dana came in from the dining room, where she'd been setting out the good plates — a wedding gift from his aunt, used maybe nine times. She had a bottle of prosecco under one arm and their old iPod dock in the other hand. "Do you remember the playlist from the reception?"

"I remember your cousin requested 'Free Bird.'"

"I made a new one." She plugged it in. Something slow and unfamiliar came on, and Michael raised his eyebrows at her over his shoulder.

"This isn't reception music."

"No. This is us-now music."

They ate at seven, sitting catty-corner instead of across, because the table was too long and the distance felt formal. The scallops were fine. The asparagus was better. Michael told the story of their first apartment's broken radiator and Dana corrected two details, as she always did, and he let her, as he always did.

Afterward she washed and he dried, and when the last pan was in the rack he put his hands on her hips and they swayed in the small space between the sink and the refrigerator, not really dancing, just moving, until the song ended and neither of them stepped away.


Marcus got home first, which almost never happened. He stood in the kitchen with the grocery bag still in his hand, looking at the counter where Dana had left a note under the salt shaker: *Don't order anything. I'm cooking. — D.*

He laughed out loud in the empty house. Twelve years, and she still thought she could beat him to it.

By the time she came through the door at six-fifteen, he had the chicken already browning, the good wine open, and her note pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like Ohio.

"You're a criminal," Dana said, dropping her bag by the stairs.

"You left the note where I'd see it. That's entrapment."

She came up behind him and looked over his shoulder at the pan. "You're going to overcook that."

"I have never once overcooked chicken."

"Thanksgiving, 2019."

"That was a turkey. Different animal entirely."

She took the wooden spoon out of his hand anyway, and he let her, and went to set the table. They'd agreed on no gifts this year — the roof had eaten the budget in March — and no restaurant, because the last three anniversaries had involved parking garages and waiting for a table while both of them pretended they weren't tired.

They ate at the kitchen table instead of the dining room, because the dining room was where the tax paperwork lived now. Dana lit two candles that didn't match. Marcus told her about the argument he'd lost at work, and she told him about the woman in her building who'd started leaving passive-aggressive notes about the recycling, and somewhere in the middle of it she reached over and put her hand on his wrist for no particular reason.

Later, doing dishes, he asked if she'd wanted something bigger.

Dana handed him a plate to dry. "This is the bigger thing," she said. "It just doesn't look like it from outside."


The Fifteenth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning—*Don't make plans*—and felt suddenly foolish, like a teenager.

She had the salmon out and the oven preheating when Marcus came through the door at 6:40, carrying a paper bag from the wine shop on Cortland.

"You went to Bianchi's," she said.

"You said don't make plans. You didn't say don't buy wine." He set the bag down and kissed the side of her head. "Also I got the bread. The seeded one you like."

"I already got bread."

"Then we'll have two breads. It's an occasion."

They cooked without much talking, moving around each other in the narrow galley kitchen with the practiced choreography of eleven years in the same apartment. Marcus did the green beans because Dana always overcooked them. Dana did the fish because Marcus was afraid of fish. At some point he put on the Bill Withers record his brother had given them, and she laughed, because it was the same one they'd played that first winter in the place on Halsted, when the radiator clanked all night and they didn't care.

"Fifteen years," he said, pouring.

"Fifteen years since the courthouse. Seventeen since the bus stop."

"I'm counting the bus stop."

"You always count the bus stop."

They ate at the small table by the window. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped. Dana talked about her sister's new job; Marcus complained about a contractor. Neither of them made a speech.

Later, clearing plates, he said, "Was this what you wanted? Just this?"

She handed him a dish to dry. "This is exactly what I wanted."


The Twentieth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning—*Don't eat, I mean it*—and felt a small satisfaction that Marcus hadn't crumpled it up.

She started the sauce before she took her shoes off. Twenty years ago they'd eaten spaghetti out of the same pot in a studio apartment on Winslow Street because they'd spent everything on the deposit. Marcus had burned his tongue and pretended he hadn't.

He came in at six-forty, tie already loosened, holding a paper bag against his chest like something fragile.

"You went to Rossi's," she said.

"I went to Rossi's."

"We agreed. Nothing extravagant."

"It's a loaf of bread." He set it down and kissed the side of her head. "And a very small cake."

"How small?"

"Personal-sized. For two people who are personally very hungry."

She let it go. He rolled up his sleeves and took over the garlic, because he was better at it and they both knew it, and she moved to the table with two candles she'd found in the hall closet, half-burned from some Thanksgiving.

"I looked up what twenty is," Marcus said. "China. As in dishes."

"We have dishes."

"That's what I told the internet."

They ate slowly. The radiator knocked. Somewhere upstairs the neighbor's dog turned in circles. Dana talked about the impossible woman in accounts payable, and Marcus told her about a kid at the hardware store who'd asked him how to hang a shelf and then argued with the answer.

At nine they split the cake, which was in fact very small.

"Twenty," Dana said.

Marcus reached across and put his hand over hers, the way he did, not saying anything, and that was the whole evening, and it was enough.


The Twenty-Fifth

Marion got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning—*Don't stop at the store, I mean it*—and felt the particular satisfaction of a plan not yet ruined.

She had the salmon in the refrigerator, the good vinegar, the bottle of Riesling they'd bought in Michigan in August and forgotten about. Twenty-five years. It seemed both impossible and unremarkable, like most true things.

Dennis came in at six fifteen, snow on his shoulders, holding a paper bag.

"You went to the store."

"I went to Aldrich's," he said. "That's a bakery. Legally distinct."

She took the bag from him. Inside was a small round cake, white, with nothing written on it. She had expected something with piping, something embarrassing.

"They wanted to put our names on it," he said, reading her face. "I said no."

"Good."

He hung up his coat and rolled his sleeves and started on the potatoes without being asked, the way he had for a quarter century, and she stood at the stove with the pan heating and thought about the apartment on Delaware Avenue where the oven only worked if you held the door shut with a chair.

They ate at the kitchen table, not the dining room. Marion had considered the dining room and decided against it. Halfway through, Dennis raised his glass and then couldn't think of anything, and lowered it again.

"That's all right," she said.

"I had something."

"You'll have it later."

Outside, the snow kept on. He remembered it around ten, standing at the sink with a dish towel, and told her, and she said it was worth waiting for, and mostly meant it.


The rain started around four, which Marisol took as a good sign. Rain meant Danny wouldn't be able to work on the fence, and she'd have him to herself all evening.

She got home first and found the good plates already out, which meant he'd left work early too. He was in the kitchen with his sleeves pushed up, doing something aggressive to a chicken breast with a mallet.

"You're pounding it too thin," she said.

"I'm pounding it correctly." He didn't look up. "Twelve years ago you told me you liked a man who could cook."

"Eleven. And I said I liked a man who could *order*."

He laughed at that, finally, and she came around the counter to take the mallet from him. They'd done this dance before—she cooked, he narrated. Tonight she let him keep the chicken and started on the salad instead, tearing romaine while he told her about the guy at the shop who'd tried to sell him a boat.

Eleven years since the courthouse. There had been no wedding, technically. Her mother still brought it up. But there had been that Tuesday in March, the two of them and Danny's brother as witness, and afterward pancakes at a diner on Route 9 that had since become a vape shop.

They ate at the table instead of in front of the TV. Danny had bought a bottle of wine that cost more than he'd admit to, and they drank most of it. Around nine she found the old photo on her phone—the two of them outside the courthouse, both squinting, her hair unfortunate.

"We looked like children," she said.

"You looked beautiful."

"I looked twenty-six."

He took the phone from her, studied it a moment, then set it face-down on the table and reached for her hand.


Marcus came home from the hardware store with a bag of charcoal and the wrong kind of onions, which Dana pointed out before he'd finished setting down his keys.

"Sweet, I said. These are yellow."

"They're onions."

"They're for the salsa." She held one up like evidence at a trial, then laughed and set it on the counter. "Fine. We'll survive."

Fifteen years ago that night, they'd met at a friend's cookout in Tulsa, where Marcus had burned every burger on the grill and Dana had eaten one anyway to be polite, then admitted three weeks later that it had tasted like a tire. They'd built a small tradition around it — no restaurant, no crowd, just the two of them and whatever Marcus could manage over coals in the backyard.

He got the chimney starter going while she chopped. Their house in Fort Collins sat on a corner lot with a fence he kept meaning to stain. The evening went gold, then blue. Somewhere down the block a kid was practicing trumpet, badly.

"Do you want the good plates?" she called through the screen door.

"We're eating outside."

"That's not an answer."

She brought the good plates. They ate at the picnic table with a citronella candle between them, and the burgers were, Dana noted, only slightly overdone, which she called personal growth. Marcus said fifteen years was a long time to wait for a compliment.

After, they sat with the plates pushed aside. Dana put her feet in his lap. He asked if she remembered what she'd been wearing that first night and she said yes, a green sundress with a broken strap she'd safety-pinned in the car. He said he remembered the safety pin.

"You did not."

"I did. I thought, that woman has a plan."

She let that sit a moment. Then she reached over and took his hand, and neither of them said anything for a while.


The Anniversary

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the good cutting board that morning, and tried to remember whether they'd agreed on salmon or the chicken thing with the lemons.

Salmon. She'd texted him a picture of the recipe at 11:40, between meetings.

By the time Marcus came in, shaking rain off his sleeves, she had the oven preheating and a bottle of wine sweating on the counter — not the expensive one they'd been saving, because they'd learned in year six that saving things was mostly a way of never having them.

"Ten years," he said, hanging his coat on the chair instead of the hook. She let it go.

"Ten years of you doing that with your coat."

He kissed the side of her head and took over the asparagus, because he cut it more evenly and they both knew it. They worked around each other in the narrow galley kitchen with the unconscious choreography of a decade — she stepped left, he stepped right, neither of them looking up.

They'd talked about going out. There was a place downtown with a tasting menu and a three-week wait. But Marcus had said, honestly, that he'd rather not spend their anniversary being handed small plates by a stranger, and Dana had been so relieved she'd laughed.

They ate at the table instead of in front of the TV. Marcus told the story about the flat tire on their second date, which he told every year, and Dana corrected the details, which she also did every year.

Afterward he washed and she dried, and she said, "Same time next year?"

"I'll pencil you in," he said, and handed her a plate.


The Twentieth

Marguerite got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter she'd wiped that morning, and decided the evening would begin with the good tablecloth.

By the time Dev came in, stamping November off his shoes, she had the linen down and was arguing with a candle that refused to stand straight in its holder.

"You're supposed to be stuck in traffic," he said.

"Sanders canceled the four o'clock. I took it as a sign."

He set down two grocery bags. Inside: a bag of arborio rice, a container of stock, a wedge of parmesan, and a bottle of the Barolo they'd had in Turin on a trip they'd taken when they were poorer and younger and hadn't understood how expensive the wine was until the check came.

"Risotto," she said. "You know that means standing at the stove for forty minutes."

"I know. That's the point. We can talk while I stir."

So he stirred and she sat on the counter beside him with her shoes off, feeding him ladles of stock when he held out his hand. They talked about the leak in the upstairs bathroom, about whether Tess would come home for Christmas or stay in Denver with the new boyfriend, about the strange fact that twenty years had gone by and neither of them had noticed it happening except in retrospect, all at once, the way you notice a hill only after you've climbed it.

The candle finally stood. They ate at the table instead of in front of the television. The wine wasn't as good as they remembered.

"It's better," Dev said, "because we're not worried about the check."

Marguerite laughed and refilled his glass. Outside, the first hard rain of the season started, and neither of them got up to close the window.


The kitchen still smelled like garlic when Dana came in from the garage, shaking rain off her coat. Ren was at the stove, sleeves pushed up, stirring something with the wooden spoon that had been splitting along the handle for three years.

"You're early," he said.

"I left the last invoice for Monday." She hung her coat on the hook by the door, the one they'd argued about installing and now couldn't imagine living without. "What is that?"

"Cacio e pepe. Or an attempt."

"Twenty years ago you microwaved a hot dog for me and called it dinner."

"Twenty years ago you ate it."

She laughed and got the wine down from above the refrigerator, a bottle they'd bought on a trip to the Finger Lakes and kept meaning to open. Ren had already set the table—two plates, the cloth napkins from the drawer nobody opened, a candle in a jam jar because the actual candlesticks had gone missing sometime during the last move.

"Cara called," Dana said, working the corkscrew. "She wanted to know if we were doing anything fancy."

"What did you tell her?"

"That we were staying in and you were cooking, and she said that sounded sad, and I said she'd understand in thirty years."

Ren tasted the sauce, made a face, added pepper. "It broke a little."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine, but it's edible."

They ate at the table instead of in front of the television. Outside, the rain kept up against the windows. Dana talked about her sister's move; Ren mentioned the leak under the bathroom sink, then apologized for mentioning it.

"Don't," she said. "That's the whole thing, isn't it. Leaks and invoices."

He refilled her glass. "Happy anniversary."

"Happy anniversary." She reached across and put her hand over his, and they sat there a while, letting the pasta go cold.


The Fifteenth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the counter: the good cutting board, the bottle of Sancerre they'd been saving without ever deciding what for.

Marcus texted from the car. *Ten minutes. Did you get bread?*

*Obviously not,* she wrote back, and then, *There's the heel of the sourdough.*

*Tragic.*

By the time he came in, she had the radio on low and was searing scallops badly, the pan too crowded, the way he always told her not to. He didn't say anything about it. He set down a paper bag—bread, and a small carton of the lemon sorbet she liked—and hung his coat on the chair instead of the hook.

"Fifteen years," he said.

"Fifteen years of you not using the hook."

He moved behind her, took the tongs out of her hand, and turned the scallops one by one. She let him. She poured the wine into the jelly glasses because the real glasses were somewhere in the boxes they still hadn't unpacked from the move in April.

They ate at the kitchen table, not the dining room, because the dining room had become where Marcus's mother's things were stacked since February. Dana asked about the deposition. He asked whether the Hartley account had come through. Then they stopped doing that.

"Do you remember the mice?" she said.

He laughed, surprised. Their first apartment in Providence, the mice in the oven drawer, Dana standing on a chair at two in the morning, furious and delighted.

"You said you'd never live anywhere with a basement again."

"I lied."

Afterward they sat on the couch with the sorbet between them and one spoon, arguing mildly about whether to start the next episode. They didn't. Marcus fell asleep first. Dana turned off the lamp and stayed a while, listening to the house settle.


The Twenty-Fifth

Diane got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *Don't stop at the store, I've got it* — and felt a small satisfaction that Martin had listened for once.

She had it, technically. A rotisserie chicken, a bag of the good rolls, and the bottle of Chianti they'd been saving since Rob's wedding. Twenty-five years didn't seem like it should be marked with a rotisserie chicken, but they'd agreed: no restaurant, no crowd, no driving forty minutes to Providence to eat food they'd have to comment on.

Martin came in at six-twenty, snow on his shoulders, holding a paper bag against his chest like something breakable.

"You said don't stop at the store."

"This isn't the store. This is the bakery."

He set it down and unrolled the top. Inside was a small round cake, white frosting, no writing on it. Diane looked at it a while.

"They wanted to put something on it," he said. "I couldn't think what."

"That's fine. That's better."

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room was still full of boxes from her mother's house. Martin poured the Chianti into juice glasses, the stemware being packed somewhere, and Diane didn't say anything about it. He asked if she remembered the reception hall having that awful blue carpet, and she said it was green, and he said no, blue, and neither of them cared enough to look it up.

Afterward they sat on the couch and she put her feet in his lap, the way she did, and he held them without especially noticing he was doing it. The furnace kicked on. Outside, the snow kept up, quiet and steady, and neither of them got up to close the curtains for a long time.


The Twelfth Year

Renée got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning: *Don't eat. I mean it.*

By six-fifteen she had the chicken in the oven and the good plates down from the top shelf, the ones from Marcus's grandmother that they used maybe twice a year. She was reaching for the wine when she heard his key.

"You cooked," he said, setting down a paper bag.

"I cooked. Don't look so amazed."

"I'm not amazed. I'm suspicious." He kissed the side of her head and pulled a bottle out of the bag—the same cheap Malbec they'd bought the night they moved into the apartment on Delaware Avenue, back when they had one fork between them and ate off a cardboard box. He'd tracked it down at three stores.

Renée laughed out loud. "You didn't."

"Nine dollars. It's gone up."

They ate at the table instead of in front of the TV. The chicken was slightly dry and neither of them mentioned it. Marcus talked about a coworker's disastrous retirement party; Renée told him about the woman at the pharmacy who'd asked if she was a nurse and then wouldn't accept that she wasn't.

Twelve years since the courthouse. No photographer, no flowers, her mother furious about the short notice and then crying anyway.

"You want to do something?" Marcus asked, clearing the plates. "There's still time to catch a movie."

Renée considered it. Outside, a car alarm went off and stopped.

"No," she said. "Let's stay."

So they stayed. He washed, she dried. Later they sat on the couch with the second half of the terrible wine and argued pleasantly about whether the chicken had been dry, and it was, by any measure, an ordinary Thursday, and neither of them would have traded it.


Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter, and then she took the coat off and started pulling things out of the refrigerator.

By the time Danny came in at six-forty, there was a pot of water going and the good tablecloth—the one his mother had given them, cream-colored, faintly ridiculous—laid over the small table by the window.

"You beat me," he said.

"Only because Ruthie canceled her four o'clock."

He set down a paper bag. Inside was a bottle of the same cheap Chianti they'd drunk ten years ago in the apartment on Delancey, when the radiator had banged all night and neither of them slept.

"You didn't," she said.

"They still make it. It's still terrible."

She laughed and took two water glasses down from the cabinet, because they'd broken one wineglass in the move and never replaced the set. Danny found the corkscrew in the drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus. He poured while she dropped pasta into the water and stirred it with a wooden spoon.

They ate slowly. Outside, someone was scraping ice off a windshield. Marisol told him about a patient who had cried in her office over a dog, and Danny told her about the argument he'd lost at work and how he'd been right anyway. She reached over and took a piece of bread off his plate without asking, which was a thing she had done for a decade.

"Ten years," he said.

"Ten years since the courthouse. Eleven since Delancey."

"I'm counting the courthouse."

"You would."

He refilled her glass. She put her feet up on the empty chair. Nobody called, and they didn't turn on the television, and the evening went on like that a long while.


The rain had started around four, and by six it had settled into the steady drum that Marguerite always associated with October in Portland. She stood at the kitchen counter, sleeves pushed to her elbows, working butter into flour with her fingertips because Dev insisted the pastry cutter made the crust tough.

"You're going to overwork it," he said from the doorway, still in his work clothes, tie loosened.

"I've made this pie eleven times."

"Twelve." He set his bag down and came to stand beside her, close enough that she could smell rain on his jacket. "You made one the night before we signed the mortgage. You just didn't let anyone eat it."

"It was a disaster."

"It was a disaster," he agreed, and kissed the side of her head.

Twenty years. It seemed both impossible and entirely unremarkable, the way a mountain looks small from far enough away. They had discussed going out — there was a place on Alberta that Dev's coworkers wouldn't shut up about — but Marguerite had said she'd rather stay in, and he'd admitted, with some relief, that he would too.

He changed into a sweater and took over the filling, slicing apples thin the way she liked, dropping the peels into the compost bin. They didn't talk much. The oven ticked as it heated. At some point he put on the record she'd given him for his fortieth, and they moved around each other in the small kitchen with the particular choreography of people who have shared a space for a long time.

"I found the photos," he said eventually. "From Crater Lake. You look about fourteen."

"I was twenty-six."

"You looked fourteen."

She flicked flour at him. Later they ate the pie on the couch, plates on their knees, listening to the rain, and neither of them said anything about how fast it had gone.


The rain started around four, which meant the grill was out. Dana stood at the kitchen window watching water bead on the patio umbrella and considered whether disappointment was worth the energy.

"We could do the oven," Marcus said behind her. He had the steaks out already, still in butcher paper, and a dish towel over his shoulder. "Four-fifty, cast iron, finish with butter. Honestly it might be better."

"You've been saying you'd grill for two weeks."

"I've been saying a lot of things for two weeks." He set the package down. "Ten years, Dana. I'm not going to let a low-pressure system ruin it."

She turned from the window. The kitchen still had the half-painted wall they'd been arguing about since March—a swatch of greenish gray they'd both agreed on and then both quietly hated. She'd stopped noticing it most days. Tonight she noticed.

"I got the wine," she said. "The Oregon one. From that place in Dundee."

Marcus looked up. "The one we drove three hours out of the way for?"

"Two and a half."

"It was three."

She got the glasses down while he heated the pan, and the smoke alarm went off exactly as they both knew it would, and Marcus waved the towel at the ceiling while Dana opened the back door and let in the wet air and the sound of rain on the gutters. The steaks were good. They ate at the actual table instead of the couch, which felt slightly formal, slightly like a performance of being people who ate at tables.

Afterward Dana refilled both glasses. Marcus put his hand flat on the table, palm down, and she covered it with hers.

"Ten years," she said.

"Ten years." He tipped his glass toward the half-painted wall. "Next one we finish that."

"You said that last year."

"I did," he agreed, and neither of them moved.


The Twelfth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter, trying to remember whether they'd agreed on cooking or ordering. Twelve years. The number seemed both enormous and unremarkable.

She was slicing a lemon when Marcus came through the door, holding a paper bag against his chest like something fragile.

"You beat me," he said.

"Barely. Traffic on Cermak was a nightmare."

He set the bag down and pulled out a bottle of the same cheap prosecco they'd drunk on the courthouse steps in 2012, when neither of them had money for anything better. He'd been calling liquor stores for three days to find it.

Dana laughed out loud. "Oh, no. Oh, that's terrible."

"It's historically accurate."

They made pasta together, badly, the way they always did—Marcus overcooking the garlic, Dana adding too much salt and then trying to fix it with more water. Neither of them mentioned the argument from Tuesday, which had been about the dishwasher and had not actually been about the dishwasher. It sat in the room with them, deflating slowly.

Over dinner Marcus asked what she remembered most from that day, and Dana said the judge's tie, which had cartoon fish on it, and the way Marcus's hands had shaken.

"They did not shake."

"Marcus. They shook."

He conceded. He poured the prosecco, which was every bit as bad as they remembered, and they drank it anyway.

Afterward they moved to the couch and put on a movie neither of them watched. Dana fell asleep against his shoulder around ten-thirty. Marcus stayed awake a while longer, letting his arm go numb rather than move her, thinking that twelve years was a long time and also nothing at all, and that he would very much like to see how far this went.


The Fifteenth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She set the grocery bag on the counter—two ribeyes, a bag of arugula, the ugly heirloom tomatoes Peter liked because he said the ugly ones tasted better—and stood for a second in the quiet of the kitchen, listening to the refrigerator hum.

By the time Peter came in at six, shaking rain off his jacket, she had the cast iron heating and the radio tuned to the station that played standards on Friday nights.

"You beat me," he said.

"Barrett canceled. First good thing that man's ever done for me."

Peter kissed the side of her head and went to change out of his work clothes. When he came back in a T-shirt, he took over the steaks without being asked, because he was better at them and they both knew it, and Dana washed the arugula and sliced the tomatoes thick, laying them out on the blue platter they'd gotten as a wedding present from his aunt Ro, who had since died.

"Fifteen years," he said, pressing a steak with the flat of the spatula. "You know what they say. Crystal."

"Nobody says that."

"Somebody says it. There's a whole list."

"Did you get me crystal?"

"I got you a card and a bottle of the Malbec you like." He glanced over. "And I fixed the closet door."

Dana laughed. "That's the crystal."

They ate at the table instead of the couch, which felt like an occasion. Rain kept up against the window. Peter refilled her glass, and she told him about the client who cried in a conference room, and he told her about his brother's new obsession with kayaks, and neither of them looked at a phone.

Later she found the card propped against the sink. He'd written, *Still you.*


Marguerite found the recipe card in the drawer where they kept the takeout menus, still stained with olive oil from twelve years ago. She set it on the counter and started pulling things from the refrigerator.

"You're really doing it," Owen said from the doorway. He'd come home early, tie already loosened.

"I said I would."

"You said that last year." He crossed the kitchen and took the shallots from her hands. "Let me. You always cut too thick and then you complain about the texture."

She let him. She poured two glasses of the Rioja they'd been saving, which had probably turned by now, and set one near his elbow. Outside, the November dark came down over the neighbor's fence, over the grill they'd never covered for winter.

Twelve years since the courthouse. Nine since the house. Four since the year they didn't talk about, when Owen slept in the study and Marguerite learned every crack in the bedroom ceiling.

"It smells wrong," she said, leaning over the pan.

"It smells like it's supposed to. You just remember it wrong." He tipped in the wine. "You remember everything a little wrong."

"That's a terrible thing to say to your wife."

"It's a kind thing. You remember the bad parts wrong too."

She laughed and set the table, the good plates, no candles because Owen thought candles at dinner were theatrical. They ate at the small table by the window, not the dining room, which they only used when her sister visited. The chicken was good. Better than she remembered, which proved his point, though she didn't say so.

Afterward he washed and she dried, and they stood at the sink not talking, the radiator ticking in the next room. When the last pan was put away he kissed the side of her head, briefly, the way he had ten thousand times.

"Same again next year," he said.

"Same again," she said.


The Twentieth

The pot roast had been in since two, and by six the whole house smelled like Sunday even though it was a Thursday. Diane stood at the counter slicing carrots thinner than she needed to, just to keep her hands busy.

"You're overdoing the carrots," Michael said from the doorway. He'd changed out of his work clothes into the gray sweater she'd given him three Christmases ago, the one with the loose thread at the cuff she kept meaning to fix.

"I'm being precise."

"You're nervous."

She set the knife down. "It's twenty years, Michael. That deserves precision."

He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at the cutting board, then reached past her for the bottle of wine they'd been saving—a Napa cabernet a friend had given them in 2019, sitting in the pantry ever since waiting for an occasion.

"You're opening that?"

"If not now, when? We'll be too old to taste it."

She laughed and let him work the corkscrew while she set the table, two plates instead of five. Their oldest was in Chicago, the twins at their grandmother's for the night. The dining room felt enormous.

They ate slowly. Michael told the story of their wedding again, the part where the caterer's van broke down on Route 9 and her uncle drove out with his truck to save the day. She'd heard it four hundred times. She let him tell it.

Afterward they carried their glasses into the living room and put on a record instead of the television. Diane pulled her feet up under her on the couch. Michael sat close enough that his shoulder touched hers.

"Twenty," he said.

"Twenty."

Outside, a car went by, headlights sweeping the wall. Neither of them got up to close the curtains.


The Fifteenth

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *Don't buy anything. I mean it.* Marcus had drawn a small skeptical face beneath it.

She started the water for the pasta. Fifteen years ago they'd eaten spaghetti out of the same pot in an apartment on Vernor with a radiator that clanked like someone was trapped inside it. They'd had eleven dollars between them and a card table someone had left in the alley.

The front door. Marcus came in shaking rain off his jacket, holding a paper bag against his chest like a football.

"That better not be anything," Dana said.

"It's bread." He set it down. "Bread is a food group, not a gift."

"Uh-huh."

"And a candle. One candle. It was two dollars."

She let it go. He found the corkscrew in the drawer that stuck, and she pretended not to watch him fight with it, the way his jaw set, the gray coming in at his temples now, thicker this year than last. He got the cork out and made a small triumphant noise, and she laughed at him, and he pointed the corkscrew at her like a warning.

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room had become a place where mail went to die. Marcus told the story about the card table, which she had heard four hundred times and would have been disappointed not to hear.

"You said you'd give it two years," she said.

"I said *at least* two years. I was managing expectations."

Outside, the rain kept on. Dana reached across and put her hand over his, and neither of them said anything for a while, which was the point.


The Twelfth Year

Nadia got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, taking inventory: the good olive oil, half a lemon, a package of scallops she'd bought on impulse at the Whole Foods off Route 9. Twelve years. Not a round number, not the kind that made people throw parties. That was exactly why she'd wanted it quiet.

By the time Elias came through the door at six-forty, she had the burners going and the radio on low, some station out of Amherst playing a live set from decades ago.

"You cooked," he said, setting down his bag. "I brought a pie. From that place near the clinic. I panicked."

"What kind?"

"Blueberry. It's February. I have questions about it too."

He rolled his sleeves and started on the salad without being asked, the way he'd been doing since their first apartment in Somerville, the one with the radiator that clanged like someone was trapped inside it. He was slower now. His knuckles had started giving him trouble in the cold, and he'd stopped pretending otherwise sometime last spring.

"Do you remember what we ate?" Nadia asked. "That night."

"Chinese. From the place that closed."

"You said you'd never seen anyone eat lo mein so aggressively."

"You were nervous."

"I was starving. There's a difference."

They ate at the small table, not the dining room, because the dining room was where they put the mail. The scallops were slightly overdone. Neither of them mentioned it.

Afterward, Elias washed and Nadia dried, and she told him about the argument with her department chair, and he told her about a patient who'd brought him tomatoes in a coffee can. The pie was better than it had any right to be.

At ten they went upstairs. The house settled. Outside, it began, very lightly, to snow.


Marcy found the recipe card in the back of the drawer, still stained with butter from twenty-five years ago. Her mother's handwriting, the pot roast they'd eaten the night Daniel proposed in the cramped kitchen of his apartment on Fillmore Street.

"You're actually making it," Daniel said, coming in from the garage with a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. He had grease on his knuckles from adjusting the mower blade, and he washed his hands for a long time at the sink.

"Don't get excited. I've never gotten the gravy right."

"Nobody gets the gravy right. That's the point of the gravy." He set the bottle on the counter and pulled the paper down. Not champagne—a bottle of the terrible sweet red they'd bought for eleven dollars at the corner store in 1999, because it was all they could afford and neither of them knew anything about wine.

"Where did you even find that?"

"Same place that makes everything. The internet." He looked pleased with himself, which was his most reliable expression.

She browned the roast while he set the table, and then he stood behind her at the stove with his hand flat on her back, not moving it, watching the meat go dark at the edges. Outside, the neighbor's dog was carrying on about something. The kids were both at school in different states and had both called that morning, dutiful and rushed.

"Twenty-five," Marcy said.

"You want to say something profound?"

"Not particularly."

"Good." He reached past her and turned the burner down before it scorched. "I never know what to say either. I just keep showing up."

She let the spoon rest against the pot. Later the gravy would break, and they would eat it anyway, and it would be fine.


The rain had started around four, and by six it had settled into the steady drum that Nadia loved. She stood at the kitchen window watching it bead on the glass while the pot of water came to a boil behind her.

"Do we have the good salt or just the box salt?" Owen called from the pantry.

"There's a difference?"

He emerged holding a small ceramic jar like evidence in a trial. "Your mother gave us this. Two Christmases ago. It's flaky."

"Then use it. Use all of it. Live dangerously."

They were making the same meal they'd made the night they moved into the apartment on Fulton Street eleven years ago—cacio e pepe, badly, because it had been the only thing either of them knew how to cook and they'd had exactly one pan. That night the pasta had come out gluey and they'd eaten it sitting on the floor between boxes, laughing, half-drunk on a bottle of wine someone's aunt had sent.

Owen cracked pepper into the skillet and it bloomed, sharp and green-smelling. Nadia reached past him for the tongs and he shifted his hip to let her in, a small choreography they'd worked out over years without ever discussing it.

"Do you want to do gifts before or after?" she asked.

"We said no gifts."

"I know what we said."

He grinned. "Mine's in the closet. Behind the vacuum."

"Mine's under the bed, so I win on effort."

They ate at the table with the lamp on low, because the overhead light was unforgiving and they'd both admitted, separately and then together, that they were vain about it. The pasta was better than it had been in 2013. Not perfect. Slightly clumped on one side.

"Still gluey," Owen said.

"Tradition," said Nadia, and refilled his glass.


The Anniversary

Dana got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *Don't eat, I'm cooking* — and felt a small flare of satisfaction that Mateo hadn't crossed it out and written something smart underneath.

Fifteen years. Not the wedding, which came later, but the night in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen in Marshalltown when he'd said, "I think I want to do this with you," and she'd said, "Do what," just to make him say it out loud.

She had chicken thighs, lemons, a bag of good bread from the place on Third. She turned on the oven and shed the coat.

Mateo came in at six-forty with his tie loosened and a paper bag under one arm. "You're cooking," he said, unnecessarily.

"I said I would."

"I know. I brought insurance." He set the bag on the counter and pulled out a bottle of the Portuguese red they liked, plus a smaller bag from the bakery. "Also I got the almond thing. Don't argue."

"I wasn't going to argue about cake."

He washed his hands and started on the salad without being asked, tearing lettuce while she pulled the pan out. They didn't talk much. Somebody's dog was barking two houses down. The kitchen window went from blue to black.

They ate at the table instead of in front of the TV, which was the whole ceremony, really. Halfway through, Mateo said, "Do what," in a decent imitation of her twenty-four-year-old voice, and Dana laughed so hard she had to put her fork down.

Later she found him asleep on the couch with the cake untouched. She woke him up. They ate it standing in the kitchen, in the dark.


The rain started around four, which Elena took as a sign she'd made the right call canceling the reservation.

"Twelve years," Marcus said, setting the grocery bag on the counter. "And we're eating at home like a couple of retirees."

"We *are* practically retirees. You fell asleep during the news last Tuesday. Sitting up."

"That was a long Tuesday." He pulled out a package of pork chops, the good mustard, a bag of shallots. "Besides, you're the one who wanted this."

She was. The restaurant would have meant driving into the city, valet parking, a server named Chad describing the provenance of a beet. Twelve years ago they'd gotten married at the courthouse on a Thursday afternoon and eaten fried chicken from a gas station on the way home, because Marcus's cousin's wedding the following weekend had already eaten their budget. It had been, they agreed later, a better meal than most.

Elena put on the Chet Baker record, the one with the scratch in the third track that they'd both stopped hearing years ago. She poured wine into the jam jars they used when the real glasses were dirty, which was most of the time.

"Shallots or onion?" Marcus asked.

"You already bought shallots."

"I'm asking if I *should* have bought shallots."

"Then yes. Obviously yes."

He cooked. She sat on the counter beside the stove, close enough that he had to work around her knees, and told him about the woman at work who'd started bringing a parrot to the office. He laughed in the wrong places, which she'd come to find endearing.

They ate at the kitchen table with the overhead light off, just the stove hood and a candle Elena found in the junk drawer, a leftover from someone's birthday. The pork was slightly overdone. Neither of them mentioned it.

Afterward, Marcus washed and Elena dried, and the rain kept on against the window, steady and unremarkable and theirs.


Marguerite found the receipt still tucked in her wallet, soft as cloth from eleven years of being moved between billfolds. Twenty-two dollars and fourteen cents. Two plates of pancakes, coffee, and the slice of lemon pie they'd split at a diner outside Bloomington because neither of them had wanted the night to end.

"You still have that thing," Desmond said, coming in from the garage with a paper sack of lemons.

"It's an artifact. It belongs in a museum."

"It belongs in a landfill. It's going to disintegrate." He set the lemons on the counter and started rolling them under his palm, the way his mother had taught him, to loosen the juice. "Zester's in the drawer by the stove."

They had agreed on no restaurant. Eleven years wasn't a round number, and a Tuesday wasn't a Saturday, and the whole appeal of the thing was that it would be nobody's business but theirs. Marguerite made the crust while Desmond juiced. She overworked it slightly, the way she always did, and he didn't say anything, the way he always didn't.

The pie went in. They ate leftover chili standing up, because the table was covered in the tax paperwork neither had touched since April. Desmond put on the record she'd bought him for his birthday, and they danced badly in the four feet of open floor between the couch and the bookshelf, her socked feet on the cold spot where the vent blew.

"I would've married you at that diner," she said into his shirt.

"You'd have been the only one there in a windbreaker."

"You'd have worn one too. Out of solidarity."

The timer went off. The pie came out too dark at the edges and perfect in the middle. They ate it out of the dish with two forks, sitting on the floor, and did not save any for tomorrow.


The rain started around four, which Marcus took as a good sign. Nobody would expect them to go out in weather like this.

He'd left work early to get the chicken marinating. Twenty-five years ago, Delia had made him this exact dish—paprika, too much garlic, lemon—in her apartment on Sedgwick Street, and he'd known within three bites that he was going to marry her. She'd burned the rice that night. He'd eaten it anyway.

She came in at six, shaking water off her coat, and stopped in the doorway.

"You're cooking."

"Don't sound so alarmed."

"I'm not alarmed. I'm suspicious." She hung the coat on the hook by the door, the one he'd been meaning to remount for two years. "I got the wine. The Spanish one."

"The one we couldn't afford."

"We still can't." She set the bottle on the counter and looked at what he was doing to the chicken. "You're not going to sear that first?"

"I never sear it first."

"You always sear it first."

He handed her the tongs. This was the arrangement, more or less, and had been since the beginning: he started things, she corrected them, and somewhere in the argument the thing got done. She seared the chicken. He opened the wine and poured two glasses and put on the record they'd danced to at the reception, which skipped now in the second verse.

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room had become a place where mail went to die. Delia asked if he remembered the rice. He said he remembered everything, which wasn't true, but was true enough.

Later, she fell asleep on the couch with her feet in his lap and the rain still going. He didn't wake her. He sat there a while, doing the arithmetic, and found he couldn't make twenty-five years account for how fast it had gone.


The Twentieth

Marguerite got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, considering the counter — the mail, the bowl of pears going soft, the spatter of tomato sauce from Tuesday that neither of them had wiped up.

She wiped it up. Then she took off her coat.

By the time Desmond came in at six-forty, she had the good plates down from the top shelf and was arguing with a bottle of wine they'd been saving so long the label had faded at the corner.

"You didn't have to cook," he said, setting down a paper bag.

"I didn't. I heated. There's a difference." She nodded at the bag. "What's that?"

"Bread. And a thing." He pulled out a small potted plant, some kind of succulent, sitting in a blue ceramic pot. "The florist was closed. This was the gas station."

Marguerite laughed — the real one, from the chest. "It's hideous."

"It's resilient."

"It's the two of us in a pot." She set it on the windowsill, adjusted it twice, and left it slightly crooked.

They ate at the table instead of the couch. Twenty years ago they'd eaten at a folding table in an apartment in Somerville, using a bath towel as a tablecloth because they hadn't unpacked. Desmond brought that up. Marguerite said she remembered it differently — she said the towel was his idea and he'd been very proud of it.

"I was proud of it."

"You were insufferable."

They didn't put music on. The radiator ticked. Outside, someone's dog was losing an argument with a squirrel.

At nine Marguerite fell asleep sitting up, glasses still on. Desmond took them off her face, folded them, and set them beside the ugly little plant.


Marisol got home first, which was rare. She set the grocery bag on the counter—the good bread, a wedge of taleggio, the tomatoes that had cost too much for February—and stood a moment in the quiet of the kitchen, listening to the radiator tick.

Twenty years. Not their wedding; that anniversary came in September and they always let it pass with a card and a decent bottle of wine. This was the other one, the February night in a Milwaukee bar when Dev had spilled half a beer on her sleeve and then talked to her until closing about a documentary neither of them had actually finished watching.

He came in at six-thirty, stamping snow off his boots. "You bought the expensive tomatoes."

"I bought the expensive tomatoes."

"Good." He hung his coat, kissed the side of her head, and started pulling down the heavy pan. They'd argued about dinner earlier in the week—he'd wanted to drive into the city, get a table somewhere with cloth napkins. She'd said she didn't want to spend the night parking. He'd relented faster than she expected, which told her he hadn't really wanted to go either.

They cooked mostly in silence, the practiced kind. He handled the pasta; she made the salad and opened the wine and put on the record he'd given her four Christmases ago. When they sat down, he raised his glass and couldn't think of anything to say, so he just said, "Twenty."

"Twenty," she agreed.

Later they moved to the couch. She put her feet in his lap. He asked if she remembered what he'd been wearing that night, and she said a terrible gray sweater, and he said it wasn't terrible, and she said it was, and neither of them was entirely sure who was right, and it didn't matter.

The snow kept falling. They stayed up later than they meant to.


The rain started around four, which meant the grill was out. Nadia found Marcus in the kitchen at five-thirty, already improvising, a cast-iron pan heating on the back burner.

"Twelve years," he said, without turning around. "You'd think I'd have learned to check the forecast."

"Twelve years and you still can't." She set down the bottle she'd picked up on the way home—not expensive, but the one they'd had at that restaurant in Asheville, the one with the wobbly table. She'd hunted three stores for it.

He turned then, saw the label, and made a face she'd known since they were twenty-six. "You remembered the wobbly table."

"I remembered you put a matchbook under it and it still wobbled."

They cooked around each other in the way of people who had negotiated the same eight square feet for over a decade. He seared the steaks; she made the salad she always made, too much lemon, the way he liked it. Somewhere in the middle she put on the record he'd given her their first Christmas together, and he groaned, because the second track had a skip and always had.

They ate at the kitchen table instead of the dining room. The good plates stayed in the cabinet. Outside, the rain kept up its steady noise against the window over the sink.

"I got you something," Marcus said, "but it's stupid."

"Everything you get me is stupid."

He handed her a small box. Inside was a matchbook, folded in half, from a restaurant in Asheville that had closed in 2019. He'd found it in a drawer while looking for batteries in March and had been sitting on it for four months.

Nadia laughed, and then didn't, and turned it over in her fingers a long moment.

"Twelve years," she said.

"Still wobbly."

"Still here."


Marisol got home first, which almost never happened. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter and trying to remember whether they owned candles that weren't emergency candles.

By the time Danny came through the door at six-forty, she had found two tapers in a drawer, still wrapped in cellophane from someone's wedding, and set them in juice glasses because they didn't have holders.

"You're cooking?" he said.

"I'm boiling water. It's different."

He set down a paper bag and pulled out a bottle of the cheap Malbec they'd bought the first time they went to a liquor store together, back when buying wine had felt like an adult thing they were pretending to do. He'd had to go to three stores to find it.

"Oh, no," Marisol said, delighted. "That stuff is terrible."

"It was terrible then, too. That's the point."

Fifteen years. Not their wedding anniversary—that was in June—but the anniversary of the night she'd knocked on his apartment door in Providence at eleven-thirty with a duffel bag and no real plan, and he'd stepped aside and let her in. They'd never agreed which anniversary mattered more. They celebrated both.

Danny took over the sauce because Marisol had a habit of walking away from things on the stove. She sat on the counter beside him with her wine, swinging her heels lightly against the cabinet door, telling him about a woman at work who'd started bringing a parrot to Zoom meetings.

They ate at the small table by the window. The candles burned crooked. Somewhere around nine, Danny got up to put on a record and didn't sit back down; he held out a hand instead, and Marisol looked at him like he was ridiculous, and then took it.

The kitchen still smelled like garlic. Neither of them minded.


The Tenth Year

Dana got home first, which was unusual. She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, looking at the counter where she'd left the note that morning — *Don't buy anything. I mean it.* Marcus had circled "anything" in red pen and drawn a question mark.

She took off her coat and started the rice.

He came in at six-forty, carrying a paper bag that clearly contained a bottle of wine, which technically counted as something but which they had agreed, years ago, existed outside the rules.

"Ten years," he said, setting it down.

"Ten years since a courthouse and a sandwich."

"It was a good sandwich."

Dana laughed and handed him the cutting board. He'd gotten better at chopping over the decade — she remembered the first apartment, the way he'd hacked at an onion like it owed him money. Now he worked steadily, scraping garlic off the knife with his thumb, and she watched him for a second longer than she needed to.

They ate at the kitchen table because the dining room had become a place where mail went to die. Marcus poured the wine. Dana told him about the woman at work who'd cried over a spreadsheet. He told her about the dog he'd seen wearing sunglasses.

"Do you want to do the thing?" he asked, after.

The thing was a list. Every year, ten items, one for each year, things they'd want to remember. They'd started it as a joke in year three and now it was a legitimate ritual with a legitimate notebook.

Dana got up for a pen. Marcus stacked the plates in the sink and left them there, because it was an anniversary.

They sat on the couch. She wrote the first two. He argued about the third. Outside, a car alarm went off and stopped.

It took them an hour to get to ten.


The rain had started around four, and by six it had settled into the steady drum that Marguerite liked best. She stood at the kitchen window with a dish towel over her shoulder, watching the gutters run.

"Twenty-two years," Dan said behind her. He was pulling the roasting pan out of the oven, chicken skin gone amber, the lemon halves collapsed underneath. "You want to eat in the dining room or on the couch?"

"Couch." She turned. "Dining room feels like we're waiting for someone else to show up."

He laughed at that. He'd been laughing more since he retired from the district in June, which was a relief; she'd braced for the opposite. He carved the bird right on the stovetop, sneaking a piece of the crispy part and burning his fingers, same as he did every time.

She poured the wine, a Rioja their daughter had sent from Chicago with a card that said *don't save it*. They'd saved it four months anyway. Now she pulled the cork and it came out clean, and she considered that a good omen.

They ate with the plates on their knees and the TV off. Dan told her about running into Ted Klosterman at the hardware store, how Ted had asked after her by her maiden name, which nobody had used since 1997. Marguerite told him she'd finally called about the gutters, actually called, and had a man coming Thursday.

"Look at us," he said. "Living."

Afterward she put on the record he'd given her the first Christmas, the Sam Cooke, which skipped in the same place it always had. They didn't dance. They sat with their shoulders touching and let it play through, and when the needle lifted, Dan said he'd get the coffee, and she said not yet, and they stayed where they were a while longer.


Marcus found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. Fifteen years old, faded to the color of weak tea, but he could still read the venue name.

"Hey," he called toward the kitchen. "Remember the Fillmore?"

Denise came out drying her hands on a dish towel. She took the stubs, held them at arm's length the way she did now with everything, and laughed. "You spilled beer on that woman's boots."

"She forgave me."

"She did not. She moved."

They stood in the hallway of the house they'd bought four years ago in Sacramento, the one with the crooked back fence and the lemon tree that produced more than they could give away. Their anniversary was Saturday. Neither had brought it up yet, which was its own kind of conversation.

"I was thinking dinner somewhere," Denise said. "Somewhere with cloth napkins."

"We could." Marcus took the stubs back. "Or."

She waited. He'd always needed the extra beat.

"Or we drive to the coast. Bodega. Get a room, walk out to the rocks, eat clam chowder out of a bread bowl like tourists."

Denise considered this. She thought about the restaurant she'd half-imagined, the good dress hanging in the closet, the way she'd wanted, briefly, to be seen. Then she thought about wind, and the particular quiet of Marcus driving, one hand on the wheel, saying nothing for twenty minutes and it being fine.

"Both," she said. "Coast on Saturday. Dinner the following weekend, when it's cheaper."

"Practical."

"One of us has to be."

He put the stubs on the hall table instead of back in the box. She noticed, and didn't say anything about it, and later that night when she passed by she moved them to the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a lemon.


Marcus found the box in the back of the closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: the receipt from the Walgreens where they'd bought a disposable camera on their first anniversary, back when they were broke and living in the apartment above the laundromat in Providence.

"You kept this," Nadia said from the doorway. She'd come up to see what was taking so long.

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

She sat on the floor beside him. Twenty-five years. Her mother had already called twice this week asking what they were doing to celebrate, and both times Nadia had said they were still figuring it out, which was true.

"Rosalie thinks we should go to Portugal," Marcus said.

"Rosalie thinks everyone should go to Portugal." Nadia turned the receipt over. The ink had gone brown. "What do you want?"

He considered it honestly, which was one of the things she'd always appreciated about him — he didn't reach for the easy answer.

"I want to drive to Providence," he said. "See if the laundromat's still there. Eat somewhere terrible. Come home."

"That's it?"

"That's a lot. That's eight hours in the car with you."

Nadia laughed. She'd been braced for a proposal involving reservations and a dress code, some performance of significance that would leave them both exhausted and vaguely disappointed.

"The laundromat's a vape shop now," she said. "Deshawn sent me a picture last year."

"Then we'll look at the vape shop."

"And eat somewhere terrible."

"Non-negotiable."

She put the receipt back in the box. Downstairs, the dog was barking at something, probably nothing. Marcus stood and offered his hand, and she let him pull her up, and neither of them mentioned that they'd have to leave by six to beat the traffic, because they both already knew.


Marcus found the box of photographs while looking for the extension cord. He carried it to the kitchen table where Dana was grading papers, red pen tucked behind her ear.

"Twenty years," he said, setting it down. "You want to look?"

She capped the pen. "That depends. Are we doing dinner at Bellini's or are we doing something?"

They'd been circling the question for weeks. Their daughter had offered to fly in from Denver, but that felt like turning the anniversary into a performance. Marcus had floated a weekend in Charleston, which Dana pointed out would mean two days of him complaining about parking.

She opened the box. On top was a photo from the courthouse in Ann Arbor—her in a green dress she'd bought at a thrift store, him in a jacket borrowed from his brother, both of them squinting because the February sun had come out unexpectedly. Behind them, a stranger walking a dog.

"We didn't have anything," she said.

"We had eleven hundred dollars and a Corolla."

Dana turned the photo over. Someone, probably her mother, had written the date in ballpoint.

"What if we just went back," she said.

Marcus looked at her.

"Not a big thing. Drive up, find the courthouse, get a hamburger. See if that diner's still there—the one with the terrible coffee."

"That's eight hours in a car."

"We used to do it in nine, with a broken heater."

He was quiet a moment, thumbing through the rest of the pictures. Then he laughed at one—Dana asleep in the passenger seat, mouth open, a road atlas over her chest.

"I'll drive the first half," he said.

"You'll drive the whole thing. You never let me merge."

"You don't merge. You negotiate."

She put the photo in her shirt pocket and went back to grading. He started looking up motels, and found one, and didn't tell her the price.


Marisol found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from a hardware store in Tucson, dated August 14, eleven years ago. Two gallons of paint, a roller, a drop cloth.

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

Dev looked over from the kitchen table, where he was pretending to do the crossword. "That was the weekend we painted the apartment."

"That was the weekend we *ruined* the apartment. Remember the ceiling?"

"I remember you laughing so hard you sat down in the paint tray."

They had been married two years by then, broke and stubborn, convinced that a coat of terracotta on rental walls would fix something neither of them could name. It hadn't. But they'd stayed, and something had shifted anyway.

Now the anniversary was three weeks out. Thirteen years. Not a milestone anyone made a fuss over.

"We could do the steakhouse," Dev offered. "Wear real clothes. Order the thing with the bone in it."

Marisol considered it. Thirteen years ago she'd have said yes immediately. Now she found herself thinking about the paint.

"What if we did the hallway," she said.

Dev put down his pen. "The hallway."

"It's been beige since we moved in. You hate it. You've said so, roughly nine hundred times."

"I've said so *once*, memorably, and you've never let it go."

But he was already looking down the hall, squinting at it the way he did when he was measuring something in his head.

They went to the paint store that Saturday and argued for forty minutes over two nearly identical greens. Marisol won. Dev bought the more expensive brushes out of spite.

On the fourteenth, they laid down a drop cloth and worked until dark, radio on, dinner forgotten until nine. There was a smear of green on Dev's forearm and one on the back of Marisol's neck, and neither of them mentioned it until much later.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. October 14, 2009. The Fillmore. She sat back on her heels in the hall closet and laughed, because she'd forgotten the band entirely but remembered the rain afterward, and Dev holding his jacket over both their heads while they waited for the bus that never came.

"Fifteen years," she said, carrying them into the kitchen.

Dev was scraping the burnt part off a piece of toast, which he did every morning and refused to acknowledge as a pattern. He took the stubs, held them at arm's length, then closer. "I thought you hated that band."

"I did. I still came."

"We should do something," he said. "Something real. Not just dinner."

They spent the next two weeks negotiating. Dev wanted to fly somewhere — Lisbon, maybe, where neither of them had been. Marguerite pointed out that the water heater was making a sound, and that his mother's surgery was in November, and that she had a deposition on the seventeenth she couldn't move.

"So we do nothing," he said, not bitterly, just tired.

"I didn't say nothing."

What they landed on, eventually, was this: they took the Friday off. Both of them. They drove out to the coast with no reservation, stopped at a diner that turned out to be closed, ate gas station sandwiches on the hood of the car, and walked on a beach that was too cold for walking. Marguerite's hair kept getting in her mouth. Dev found a sand dollar, intact, and gave it to her like it was a ring.

They were home by nine. The water heater still knocked.

"That was good," she said, from the bathroom doorway, toothbrush in hand.

"That was good," he agreed.

He kept the ticket stubs in his wallet after that, though he never mentioned it, and she never asked.


Marisol found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Ten years old, faded to the color of weak tea, from a movie neither of them could remember the plot of — only that Devon had spilled an entire large Coke on her shoe during the previews and apologized for forty minutes afterward.

"We could go back," he said that night, standing at the stove, stirring something that was mostly garlic. "The theater's still there. I drove past it in March."

"It's a vape shop now."

"It is not."

"It absolutely is. There's a neon palm tree in the window."

He turned off the burner. "Well. Then that's out."

They ate at the kitchen island because the dining table had become a place where mail went to die. Marisol proposed a trip — somewhere with a beach, somewhere they'd never been. Devon did the math out loud, gently, the way he always did when he didn't want to say no directly: the transmission, the deductible from his mother's surgery, the fact that neither of them had taken real vacation days in two years.

"So nothing," she said, not angry, just tired.

"I didn't say nothing." He got up and came back with a legal pad. "Ten years. What if we did ten things? Small ones. One a month. Cheap. Stupid, even."

She looked at the blank page for a while. Then she took the pen from him and wrote *1. Drive to the ocean and don't get out of the car.*

He laughed. "Why not get out?"

"Because it's January and we'll be miserable and we'll remember it forever."

He wrote *2. Learn to make my grandmother's rice.* Then handed the pen back.

They filled six lines before bed. The last four they left empty on purpose, and the notepad stayed on the counter for a year, collecting grocery lists in the margins.


Marcus found the shoebox while looking for the Christmas lights. Inside, beneath a tangle of receipts, was the paper napkin from Delgado's, the one Priya had drawn on the night he proposed—a lopsided sketch of a house with too many windows.

"We could go back," he said, bringing it to the kitchen where she was cutting the ends off green beans. "Ten years. Same table if they still have it."

Priya set down the knife and studied the napkin. "That place closed. Two years ago, remember? It's a vape shop now."

"Right." He leaned against the counter. "So a nice restaurant, then. The Italian place downtown."

She wasn't sure. Ten years felt like it deserved something with more weight than a two-hour dinner and a drive home, both of them full and quiet and slightly disappointed by the tiramisu. She said as much, and Marcus nodded, because he'd been thinking it too but hadn't wanted to be the one to complain about a plan he'd made.

They spent that evening not deciding. Priya floated a weekend in Asheville; Marcus pointed out that Grace had a swim meet. Marcus suggested skydiving, which Priya greeted with a look that ended the conversation.

It was Priya who thought of it, three days later, standing in the driveway. "What if we finished the deck?"

Marcus had started it four summers ago. The frame stood, weathered gray, holding up nothing.

"That's not romantic," he said.

"It's a little romantic."

So they spent the anniversary weekend at the lumber yard, then in the backyard with a borrowed miter saw, arguing about joist spacing and drinking beer that got warm too fast. Grace brought them sandwiches. By Sunday evening the deck existed, imperfect, one board slightly proud of the others.

They sat on it as the light went orange. Priya put her feet in his lap.

"Next year," Marcus said, "the railing."


Marcus found the calendar on the refrigerator, the tenth of October circled in blue ink twice, once by him and once, later, by Priya. Fifteen years. He stood there holding the milk until it started to sweat.

"We could go back to the Adriatic Grill," Priya said from the hallway, still in her work clothes, pulling one earring out. "Except it closed. In 2019."

"Everything closes."

"So that's out." She dropped the earring in the dish by the door, the way she had every evening for eleven years in this house. "Roland offered to take the kids. Both nights."

Marcus considered the ceiling. Somewhere above them, their daughter was practicing scales badly on purpose. "We could drive up to that cabin. The one with the woodstove that almost killed us."

"It didn't almost kill us."

"You said the phrase 'carbon monoxide' four times."

"I was being thorough." Priya took the milk from him and put it away herself, because he'd been holding it for a full minute. "I don't want to drive four hours. I want to be here, honestly. I want to make the lamb, and I want you to make the bread that takes all day, and I want to eat at the actual table and not standing at the counter."

He hadn't expected that. He'd braced for a trip, for a plan, for logistics.

"The whole day," he said.

"The whole day. You start the dough in the morning. I'll do the marinade. We put the phones in a drawer."

"Roland will call."

"Roland can leave a message."

Marcus laughed, and then thought about flour on the counter, about the smell of the oven filling the kitchen for hours, about her hands next to his.

"Deal," he said, and she reached past him to write it on the calendar in her narrow careful print: *Home. All day.*


Marcus found the sticky note on the bathroom mirror at six-fifteen, in Dee's handwriting: *Ten years. What are we doing?*

He wrote underneath it: *Something. Coffee first.*

They'd bought the house in Ypsilanti nine years ago, a narrow blue thing with a porch that sagged on one side. The anniversary wasn't of the house, though. It was of a Tuesday in October when they'd stood in front of a judge in Ann Arbor because Dee's mother was sick and they hadn't wanted to wait for spring.

"We could do the restaurant thing," Dee said, pouring the coffee. She was already dressed for work, badge clipped to her collar. "The place with the scallops."

"You didn't like the scallops."

"I liked the bread."

Marcus laughed. He was still in his robe, grading papers he should have finished Sunday. "What do you actually want?"

She sat down across from him and thought about it. Outside, someone's leaf blower started up.

"I want to go back to the courthouse," she said. "Not for anything. Just to stand outside it. And then I want to get sandwiches and sit in the car like we did after, because we didn't have money for a lunch."

"We had eleven dollars."

"We had eleven dollars and you bought me a Coke."

He set the pen down. "That's it? That's the whole plan?"

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

"I hate the scallops."

So on Saturday they drove the fourteen miles, and the courthouse looked smaller than either of them remembered, the way buildings do. They stood on the sidewalk for maybe four minutes. Dee took a picture of the doors on her phone. Then they got turkey sandwiches from a deli on Liberty and ate them in the parked car with the windows down, arguing pleasantly about whether the tree across the street was a maple or an oak.

It was a maple. Marcus was right, and Dee let him say so twice.


Marguerite found the box in the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside were the paper napkins from the reception, still smelling faintly of the church basement, and a photograph of Dev with a smear of frosting on his collar.

"Twenty-five years," she said, when he came in from the garage with sawdust in his eyebrows. "What do you want to do?"

He'd been thinking about it. He always thought about things longer than he admitted. "The Perkinses did a cruise."

"We're not the Perkinses."

"No," he agreed, with relief.

They sat at the kitchen table and made a list, crossing things off almost as fast as they wrote them. Paris was too expensive this year, with the roof needing work. A party meant cooking for forty people, and Marguerite said she'd rather chew glass. Dev suggested renting the cabin at Lake Ouachita where they'd gone the first summer, and she reminded him that the cabin had burned down in 2011.

"I'd forgotten that," he said.

What they settled on was smaller. They would drive to the coast on a Thursday, when the motels were cheap and the beaches were empty, and stay three nights in the same town where Dev's aunt had lived. Marguerite wanted to eat oysters. Dev wanted to walk out on the jetty and not talk to anyone.

"And on Saturday," she said, "we should get our picture taken. A real one. Not a phone."

He looked at her over the top of his glasses. "You want to get dressed up."

"I want us to have one picture where we don't look surprised."

So they went. The oysters were good. The wind on the jetty was brutal and Dev loved it. In the photograph, taken by a bored young man in a strip-mall studio, Marguerite is laughing at something just out of frame, and Dev is looking at her, and neither of them looks surprised at all.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from a Cleveland theater, dated eleven years ago that October.

"Look what survived," she said, holding them up as Desmond came in from the garage, smelling like motor oil and cold air.

He took one and squinted. "That awful play. You cried."

"I did not cry. I had allergies."

"You cried through the whole third act." He set the stub on the counter carefully, the way he handled things he intended to keep. "Twelve years next month."

They'd talked around the anniversary for weeks. Desmond's sister kept suggesting a cruise. Marguerite's mother thought they should renew their vows, which felt to Marguerite like admitting the originals had expired.

"I don't want a party," Marguerite said. She was scrubbing a pan that didn't need scrubbing. "I don't want to explain to people why we're happy."

Desmond leaned against the doorframe. "The Hendersons are selling that canoe. Two hundred dollars."

"You've mentioned that canoe four times."

"Because it's a good canoe."

She laughed and turned around. He had grease on his forearm and gray coming in at the temples and she thought, not for the first time, that she'd chosen well without entirely knowing what she was doing at the time.

"Okay," she said. "The canoe. And that campground by the river where the bathrooms are terrible."

"They renovated the bathrooms."

"They did not."

"They put in a hand dryer."

So they went. They paddled badly for an hour, argued about which side of the river the current favored, and ate sandwiches on a gravel bar while a heron watched them with obvious contempt. Desmond fell in getting out of the boat. Marguerite laughed so hard she had to sit down in the mud.

Driving home, damp and sunburned, neither of them said anything about it being meaningful. It didn't seem necessary.


Marcus found the box of photographs on a Tuesday, while looking for the extension cord. Twenty-five years of them, most from before digital cameras made everything disposable.

"Look at this," he said, carrying a handful into the kitchen where Dee was rinsing lettuce. "Your mother's backyard."

She dried her hands and took the photo. Two people who looked absurdly young, standing under a rented white tent that had sagged in the July heat. Her dress had been her cousin's, altered twice.

"We were babies," she said.

"You were twenty-six."

"Like I said."

They'd been circling the question of the anniversary for a month. Their daughter Nia had offered to book them somewhere—Charleston, maybe, or a cabin in the Blue Ridge. Marcus had liked the idea for about four days. Then his knee started acting up again, and Dee's mother had another fall, and the whole thing began to feel like a chore they were assigning themselves.

"What if we didn't go anywhere," Dee said.

Marcus looked up.

"What if we just had people here. The way we did then. Your brother, Renee, the Okonkwos. Cook everything ourselves. Put the tent up in the yard if it doesn't rain."

"That's more work than Charleston."

"It is."

He turned the photograph over. Someone had written *July 1999* in ballpoint, in handwriting neither of them recognized anymore.

"I'd want to do the ribs," he said.

"I assumed."

"And no toasts. People stand up and get sentimental and I end up crying in front of Reggie."

"You cried at Nia's graduation."

"Which is my point."

Dee went back to the lettuce. Marcus stayed at the table, sorting photographs into piles that made sense only to him, and after a while she heard him laughing at something, and didn't ask what.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from a 2009 showing of a movie neither of them could remember liking.

"Fifteen years," she said, holding them up as Dev came in from the garage, still smelling like motor oil.

He squinted. "That's not our anniversary. That's the second date."

"The one where you spilled Coke on my shoe."

"You said it was fine."

"It wasn't fine. They were suede."

He laughed and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Their actual anniversary was three weeks out, and they'd been circling the question for days without landing on anything. Her sister kept sending links to resorts in Sedona. Dev's mother had offered to watch the dog, which felt like pressure.

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

Marguerite sat down at the table and turned the stubs over in her hand. "I don't want dinner. I want—" She stopped, trying to find it. "I want to do something we'll actually remember. We've had a hundred dinners."

Dev dried his hands and sat across from her. Outside, the neighbor's sprinkler ticked against the fence.

"What about the drive," he said. "Up 101. The one we did before we moved here, when we were trying to decide."

She looked up. They'd stopped at every terrible roadside attraction between San Luis Obispo and Eureka. She'd gotten sunburned through the windshield. They'd argued about whether to take the job and then made up somewhere near Leggett, parked at an overlook, eating gas station sandwiches.

"That's four days," she said.

"I have vacation time."

"The dog."

"My mother's been begging."

Marguerite set the stubs on the table between them, side by side. "We'd have to leave Thursday."

"I'll book the first night," Dev said. "You pick the detours."

"All of them?"

"Every single one."


Marcy found the reservation confirmation crumpled in the junk drawer, half-buried under takeout menus and a dead flashlight. Their fifteenth anniversary was six days away, and Tom had apparently booked the Italian place downtown back in February and then forgotten to mention it.

"You made a plan," she said, holding up the paper when he came in from the garage, wiping grease from his hands.

He squinted. "I made a plan in a moment of optimism. Then Danny broke his wrist and we spent March at urgent care."

She set the paper on the counter and smoothed it flat. "I don't want to go downtown."

"No?"

"We'd have to park. And then we'd sit there being polite to each other under a fake grapevine." She looked up. "Fifteen years. That deserves better than a fake grapevine."

Tom pulled a chair out and sat, which he only did when he was actually considering something. "What did we do for the first one?"

"We ate cereal on the floor. We didn't have a table yet."

"Right. And you cried because you thought that was pathetic."

"It was pathetic."

"It was the best one," he said.

They ended up settling on Saturday, the whole day, no plans past breakfast. Danny would go to his grandmother's. They'd drive out to the reservoir where they used to go before the house, before the kid, and walk until they were tired of walking. Tom wanted to bring the good sandwiches from the deli on Lyle Street. Marcy wanted to bring the blanket that was too ratty for guests.

"And then dinner here," she said. "You cook. I'll stay out of it."

"You'll hover."

"I'll hover quietly."

He canceled the reservation Thursday. The hostess said congratulations anyway, and he thanked her, and hung up feeling absurdly, unreasonably pleased.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from the Orpheum, twelve years old, the ink nearly gone.

"Dev," she called. "Look what survived."

He came in from the garage still holding a wrench, squinted at them, and laughed. "You cried at that movie. You said it was allergies."

"It was allergies."

They had been talking around the anniversary for weeks. Fifteen years since the courthouse in Sacramento, since her mother's careful silence and his mother's overcompensating enthusiasm, since the two of them eating burritos on the hood of a car in a parking garage because they hadn't planned anything else.

"We could do the fancy thing," Dev said. "Ilaria keeps telling me about that place downtown with the tasting menu."

Marisol made a face. "Nine courses of foam."

"Nine courses of foam," he agreed. "Or?"

"Or we drive up to Tahoe. That cabin's cheap in September."

He set the wrench on the counter, which she would give him grief about later. "I was thinking something else. What if we did nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Not nothing. I mean—we take the Friday off. Both of us. We don't tell anyone. No phones after noon. I'll make the short ribs. You pick the records."

She considered it. Fifteen years of school pickups and sick days and one very bad autumn when his father was dying and they'd barely spoken except about logistics. A whole day where nothing was required of them felt more extravagant than foam.

"The good bourbon," she said.

"Obviously."

"And you have to dance with me. In the kitchen. That's non-negotiable."

Dev groaned, but he was already smiling. "One song."

"Three."

"Two, and I'll do the dishes."

Marisol slid the ticket stubs into her pocket, where they'd stay until she thought of somewhere better. "Deal," she said.


Marisol found the shoebox first, wedged behind the winter coats. Inside were the ticket stubs — a matinee, September 2009, some forgettable action movie that neither of them had watched much of.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen. "Do you want to do something?"

Daniel was scraping burnt bits off a pan. He looked up. "I thought we agreed we didn't do anniversaries."

"We agreed that when we were broke."

He set the pan down. "Fair."

They started with a restaurant, the way people do. Marisol found a place downtown with a tasting menu, and Daniel looked at the price and made a face that made her laugh, and then he said he'd pay for it if that's what she wanted, which she knew he meant.

"It's not what I want," she admitted. "I just couldn't think of anything else."

They sat with it for a few days. Daniel brought it up again on a Tuesday while they were folding laundry, which was when they talked about most things.

"What about the drive," he said. "The one we did after the wedding. We never made it past Amarillo."

Marisol paused with a towel half-folded. They'd been twenty-four and had a car with a broken air conditioner and a plan to see the Pacific. Her grandmother had gotten sick outside Amarillo and they'd turned around and driven eighteen hours home.

"That's a lot of days off," she said.

"I have days off. I never take them."

She thought about the two-lane roads, the terrible motels. She thought about how it would just be the two of them in a car for a week, which sounded either wonderful or unbearable.

"Okay," she said. "But we're getting a car with air conditioning."

Daniel smiled at the towels. "That was implied."

They left in October, and this time they made it to the ocean.


Marisol found the shoebox on the closet shelf while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the U-Haul they'd rented fifteen years ago to move into the duplex on Whitaker Street.

"Guess what I found," she called down the hall.

Dev came in with a dish towel over his shoulder. He turned the U-Haul receipt over in his hands. "Eighty-nine dollars. And I threw out my back carrying that awful futon."

"You made me carry the boxes of records."

"You volunteered."

They'd been arguing about the anniversary for two weeks, in the low-stakes way of people who have nothing serious to fight about. Dev wanted to go somewhere—Asheville, maybe, a cabin, a weekend of nothing. Marisol kept saying it felt wrong to spend that much when the water heater was making a noise.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. "What if we went back?"

"Back where?"

"Whitaker Street. Drive by the duplex. Then that Greek place we used to go, if it's still there."

Dev sat beside her. "Papou's closed. Like, eight years ago."

"Oh." She looked genuinely disappointed, which surprised him. Marisol was not sentimental. She threw out birthday cards.

"But," he said, "there's that place on Ninth that does the lamb. And we could get the good bottle. The one your sister gave us that we keep not opening."

"We're saving that."

"For what?"

She didn't have an answer. That was the thing about the good bottle.

So on the Saturday, they drove past the duplex—someone had painted the door red, which Marisol declared an improvement and Dev declared a crime—and ate lamb on Ninth, and came home and opened the wine on the back steps while the dog nosed around the fence line.

"Fifteen," Dev said.

"Feels shorter."

"Feels about right," he said, and she let him have it.


Marcus found the calendar page already circled in Diane's handwriting, three weeks out, the number twelve traced over twice in blue ink.

"You could have just told me," he said, holding it up.

She looked over from the sink. "I wanted to see if you'd notice."

"I noticed in March. I've been pretending not to notice since March."

Twelve years. They'd married in a courthouse in Sacramento with two witnesses from the DMV line and a lunch afterward at a diner where Diane had gotten mustard on her dress. Every anniversary since had been a negotiation between her instinct toward ceremony and his toward the practical.

"I was thinking Big Sur," she said. "Four days. The place with the deck."

"The place with the deck is nine hundred dollars a night now. I looked."

"You looked?"

"In March."

She dried her hands and sat down across from him at the kitchen table, which wobbled, which it had wobbled for six years. "Okay. What did you find while you were looking?"

He got out his phone and showed her: a cabin outside Mendocino, not fancy, a wood stove, an hour from anything. Three nights. Half the price.

Diane scrolled the photos slowly. "There's no cell service."

"No."

"You'd hate that."

"I'd survive it."

She kept scrolling. There was a picture of the kitchen, small and yellow, with a window over the sink facing trees.

"We could bring the good coffee," she said.

"I already ordered it."

She set the phone down and looked at him for a while, the particular look she'd been giving him since roughly year four, half exasperation and half something warmer she'd never named.

"Book it," she said. "And bring the mustard-colored dress."

"It's not mustard-colored. It has mustard *on* it."

"It has history on it," she said, and went back to the dishes.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, wedged behind a stack of extension cords. Inside were the ticket stubs, the receipt from the diner on Route 9, the photograph of the two of them squinting into the sun outside the courthouse in Albany.

"Ten years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Deon was scraping burnt cheese off the pan.

He wiped his hands and took the photo from her. "My hair was ridiculous."

"Your hair was aspirational." She sat on the counter, which he'd asked her a hundred times not to do. "So what do we do? Elena keeps sending me links to resorts in Tulum."

Deon leaned against the sink. "Do you want to go to Tulum?"

"I want to want to go to Tulum."

He laughed. "That's a no."

They talked through it over dinner, the way they talked through most things—circling, backtracking, letting the silences do some of the work. A big party felt exhausting; they'd hosted enough of those. A trip meant airports and dog boarding and the vague guilt of spending money they'd earmarked for the roof.

It was Deon who said it first, halfway through the dishes. "What about the diner? On Route 9. Is it still there?"

Marisol pulled out her phone. It was still there, though the reviews mentioned new owners and a remodel.

"We drive up," he said. "We eat bad eggs. We come home. We take a picture outside the courthouse and we look ridiculous again."

She thought about it. It was two hours each way, and the diner would probably disappoint them, and they'd argue about the route because he refused to trust the GPS.

"Yes," she said. "That."

They marked it on the calendar in the kitchen—Saturday the twelfth, *Route 9*—and Deon went back to the dishes, and she stayed sitting on the counter a while longer.