Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. The apartment smelled like garlic and roasting chicken, and outside the window the November dark had come early, streetlights blooming orange over the parking lot.

"They're going to be late," Dev said from the living room. He was on the floor with a screwdriver, tightening the leg of the coffee table, which had wobbled for eleven months. "Ana's always late."

"She has a kid now. Latenessis structural." Marisol tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted again. "Did you find the good napkins?"

"We have good napkins?"

"The cloth ones. My mother gave them to us."

Dev stood, brushed his knees, and went to the hall closet. He came back with a stack of pale green napkins that smelled faintly of cedar. "These?"

"Those."

He folded them badly and she let him. Four years in this apartment and she had learned which corrections mattered. The table was too small for six, so they'd pulled the desk from the bedroom and pushed it flush against the dining table, covered the seam with a tablecloth. It looked almost intentional.

"Wine's in the fridge," Dev said. "The white. Should I open the red now, let it breathe?"

"You just want to drink some."

"That is one of several motivations."

She laughed and handed him the corkscrew. He poured two inches into a glass for each of them, and they stood in the kitchen for a moment, not talking, the oven ticking. Marisol leaned her hip against him. He smelled like the shampoo they shared.

"I like this part," she said. "Before."

"Before's good," he agreed.

The buzzer went off, too loud, the way it always was. Dev set down his glass. Marisol pushed her hair back with her wrist and went to press the button, and then the stairwell filled with voices, and the evening started.


Miriam had been chopping cilantro for six minutes and still wasn't finished, because she kept stopping to check her phone.

"Ana says they're running late," she called toward the bathroom. "Which probably means an hour."

Devin came out, still buttoning his shirt, hair damp. "An hour's fine. The chicken's not going to be ready anyway."

He'd started the marinade at noon, confident, then discovered around four that their oven ran cold — a fact they'd both known for two years and forgotten again. Now the thermometer he'd bought in a panic at the hardware store sat on the middle rack like a small judgment.

"Can you find the good napkins?" Miriam asked.

"We have good napkins?"

"The blue ones. From your mother."

He knelt at the hutch, pulling out placemats they never used, a candle burned to a stub, a deck of cards missing the seven of hearts. The napkins were at the bottom, still creased in their original folds. He shook one out and it smelled faintly like cedar.

Miriam wiped her hands and went to the window. Their street was quiet, a few kids on the sidewalk, the neighbor's dog barking at nothing. She'd lived in three apartments before this one and hadn't hung a single picture in any of them. Here there were four, and a spice rack, and a chair Devin had refinished badly but earnestly.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she said.

"Five, plus the stool."

"That's six for seven."

He thought about it. "I'll sit on the cooler."

"You are not sitting on the cooler."

"I've sat on worse."

She laughed, and he came up behind her and put his chin on her shoulder, and for a moment they both looked out at the street doing nothing in particular. Then the timer went off, and the oven still wasn't hot enough, and they went back to work.


Marisol was slicing lemons at the counter when Dev came in from the garage carrying a folding chair under each arm.

"We're two short," he said. "Unless somebody wants to sit on the cooler."

"Ellie's bringing her camp chair. She offered." Marisol dropped the lemon rounds into a pitcher of water. "Did you text Kwame about the parking? He got a ticket last time."

"Told him to use the lot behind the church. He said, and I quote, 'bet.'"

She laughed. The kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter. On the stove, a pot of rice had gone quiet, and Dev lifted the lid, poked at it with a fork, and put the lid back on the way he always did — three times before he trusted it.

"Table or floors?" he asked.

"Floors. There's dog hair on the rug and Priya's allergic."

He went for the vacuum. Marisol wiped down the counter, then stood on a chair to get the good bowls from the top shelf, the ones her grandmother had shipped from Albuquerque in a box packed with newspaper. She'd broken one last spring and still thought about it.

Dev shouted over the vacuum. "Did we ever decide about the wine?"

"You said you'd handle the wine."

"I did handle it. I bought four bottles. I'm asking if that's enough."

"It's six people."

"So no."

He went out again, keys jingling. Marisol lit the candles on the windowsill, straightened the stack of mail into a neater stack of mail, and looked at the room — mismatched chairs, the couch they'd hauled up two flights together in July, the crooked print of a lake neither of them had visited.

The door opened. Dev came back with two more bottles and a bag of ice, sweating a little.

"Fifteen minutes," she said.

"We're fine."

They were, mostly. The doorbell rang eight minutes early.


Marisol wiped condensation from the kitchen window with her sleeve and watched the sleet make halos around the streetlights. Six-forty. Danny had said the roast needed to rest twenty minutes, which meant she'd been standing here at least ten too long.

"You're hovering," Danny said, coming up behind her with a stack of mismatched plates. They'd never gotten around to buying a matched set in the four years they'd shared the duplex on Fernwood, and now the chipped blue ones felt like part of the place.

"I'm supervising."

"You're worrying about Kendra." He set the plates down and started counting forks. "She said she's fine with it. People get divorced. She's not going to spontaneously combust over a dinner party."

Marisol turned the oven light on and off. "I put the good candles out."

"So she'll be well lit while she doesn't combust."

She swatted him with a dish towel, then took the towel back and dried the salad bowl properly, since he'd left water pooled in the bottom. In the living room, their dog had claimed the exact center of the couch, the one place four people needed to sit.

"Rufus. Off." Danny clapped once. The dog rolled onto his back instead.

Marisol found the wine opener in the junk drawer, under a phone charger and a takeout menu from a place that had closed in 2019. She opened the red so it could breathe, poured two fingers into a jelly jar, and handed it to Danny without asking.

"To not combusting," he said.

Headlights swung across the front window. Marisol heard car doors, then Kendra's laugh, too loud, cutting through the sleet, and Ben saying something about parking. Danny lit the candles with a grill lighter that took three tries.

"Ready?"

"No," Marisol said, and went to open the door anyway, wiping her hands on her jeans as she went.


Marisol found the wine glasses pushed to the back of the cabinet, three of them dusty from disuse. She ran them under hot water while Danny wrestled the leaf into the dining table, cursing softly when it caught on the track.

"You need help?"

"I need this table to have been designed by someone competent."

She dried her hands and came over, and together they eased it open. The gap closed with a satisfying thunk. Danny went to find the extra chairs from the basement, and she heard him bumping down the stairs, then back up.

The apartment smelled like garlic and browning onions. Marisol had started the sauce at four, which was probably too early — it had been simmering so long the tomatoes had gone dark and sweet. She tasted it, added salt, tasted again.

"Ruth's bringing her boyfriend," Danny said, setting a chair down. "The one who does something with logistics."

"Freight logistics."

"Right. What do we ask him about that?"

"You ask him how it's going and then he talks for eleven minutes and you nod."

Danny laughed. He'd showered but not shaved, and he was still wearing the shirt he'd had on all day, which she decided not to mention. He put on a record instead of the speaker, which she liked, and started folding napkins into rough triangles.

At six-forty she remembered the bread and swore. Danny grabbed his keys and was out the door before she finished explaining, back eleven minutes later with two baguettes and a bag of ice nobody had asked for.

"In case," he said.

The buzzer went off at seven-oh-five. Marisol looked at him — flour on her wrist, the sauce covered, the table long and set and a little crooked in the small room.

"Okay," she said.

He hit the button to let them in.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, wedged behind a stack of towels she'd been meaning to fold since Tuesday. She shook it out on the dining table, and a moth of dust caught the late afternoon light coming through the west window.

"Do we own napkins?" she called.

"Paper towels," Dev said from the kitchen. "Folded into triangles. Nobody's ever noticed."

"Priya notices."

"Priya notices because you tell her."

He was standing over the stove in the apron his sister had given him as a joke — KISS THE COOK, the letters cracked from the dryer — stirring a pot of dal that had been simmering since two. The rice cooker clicked over to warm. He tasted from the spoon, made a face, added salt, tasted again, and made a different face.

Marisol came in and reached past him for the wine opener, her hip against his. "Smells right."

"It's fine. It's not my mother's."

"Nothing's your mother's."

They'd lived in the duplex on Fourth Street for two years now, long enough that the landlord had stopped asking when they were going to make it official and long enough that they had a system: he cooked, she cleaned, and both of them pretended the bathroom was a shared responsibility. She'd scrubbed the sink at four. He'd hidden the mail pile in a drawer.

At six-fifteen the doorbell rang, twenty minutes early, and they looked at each other in the particular way of people who have just realized the candles are still in the grocery bag.

"Go," Dev said. "I'll do the candles."

Marisol wiped her hands on her jeans, checked her reflection in the microwave door, and went to open it. Behind her, a match struck. Voices came in on a wave of cold air, and the evening opened up like a door left ajar.


Marcus found the good tablecloth wadded in the back of the linen closet, wrinkled beyond salvation. He held it up to the kitchen light.

"Iron it," Dana said, not looking up from the cutting board. She was working through a pile of shallots, her eyes streaming.

"We have people coming in forty minutes."

"So iron fast."

He set up the board in the living room and worked at the creases while the apartment filled with the smell of butter and thyme. From the kitchen came the rhythmic knock of the knife, then a pause, then Dana swearing softly.

"You okay?"

"Nicked my thumb. It's fine." A beat. "It's mostly fine."

He abandoned the iron and found her running her hand under the tap. The cut was shallow but bleeding steadily. He got the bandages from the bathroom drawer, the good ones they'd bought after the last time.

"You always do this when we host," he said, wrapping her thumb.

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true."

She flexed her hand and went back to the shallots, one-handed and slower now. Marcus took over the wine situation — three bottles chilling, a fourth on the counter breathing, though he wasn't sure that was a real thing or just something people said. He put on a record, something instrumental, low.

At 6:40 Dana came out of the bedroom in the green sweater, hair still damp, and surveyed the table. Candles, the ironed cloth, mismatched chairs from three different apartments they'd lived in.

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

"Barely."

"I'll take barely."

The buzzer went off. Jonah and Priya, twenty minutes early as always, apologizing on the stairs. Dana handed Marcus the corkscrew and went to the door, wiping her palms on her jeans, and the noise of the evening came in with the cold air from the hallway.


Marcus wiped the counter for the third time while Dana stood at the stove, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon.

"More salt?" she asked, holding it out.

He blew on it, tasted. "More something. Acid, maybe."

She squeezed half a lemon in and tried again. Better. Behind her, Marcus was pulling wine glasses down from the cabinet above the fridge, the ones they only used when people came over, which lately felt like never. Dust had settled in the bowls. He rinsed them one at a time in the sink.

"Did Priya say seven or seven-thirty?" he called.

"Seven. But she's always late, so."

"So we have until seven-forty."

Their apartment was on the second floor of a converted house in Somerville, all sloped ceilings and radiators that clanked. They'd been there two years, since Dana's lease ended and it made more sense, financially, to combine. Neither of them had made much of the decision at the time. It just happened, the way most things did.

Marcus set the table with mismatched plates. He folded paper napkins into triangles, then unfolded them, then decided the triangles were fine.

"You're doing that thing," Dana said without turning around.

"What thing?"

"Where you fuss."

"I'm setting a table."

"You've set it twice."

He laughed. She was right. He put the napkins down and went to change out of his work shirt, and when he came back she had lit the two candles they'd gotten as a housewarming gift from his sister and never used. The kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter. Somewhere below, the front door of the building opened and closed.

"That's not them," Dana said. "Too early."

"Probably Steve from downstairs."

They stood there a second, listening. Then she handed him the spoon again, and he tasted, and this time he said it was perfect.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, wedged behind a stack of towels she kept meaning to donate. It smelled faintly of cedar. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev, in the kitchen, argued with a jar of capers.

"Did you buy the small ones or the big ones?" he called.

"The ones on the list."

"There were two kinds on the shelf."

"Then whichever one my hand touched first."

He held the jar up to the window light, decided it didn't matter, and dumped half of it into the puttanesca. The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt olive oil, which was how it always smelled when he cooked, and which she'd stopped minding sometime during the second year.

They'd been in the place on Fillmore for four years now. Her mother still asked, at Christmas, whether there was news. There wasn't. Marisol had a filing cabinet in the second bedroom and a name on the lease, and that had turned out to be enough.

"Vinnie's bringing his new girlfriend," Dev said.

"I know. Priya texted me. Apparently she's a vegetarian."

Dev stopped stirring. Marisol watched him do the math on the anchovies.

"There's the bread," she offered. "And I'll make a salad."

"You'll make a salad."

"I make an excellent salad."

"You put lettuce in a bowl."

She flicked a napkin at him and went to light the candles, which were mismatched and half-melted from Thanksgiving. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

At six-fifty, Dev came out of the bathroom in the blue shirt she liked, still damp at the collar. Marisol was straightening the chairs, six of them, two borrowed from the neighbors.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like our apartment."

"That's what I said."

The buzzer rang. She got the door. He turned down the burner and followed her.


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. Outside, October wind pushed leaves against the kitchen window of the little rental house in Sacramento she and Devon had signed for eighteen months ago, both of them nervous about the lease, both of them pretending not to be.

"They're going to be late," Devon said from the living room. He was on his knees, wrestling the leaf into the dining table, the one they'd bought secondhand and refinished badly. "Ravi is always late."

"Then we'll have wine before they get here."

"That's not a punishment for him. That's a reward for us."

She laughed and dumped the chopped cilantro into the pot of pozole she'd started that morning, using her aunt's recipe with the hominy and the dried guajillos she'd toasted until the whole house smelled like something worth staying home for. Devon came in behind her, smelling like the cedar of the table wax, and reached past her for a spoon.

"Don't," she said, and he did anyway, blowing on it.

"More salt."

"There is no more salt."

"There's always more salt."

He got the salt. She let him. That was how most things went between them: a negotiation that neither of them cared to win.

By six-fifteen the mismatched chairs were arranged, the good napkins found in a box in the closet, the playlist decided after four vetoes. Devon lit the candles too early and they'd be stubs by dessert. Marisol changed out of her flour-dusted shirt into a green sweater he liked, and he told her so, and she said nothing but touched his wrist on her way past.

The doorbell rang at six-forty. Ravi, holding a bottle and apologizing before the door was fully open.

"Told you," Devon said.

Marisol was already reaching for glasses.


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. Outside, October light slanted through the kitchen window of the rented duplex, catching the steam off a pot of beans.

"Did you salt these?" she called.

Dev appeared in the doorway with a stack of mismatched plates, one of them still bearing a faded cartoon rabbit from his childhood. "Twice. You told me twice."

"I said once. You said you'd forget."

"And I didn't." He set the plates down and nudged her hip with his own to reach the drawer for forks. They had lived together for two years in this narrow house on the east side of Columbus, long enough that their movements around each other had become a kind of choreography — she stepped left, he pivoted right, neither looking up.

The doorbell was broken, so their friends would knock. Dev had promised to fix it in April. Marisol had stopped mentioning it, which he found more damning than nagging.

"Six people," she said. "Is six too many chairs for that table?"

"We'll put Andre on the piano bench. He likes it."

"Nobody likes the piano bench."

Dev poured a bag of ice into a cooler on the back porch, wedging in beer cans and a bottle of orange soda for Kelly, who didn't drink anymore. When he came back in, Marisol had changed into the green shirt he liked and was frowning at her reflection in the dark microwave door.

"You look good," he said.

"I look tired."

"You look good and tired."

She laughed, and then there was a knock — early, of course, because Andre was always early. Marisol pulled the beans off the burner. Dev went to the door, wiping his hands on his jeans, and the house filled up with voices before either of them had finished getting ready at all.


Marisol was rinsing romaine in the sink when Devon came through the back door with a paper bag of ice, his shoulders damp from the drizzle.

"They were out of the good kind," he said. "This is the crushed stuff."

"It'll melt faster." She shook water off the lettuce. "Which means people will drink faster, which means Trevor will tell the story about his cousin's boat."

"We've heard it four times."

"Five. You fell asleep during one."

He dumped the ice into the cooler on the porch, then came back and washed his hands, bumping her hip aside at the faucet. The kitchen of the rental was too narrow for two people, which they'd known when they signed the lease eighteen months ago and had chosen to ignore. Now it was a running joke, the way they had to announce themselves—*behind you, hot pan*—like line cooks.

"Did you move the mail off the table?" she asked.

"It's in the bedroom. Along with the laundry, the shoes, and that box of your mom's dishes we still haven't opened."

"So the bedroom is a disaster."

"The bedroom is a strategic containment zone. Nobody's going in there."

Marisol laughed and started slicing a baguette. Devon put on a record, something with horns, and turned it down when she gave him a look, then turned it up two clicks when she turned back to the cutting board.

At 6:40 he set the table, counting out mismatched forks. At 6:50 she changed her shirt because the first one smelled like garlic. At 6:55 they stood together in the doorway and looked at the living room—the couch cushions squared up, the candle lit, the rain ticking against the window.

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

"Don't jinx it."

Headlights swung across the wall. Devon went to get the door, and Marisol followed him, wiping her hands on her jeans.


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. Outside the kitchen window, the Ohio dusk had turned the neighbor's maple into a silhouette. She could hear Dev in the back bedroom, swearing softly at a hanger.

"Blue shirt or the gray one?" he called.

"Blue. The gray makes you look like you're about to sell someone insurance."

He appeared in the doorway a minute later, buttoning the blue one, sleeves already pushed to his elbows. "I sold insurance for two years."

"And you looked terrible." She handed him a bag of shallots. "Small dice. Not the aggressive chunks you did at Thanksgiving."

He took the cutting board to the island and started in, slower than necessary, the way he did when he wanted her to notice he was being careful. They had lived in the house eleven months. It still smelled faintly of the previous owner's cats when it rained, and the second bathroom faucet ran hot for no reason, and neither of them had gotten around to hanging the framed print leaning against the hallway wall.

"Priya's bringing that guy," Marisol said, sliding a pan of potatoes into the oven.

"The one with the boat?"

"He doesn't have a boat. He works at a marina."

"Same energy." Dev scraped the shallots into a bowl. "Do we have a corkscrew that isn't broken?"

She dug through the drawer and found one, then leaned against him for a second, her forehead on his shoulder blade, just long enough to feel him stop moving. Then the timer went off and she straightened up.

He put on a record, something with horns, and turned it down when she gave him a look. At 6:52 headlights swept the front window. Marisol untied her apron and threw it into the pantry. Dev opened the door before anyone could knock, and cold air came in with the sound of four people talking at once.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, exactly where she'd shoved it after Thanksgiving. She shook it out and held it up to the window light.

"There's a wine stain," she called.

Daniel came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on his jeans. He squinted at the fabric. "Put a candle there. Nobody's inspecting."

"Elena inspects."

"Elena's your sister. She's supposed to."

He went back to the stove, where the shallots had gone from translucent to a shade past golden. He turned the heat down and added the rice, stirring, while Marisol dragged the leaf out of the closet and wrestled it into the table. It stuck halfway, as it always did. She kicked the pedestal until it gave.

By six the apartment smelled like garlic and butter. Daniel had rolled up his sleeves; there was a splash of white wine down the front of his shirt that he hadn't noticed. Marisol lit the candles and set out the mismatched water glasses—four from his old place, three from hers, one from a gas station in Barstow neither of them could account for.

"Do we have enough chairs?" he asked.

"If we use the desk chair."

"That's fine. Rob likes the desk chair. He spins."

She laughed and then stopped, listening. "Did we make a salad?"

They looked at each other. Daniel opened the fridge, considered the half bag of arugula and one bruised pear, and started slicing.

At six-forty the buzzer went. Marisol pressed the button, then turned and licked her thumb and rubbed at the wine stain on his shirt. He stood still and let her, watching her face.

"It's not coming out," she said.

"Put a candle on it," he said, and she was still laughing when the first knock came at the door.


Marisol wiped down the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. Outside, the November dark had come early, and the kitchen windows had gone black and reflective, showing her own face back at her.

"They're going to be late," Devon said from the dining room. He was wrestling with the leaf of the table, an old thing from his grandmother that never quite wanted to open. "Ellis is always late. He texted that he was leaving twenty minutes ago, which means he hadn't showered yet."

"Then we have time." She checked the oven. The chicken had another half hour, at least, and the potatoes were still pale. "Can you find the other candlesticks? The brass ones."

"The ones in the hall closet?"

"The ones you put in the hall closet."

She heard him laugh, then the closet door, then the shuffle of coats. They'd lived in the house on Crandall Street for two years now — a rental with a landlord who never fixed the porch light — and there was still a box in the basement neither of them had opened. Devon's mother asked about marriage every Thanksgiving. Marisol's father had stopped asking, which was somehow worse.

He came back with the candlesticks and a small cobweb on his shoulder. She reached up and brushed it off without saying anything, and he leaned into her hand for a second before moving past.

"Napkins?" he said.

"Paper's fine."

"It's Ellis and Priya. Paper's fine."

They worked in the loose, wordless rhythm of people who had done this before. She sliced bread. He opened wine to breathe, then poured himself half a glass, then poured her one too and set it by the stove where she'd find it.

Headlights swung across the front window. Devon straightened his shirt.

"Ready?" he said.

Marisol tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Get the door."


Marisol tasted the sauce and grimaced. Too much salt, or maybe not enough of everything else. She added a splash of red wine and stirred, watching steam fog the kitchen window that looked out on their narrow Cleveland backyard, where the grass had gone brittle and gold with October.

"They'll be here in forty minutes," Danny called from the dining room. He was wrestling with the leaf that extended their table, an old thing they'd bought at an estate sale in Lakewood, its hinges stiff with a hundred years of other people's dinners.

"Then you should probably not be wearing that shirt."

He looked down at the paint-flecked flannel. He'd spent the morning touching up the porch railing. "Nobody's going to notice."

"Priya notices everything."

He conceded the point and went upstairs. Marisol heard the shower start, then stop almost immediately — Danny took showers the way other people checked the mail. She pulled the bread from the oven, burned slightly on one corner, and decided to serve it with the burned side facing down.

He came back in a gray sweater, hair still damp, and started setting out plates. They had eight but only six matched; they'd been meaning to fix that for two years, ever since they'd combined their apartments into this rented half-double. Somehow it never made it onto a list.

"Do we have candles?" he asked.

"Junk drawer. Behind the batteries."

He found two stubs of them and jammed them into wine bottles, which felt collegiate but also, he thought, sort of charming. Marisol came in carrying the salad and stopped, taking in the table, the low light, the whole arrangement.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's what nice is."

The doorbell rang early, because Priya was always early. Danny wiped his hands on his jeans and went to answer it, and Marisol pushed the burned bread another inch away from the edge.


Marisol was still in the kitchen when Dev came through the back door with two bags of ice, his shoulders damp from the drizzle.

"They're going to be late," he said, setting the bags in the sink. "Priya texted. Traffic on the Beltway."

"Good. The bread needs another ten minutes anyway." Marisol wiped her hands on a dish towel that had been white sometime in 2019. She'd been cooking since three, and the kitchen smelled like garlic and smoked paprika, the good kind Dev's mother sent from a shop in Queens.

He started clearing the dining table, which had been serving as his desk for most of the winter—a laptop, a coil of USB cables, four coffee mugs in various stages of neglect. He carried the mugs to the sink two at a time.

"Do we own napkins?" he asked.

"Bottom drawer of the hutch. The cloth ones from your aunt."

"Those are for special occasions."

"Six people eating stew on a Tuesday is a special occasion."

He found them, unfolded one, held it up to the light. Wrinkled but acceptable. He set them out anyway.

Marisol tasted the stew, added salt, tasted it again, and made a face she couldn't quite interpret herself. "Try this."

Dev came over and took the spoon. He blew on it, which she always found unnecessary and endearing.

"More lemon," he said.

"That's what I thought."

"Then why'd you ask me?"

"Because I wanted to be right."

He kissed the side of her head and went to find the lemons. Outside, a car door slammed, then another—too early, someone always came early. Marisol pulled the bread out. Dev shoved the last of the cables into a drawer and hip-checked it shut.

"Ready?" he said.

"No."

"Me neither." He went to get the door.


Dana found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, which meant it needed ironing, which meant the ironing board had to come out of the coat closet where they'd wedged it in March and never touched again.

"We have forty minutes," she called.

"I know what time it is." Marcus was in the kitchen, sleeves pushed to his elbows, scraping garlic off the cutting board into a pan that had gotten too hot. The smell that came up wasn't the smell he wanted. He swore quietly, dumped the pan into the sink, and started over, because Priya would notice. Priya always noticed.

They'd lived in the duplex for two years. It still had the previous tenant's curtain rods and a doorbell that didn't work, so guests texted from the porch. Dana ran the iron over the tablecloth twice and decided the wrinkle near the corner could face the wall.

"Do we have enough chairs?" Marcus asked.

"Five, plus the desk chair. It rolls but nobody's going to complain."

"Ben will complain."

"Ben can sit on the floor."

She set the table with the mismatched plates — four white, two blue — and put the candles in the middle, then moved them because they blocked the sightline across the table and nobody could talk. Marcus came out with the salad bowl and stopped, looking at the room.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's the same thing."

He kissed the top of her head on his way past, which she noted with some satisfaction, and went to change out of the shirt with the oil spot on it. Dana lit the candles early, knowing they'd burn down unevenly, not caring. At 6:52 a text arrived: *Here! Which door?*

"Left!" Marcus shouted from the bedroom, as if they could hear him.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled in the linen closet, exactly where she'd shoved it after Thanksgiving. She shook it out, held it up to the kitchen light, and made a face at the wine stain near one corner.

"Just put the bread basket over it," Dev called from the stove. He was standing over a pot of white beans he'd started that morning, tasting from a wooden spoon, adding salt he insisted was the last addition and then adding more.

"That's your solution to everything. Cover it with bread."

"It's worked so far."

She laid the cloth over the table anyway and rotated it until the stain sat where Priya always ended up sitting, because Priya wouldn't notice and wouldn't care. Then she went around the apartment doing what Dev called her lap—collecting his running shoes from under the coffee table, his mail from the counter, the mug he'd left on the windowsill three days ago that now had a ring in the bottom like a tree.

"Nate's bringing someone," Dev said.

"Since when?"

"Since he texted eleven minutes ago. Her name's Kelsey and she doesn't eat pork."

"There's no pork in anything."

"I know. I told him that. He seemed relieved, like he'd solved it."

Marisol laughed and went to find a sixth chair, which meant the desk chair from the bedroom, which meant explaining to whoever got it that it was that or the floor. She wheeled it down the hall and Dev caught her elbow as she passed, held out the spoon.

She tasted. "More lemon."

"You always say more lemon."

"And I'm always right."

He squeezed half a lemon in without arguing. Outside, a car door slammed, and they both looked up—too early, probably someone else's guests—and then went back to it, moving around each other in the small kitchen the way they had for four years.


Marcus found her in the kitchen at six-fifteen, elbow-deep in a bowl of ground lamb, radio tuned to the classical station she claimed helped her think.

"They're going to be late," he said. "Denise texted. Traffic on 35."

"Good. The meatballs need another twenty minutes anyway." Priya blew a strand of hair off her forehead. "Can you do the thing with the napkins?"

"The fan thing?"

"The fan thing."

He set down the bag of ice and washed his hands, then started folding cloth napkins at the counter, the way his aunt had taught him one Thanksgiving in Fort Worth. Six of them, fanned and standing in the water glasses. Priya glanced over.

"Those look ridiculous."

"They look formal."

"They look like a hotel in 1994."

"Denise will love them."

She conceded that with a shrug and slid the tray into the oven. Marcus moved through the small dining room, straightening chairs they'd bought secondhand two summers ago, when they'd first signed the lease together and both their mothers had asked, separately and pointedly, what the plan was. The plan, apparently, was this: a rented duplex, a dog named Otis shedding on the couch, a decent stereo.

"Wine's in the fridge," Priya called. "Did you get the good glasses down?"

"They're in the box in the closet."

"Marcus."

"I'm getting them, I'm getting them."

He hauled the box down and unwrapped six wine glasses from newspaper, rinsing each one and drying it with a dish towel. Priya came up behind him, put her chin on his shoulder for a second, and stole a piece of cucumber off the cutting board.

"You smell like garlic," he said.

"You're welcome."

Otis barked. Headlights swung across the front window. Priya untied her apron, tossed it over a chair, and went to open the door.


The Dinner Party

The apartment smelled like garlic and scorched butter, which Nadia decided was close enough to appetizing.

"You added the wine yet?" Theo called from the bathroom, where he was doing something complicated with a razor.

"I added the wine to me," she said. "The sauce is next."

He came out five minutes later, one cheek nicked, wearing the blue shirt she liked. "How bad?"

"You look like you lost a fight with a paper towel." She handed him a glass. "Table needs setting. And Marcus is bringing his new girlfriend, so we should probably use the actual plates."

"The actual plates are in the box under the bed. We haven't unpacked them since March."

"We've lived here eleven months, Theo."

"I'm aware."

They'd moved in together after her lease ended and his roommate got engaged—practical reasons, they'd told everyone, though neither of them had brought up the practical reasons in a while. The plates turned out to be fine, just dusty, and Theo washed them one by one at the sink while Nadia salvaged the pasta sauce with more cream than she'd admit to.

"Do we have a candle?" she asked.

"We have a candle that smells like cake. Is that going to compete with dinner?"

"Light it in the bathroom."

By seven-fifteen the table looked convincingly adult. Theo put on the record his father had given him, the one that skipped near the end of side one. Nadia stood back and surveyed the room, then moved the ficus eight inches to the left.

"That was important," he said.

"It was."

The buzzer rang. Nadia pressed the button, heard four voices layered over each other in the stairwell, and turned to find Theo already holding the wine opener, sleeves pushed up, looking at her like he was waiting for permission to be happy about it.

"Okay," she said. "We're doing this."

He kissed the top of her head and went to hold the door.


Marisol wiped condensation from the kitchen window with her sleeve and squinted at the driveway. "Still no cars. We're fine."

"You said that twenty minutes ago." Dev was on the floor of the living room, wrestling the extra leaf into the dining table, which had belonged to his grandmother and resisted assembly the way she had resisted most things. "This table hates me."

"It hates everyone. Push down on the left side."

He pushed. Something clicked. He looked up, triumphant, and she gave him a thumbs-up without turning from the stove, where the short ribs had been going since two o'clock and now filled the whole first floor of the rented duplex with a smell that had already made the upstairs neighbor knock and ask, politely, what was happening.

They had lived together three years, which their families in Ohio and New Jersey respectively had stopped commenting on around year two. Tonight was just Priya and Marcus, Tom, and Tom's new girlfriend whose name Dev kept forgetting.

"Ann," Marisol said.

"I didn't ask."

"You were about to."

He set out mismatched wineglasses, four from a thrift store on Fillmore and two survivors of a set his sister had given them. Marisol tasted the sauce, added vinegar, tasted it again, and held the spoon out over her palm for him.

"More salt," he said.

"That's what I thought."

He found the good napkins in the linen closet behind the winter sheets. She changed out of the shirt with the sauce on it. At six-forty, headlights swung across the front window, and they looked at each other across the small room the way people do when the last quiet minute is ending.

"Ready?" she said.

"No." He was already walking to the door.


Marisol was arranging the last of the cloth napkins when she heard Devin swear from the kitchen.

"Don't panic," he called, which meant she should panic.

She found him staring into the oven, where the chicken thighs sat pale and glistening, entirely uncooked. He'd preheated the broiler instead of the bake setting, or maybe he'd never turned it on at all — the timeline was already blurring in his account of things.

"Forty minutes," Marisol said, checking her phone. "They'll be here in forty minutes."

"Yeah." Devin rubbed the back of his neck, the gesture he made when he was calculating. "Okay. What if we crank it to four-twenty-five and I start the potatoes on the stovetop instead of roasting them?"

"Do we have enough butter?"

"We have a concerning amount of butter."

She laughed and went to get it. They'd lived in the apartment on Fillmore for two years now, long enough that she knew the third drawer stuck and he knew she'd hidden the good chocolate behind the oatmeal. Friends still asked, occasionally and with a certain lilt, whether they'd thought about making it official. Marisol had stopped finding the question annoying. It just seemed beside the point, like asking whether they'd considered getting a second toaster.

Devin put on the playlist they'd argued about Tuesday — his selection, her veto power exercised twice. Marisol wiped down the coffee table, moved a stack of his library books to the bedroom, lit the candle that smelled vaguely of cedar.

"Wine's open," Devin said, sliding a glass toward her across the counter. "Breathing. Like we planned it."

The buzzer rang eight minutes early. Ana and Tomás, always early, always apologetic about it.

Marisol looked at Devin. He shrugged, spatula in hand, oven light glowing behind him.

"Let them in," he said. "They can watch me sweat."


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it hadn't gotten dirty since the second. Through the kitchen window, the November light was already going gray at four-thirty, which she still hadn't adjusted to after eleven years in Chicago.

"They're going to notice the couch," Devon said, coming in from the living room with a lint roller in his hand.

"Nobody's going to notice the couch."

"There's a hole. It's not a small hole." He held up the roller like evidence of something. "I put the throw pillow over it."

"Then nobody's going to notice the couch."

He kissed the back of her neck on his way to the fridge, which meant he'd conceded. He pulled out the beer they'd bought at the place on Ashland, arranged the bottles by color, then rearranged them by height, then gave up and shoved them in.

Marisol was making her mother's arroz con gandules, which she hadn't attempted in two years and which she had, she suspected, already slightly ruined by rushing the sofrito. She tasted it. It was fine. It was probably fine.

"Ben's bringing that woman," Devon said.

"Priya. Her name's Priya. You've met her twice."

"I know her name. I'm saying he's bringing her, which is a thing."

"It's dinner."

"It's a thing," he said, but he was smiling, and he took the wooden spoon out of her hand to taste the rice himself. He made a face she'd learned to read as approval.

The doorbell went at six-fifteen, twenty minutes early, which was Ben all over. Marisol swore in Spanish and reached back to untie her apron; Devon caught the strings and undid them for her, then hung it on the pantry hook where it lived.

"Hole in the couch," he reminded her.

"I'm not saying a word about the couch."


Marisol found Dev in the kitchen, elbow-deep in a bowl of ground lamb, breadcrumbs stuck to his forearms like snow.

"They'll be here in forty minutes," she said, pulling her hair back.

"I know. I'm aware. I've been aware since two o'clock." He rolled a meatball, dropped it onto the sheet pan, and it rolled off the other side. He caught it against his hip.

She laughed at him and went to the dining room, where the table was still covered in the mail they hadn't sorted since Tuesday. She swept it into a laundry basket and shoved the basket into the hall closet, which was already full of things shoved into it during previous dinner parties. The door didn't quite close. She leaned on it until it did.

"Did you buy candles?" she called.

"I bought candles. They're in the bag on the chair."

"Which chair?"

"The chair," he said, "that has a bag on it."

She found them — tapers, the wrong size for their holders. She wedged them in with folded pieces of index card and decided nobody would look that closely. From the kitchen came the sound of the oven door and Dev swearing mildly at the heat.

By the time the first knock came, the apartment smelled like cumin and roasting lemon, and Marisol was standing in the bedroom trying to decide between two nearly identical shirts. Dev appeared in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder.

"The blue one," he said.

"They're both blue."

"The bluer one."

She threw the other shirt at him. He caught it, folded it badly, set it on the bed, and kissed the side of her head on his way past to answer the door — and then their friends were spilling in with wine and coats and complaints about parking, and the mail in the closet stayed exactly where it was.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, folded beneath a stack of towels that had migrated there sometime in October. She shook it out on the dining table while Danny hauled the extra chairs up from the basement, two at a time, banging one against the doorframe hard enough that they both winced.

"That's Tom's chair now," she said.

"Tom deserves it."

The apartment was too small for six people, technically. They'd known that when they signed the lease in Providence eighteen months ago, and they'd invited everyone anyway. Danny had spent the afternoon on the chicken—thighs, skin-on, the recipe his mother texted him in fragments over three days—and the kitchen smelled like garlic and rendered fat and the burnt edge of something he'd caught just in time.

Marisol counted forks. Eleven. She counted again and got eleven again.

"We have eleven forks," she called.

"Use the salad ones."

"They're tiny."

"Then people can share." He came around the corner with a dish towel over his shoulder, tasting sauce off a wooden spoon, and held it out to her. She took a sip and made a face.

"More lemon."

"You always say more lemon."

"I'm always right about lemon."

He went back and added lemon. She lit the candles they'd bought for a different dinner party that got canceled when Jenna's flight was delayed, and she straightened the stack of mail on the counter, and she moved the laundry basket into the bedroom and shut the door on it, which was the whole of their cleaning philosophy.

At 6:52 Danny changed his shirt. At 6:55 Marisol looked at the table—mismatched plates, wine glasses from a thrift store on Wickenden, eleven forks—and decided it was fine.

The buzzer went off at 6:58. Danny wiped his hands on his jeans.

"Ready?"

"No," she said, and went to let them in.


Marisol pulled the roast from the oven and set it on the stove to rest, the kitchen fogging with the smell of rosemary and garlic. Behind her, Dev was wrestling the leaf into the dining table, a job that had taken them four minutes and one mild argument every Thanksgiving since they'd moved into the duplex.

"It's catching," he said. "There's a screw."

"There's always a screw." She wiped her hands on the dish towel over her shoulder and came to help, and together they got the halves apart and dropped the leaf in with a satisfying thunk.

They'd invited six people, which was two more than the table comfortably held. Dev went to the basement for the folding chairs, the ones with the vinyl seats his mother had passed along, and Marisol found the tablecloth that hid the water ring near the head of the table. She counted out forks. She was one short and used a salad fork instead and put it at her own place.

"Ravi's bringing his girlfriend," Dev called up the stairs.

"I know. I made extra."

"Does she eat meat?"

Marisol stopped. She stood in the middle of the dining room with a fistful of napkins. "You didn't ask?"

"I thought you asked."

She sighed and went to the freezer and pulled out a bag of gnocchi, because there was always something to fall back on, and because it was easier than being annoyed. Dev appeared with the chairs, saw the bag in her hand, and kissed the side of her head on his way past. "You're a genius."

"I'm a person who buys frozen gnocchi."

At six-fifteen he changed his shirt. At six-twenty she lit the candles, blew out the match, and looked at the table—crowded, mismatched, ready. The doorbell rang, and Dev, still buttoning his cuff, went to answer it.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar. Delia had let the onions sit too long while she was texting Marcus about parking, and now she was scraping the pan into the trash with a wooden spoon, muttering.

"That bad?" Owen asked from the hallway. He was carrying the folding chairs up from the storage unit, one under each arm, his shirt half-tucked.

"It's recoverable." She started over with fresh butter. "Did you find the extra one?"

"There were only three. I texted Marcus—he's bringing a camp chair."

"So one of us sits on a camp chair."

"I'll sit on the camp chair." He set them down by the table, then paused. "Are we doing the tablecloth thing?"

"The tablecloth's got a wine stain."

"From my birthday."

"From your birthday." She smiled without looking up.

He put on a record because he always put on a record, then turned it down when he realized it competed with the range hood. In the bathroom he wiped the sink with a hand towel and then hid the hand towel, which was the extent of his cleaning philosophy. Delia came in behind him to check her hair, and they navigated around each other in the small space with the practiced choreography of four years.

"Your mom called," he said. "She wanted to know if we were coming at Thanksgiving."

"Did you tell her yes?"

"I told her you'd call her."

"Coward."

"Correct."

At six forty the buzzer went off—Priya, always early, holding a bottle of something orange and a bag of clementines nobody had asked for. Then Marcus and Jen, then Owen's coworker Theo, who stood awkwardly in the doorway until Owen took his coat.

The apartment got loud fast. Delia handed Owen the salad tongs without a word, and he started tossing while she opened wine, and someone laughed at something in the other room, and the burnt onions were entirely forgotten.


Nadia found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, still creased from last Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table while Theo hauled the extra chairs up from the basement, one balanced on each shoulder like a man carrying a canoe.

"Four or five?" he called.

"Five. Priya's bringing her sister."

He set them down and stood back, counting places. The apartment always felt smaller when they had people over, though it was a decent two-bedroom in a building near the river, the kind with radiators that clanked all winter. They'd moved in together fourteen months ago, after two years of Theo keeping half his clothes at her old place anyway.

In the kitchen, the chicken had been in for forty minutes and the skin was going gold. Nadia peered through the oven glass, then pulled the door open and basted it with the turkey baster they'd bought specifically for this and used for nothing else. Theo came up behind her with the wine.

"This one or the one Marcus brought in August?"

"That one was awful."

"That's why I'm asking. We could give it back to him."

She laughed and told him to open the good one. He worked the cork out while she scraped potatoes into a bowl, and for a minute neither of them said anything, just moved around each other in the narrow galley the way they'd learned to.

At six-forty he swept the hallway. At six-fifty she lit two candles and turned off the overhead light, then turned it back on because it was too dark to see the food. Theo changed his shirt. Nadia found the salt she'd been looking for behind the flour.

The buzzer went at seven-oh-five. She looked at him, and he shrugged, and they both went to the door.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, the one her mother had sent from Albuquerque, and shook it out over the dining table while Danny wrestled with the oven.

"It's preheating," he called. "Says three-fifty but I think it runs cold."

"It runs cold," she agreed. "Add ten degrees."

They had lived in the duplex on Ridgeway for two years now, long enough to know the oven's moods, the way the front door stuck in humid weather, which neighbor would complain about parking. Danny slid the tray of chicken thighs onto the middle rack and set a timer on his phone.

Marisol counted out six place settings, then remembered Priya was bringing her sister and went back for two more. The mismatched chairs bothered her — one from the curb, two from Danny's old apartment — but nobody had ever said anything.

"Did you text Kevin about the wine?" she asked.

"He's bringing red. And that pepper jelly thing his mom makes."

She lit the candles she'd bought at the grocery store, unscented because Danny got headaches. He came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a dish towel and stood in the doorway looking at the table.

"Looks nice," he said.

"It's the tablecloth."

"It's not just the tablecloth."

He put on a record, something instrumental and low, and she went to change out of the shirt with the paint on it. When she came back he had swept the entryway and moved the laundry basket into the bedroom and closed the door on it.

At six-forty the timer went off. At six-fifty they heard car doors. Danny checked the chicken with a fork and Marisol pulled the ice tray from the freezer, cracking it against the counter, and then the doorbell rang and they looked at each other for a second — the last quiet second — before she went to answer it.


Marisol found Dev in the kitchen at four thirty, sleeves shoved to his elbows, arguing with a chicken.

"It's too big," he said. "I bought a twelve-pound bird for six people."

"Seven. Priya's bringing her sister."

He set down the tongs. "Then it's exactly right."

They'd moved into the rental on Ashwood in March, and this was the first time they'd hosted anything more ambitious than a Tuesday beer. The house still had its quirks—the dining room light on a dimmer that only worked at two settings, blinding or funereal, and a radiator that clanked like someone knocking to be let in.

Marisol wiped down the table, then unfolded the tablecloth her mother had mailed from Tucson, still creased into a grid. "It looks like graph paper."

"Nobody's measuring." Dev slid the roasting pan into the oven, checked the clock, and started on potatoes. "Did you text Ben about the wine?"

"He's bringing something called an orange wine. He said it's not orange."

"That's a lie of some kind."

She lit two candles, then blew one out because it smelled like a bath store. The dog, Otis, positioned himself at the exact center of the kitchen floor, where he could be tripped over most efficiently.

At five fifteen Marisol changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. Dev found her in the bedroom doorway and said, without commentary, "You look good," which was the correct thing, and then, "There's flour on your elbow," which was less correct but true.

They stood a moment in the hallway. From the kitchen came the low tick of the oven, the smell of rosemary and hot skin.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she asked.

"Five. Plus the desk chair and the step stool."

"Somebody's sitting on the step stool."

"It'll be Ben," Dev said. "He deserves it."

The doorbell rang at six. Otis lost his mind. Marisol was still laughing when she opened the door.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar and last Thanksgiving.

"It's wrinkled," she called toward the kitchen.

"Iron's on the shelf above the washer," Dev said. He was standing over a pot of chili, tasting it off a wooden spoon, adding cumin, tasting again. Their apartment in Cleveland Heights was small enough that they could hold conversations from separate rooms without raising their voices much, which after three years still felt like a small luxury.

She set up the ironing board in the living room and worked the creases out while the radio played something local and forgettable. Through the window, the maples on their street had gone rust-colored. Bethany and Tom were coming, and Priya, and Priya's new boyfriend whose name neither of them could remember with confidence.

"Anand?" Marisol guessed.

"Arvind. I think." Dev came out wiping his hands on a dish towel. "It's Arvind. Ninety percent."

"That's not comforting."

"Just don't say a name and you can't be wrong."

They worked around each other the way people do who've learned the choreography. Dev hauled the folding chairs up from the basement; Marisol found six matching napkins, gave up, and found four matching napkins and two that were close enough. He put on a record. She lit the candle her sister had given them, the one that smelled like a campfire in a way that was slightly alarming.

At six-fifteen, Dev noticed the cornbread was still sitting in its pan, uncut.

"We have eight minutes," he said.

"We have as long as it takes them to park," Marisol said. "Bethany has never been on time in her life."

The buzzer rang at 6:22. Dev was still holding the knife. Marisol pulled her hair back, glanced at him, and he nodded — everything looked fine, more or less — and she went to let them in.


Maya had the oven timer counting down from fourteen minutes when Devon came in from the garage with the folding chairs, one wobbling under his arm.

"Two of these are broken," he said.

"Then we sit on the ottoman. Or Priya can sit on the ottoman, she doesn't care."

He leaned the chairs against the wall and looked at the table, which she'd set with the good plates and the mismatched water glasses. "This looks nice."

"It looks like we're trying." She wiped her palms on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle. "Can you taste the dressing? I think it needs more acid but I've tasted it so many times I can't tell anymore."

He dipped a spinach leaf in the bowl, chewed, considered. "More lemon. Not much."

She squeezed in half a wedge while he moved around behind her to get the wine glasses down, his hand briefly on her hip so she'd know he was passing. The apartment was small enough that they'd learned this choreography years ago, in the first place they'd rented together, when the kitchen had been so narrow only one of them could stand in it at a time.

"Ben's bringing his new girlfriend," Devon said.

"I know. That's why the good plates."

"She's going to think we always eat like this."

"Good."

At six-forty he changed his shirt, and she asked him to zip the back of her dress, and he did, and then stood there a second with his hands on her shoulders looking at both of them in the closet mirror. Neither said anything. Downstairs the buzzer went off, too early, the way Ben always was.

"Chairs," Maya said.

"Chairs," he agreed, and went to get them, and she took the bread out of the oven a minute before the timer, because it was already the right color.


The apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which Mara insisted was intentional.

"It's a caramelized onion tart," she said, angling the pan under the light. "The dark parts are flavor."

Devon didn't argue. He was folding napkins into rectangles, having abandoned the triangle after two attempts. Four place settings on the table, two on the crate they'd covered with a tablecloth because they'd never gotten around to buying more chairs. Six people in a one-bedroom in Providence. It would be tight, but Priya was bringing wine and Tom always sat on the floor anyway.

"Did you text your brother about the thing?" Mara asked.

"What thing?"

"The peanut thing. Jules is allergic."

Devon set down the napkin. "I thought that was tree nuts."

"It's both."

He went to check the satay sauce he'd made that afternoon, standing over it with his phone flashlight like it might confess. Peanut butter, second ingredient. He poured it down the drain while Mara pretended not to watch.

"There's still the tart," she said. "And bread. And I can do rice."

"I can do rice."

"You can do rice."

They moved around each other in the galley kitchen with the choreography of three years of shared square footage. She reached over his shoulder for the colander; he stepped left without looking. At 6:40 he found her in the bathroom, elbow-deep in a drawer.

"Have you seen my—"

"Left side. Behind the sunscreen."

She kissed his jaw and he went to change his shirt, then changed it again because the first one had a stain he'd apparently been wearing all day.

The buzzer went off at 6:58. Priya, early, apologetic, holding two bottles.

Mara looked at Devon. There was flour on his forearm and the rice wasn't done.

"Ready?" she said.

"No."

She pressed the button anyway.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, still creased from the last time they'd used it, which had been Thanksgiving, which had been eleven months ago. She shook it out over the dining table while Daniel stood at the stove doing something aggressive to a pan of onions.

"They're going to stick," she said.

"They're supposed to stick. That's the fond. That's where the flavor lives."

"Okay." She was not going to fight about onions. She smoothed the tablecloth and counted chairs. Five, and they needed six, so she went down the hall and got the desk chair from the spare room, wheeled it in, and parked it at the corner where the table's leaf made a seam. Whoever sat there would be a little low. Probably Kevin, who wouldn't notice.

The apartment smelled like garlic and the lemon cleaner she'd used on the bathroom sink an hour ago. Outside, on Delmar, someone was parallel parking badly, backing up and pulling forward, backing up again.

"Did you text Priya about the mushrooms?" Daniel asked.

"She said she'd eat around them."

"That's not a real answer."

"It's the answer she gave me." Marisol found the candles in a drawer with the batteries and the phone chargers, two tapers that had bent slightly in the summer heat. She straightened them as best she could and stuck them in the brass holders his grandmother had left him.

He came out wiping his hands on a dish towel and looked at the table. "It looks nice."

"It looks like we tried."

"That's the same thing." He kissed the top of her head, briefly, the way he did when he was thinking about something else, and went back to the kitchen. She heard the oven door, the rack sliding.

The buzzer went off at 6:52. Nobody was ever early. She looked at him. He shrugged, and she went to answer it.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of the cedar block she'd bought two winters ago and forgotten about. She shook it out over the dining table, and Dev caught the far corners without being asked, tugging until the creases sat more or less flat.

"It's got a stain," he said, pointing at a rust-colored ghost near the center.

"That's why God invented the bread basket."

He laughed and went back to the kitchen, where the chicken had been braising since four. They'd lived in the duplex on Kensington for three years now, long enough that his mother had stopped asking about weddings and started asking about the water heater instead. Marisol liked it that way.

She set out mismatched wine glasses—two from her old apartment, four from a thrift store on Grand, one lonely survivor of a set Dev's sister had given them. Outside, a neighbor's dog barked at nothing. The February dark had come down early, and the windows had gone black and reflective, so she could see herself moving around the table like someone in a stage play.

"Do we have the thing," Dev called, "the—the little dish, for olives?"

"Behind the mixing bowls."

He found it. He always did, eventually. He'd changed into the green sweater she liked, though he'd deny it was on purpose, and he had flour on one forearm from the biscuits.

At six-fifteen she lit two candles and stepped back. It looked good. It looked like a place where people ate together on purpose.

"Ravi's bringing his new girlfriend," Dev said, appearing in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder. "So we have to be normal."

"We're extremely normal."

"You alphabetized the spice rack last night."

"That's a hobby."

The doorbell rang. She blew out the match, and he went to answer it.


Maya wedged the last serving spoon into the drawer and shut it with her hip. Behind her, Dev was scraping candle wax off the dining table with a butter knife, working at it with the focused irritation of someone who had put off a small job for four months.

"They're coming at seven," she said.

"It's six-fifteen."

"It's six-thirty-two. The stove clock is wrong. I keep telling you."

He looked up. "Then why don't we fix the stove clock?"

They had lived in the apartment for two years, since the lease on her studio in Somerville ran out and it stopped making sense to pay rent in two places. The stove clock had been wrong that whole time.

She checked the chicken. It was doing the thing where the skin browned before the inside was ready, so she tented it with foil and lowered the heat, which she suspected was the wrong move but committed to anyway. Dev came into the kitchen carrying a dust rag he'd found somewhere, wiped down the bar cart, and started counting wine glasses.

"We have six."

"There's seven of us."

"Someone gets a tumbler."

"You get the tumbler," Maya said. "It's your apartment."

"It's our apartment."

"Right. Then someone gets a tumbler and it's a whole conversation."

He laughed and went to put on a shirt with buttons. She heard the closet door, the hangers sliding. When he came back, she was standing over the sink eating a piece of chicken skin off her fingers, and he didn't say anything about it, just reached past her for the corkscrew.

At 6:51 the buzzer went. Priya and Tom were early, the way they always were, standing in the vestibule with a grocery-store bouquet still in its plastic sleeve.

"Almost ready," Dev called down.

Maya turned the oven light on and looked in. "We're ready," she said. "More or less."


Marisol found the good tablecloth at the bottom of the linen closet, wrinkled into a grid of fold lines. She held it up to the kitchen light and sighed.

"Iron's in the hall closet," Dev called from the living room, where he was moving a stack of magazines from the coffee table to a stack somewhere less visible.

"I know where the iron is. I'm deciding whether I care."

He came in, wiping his hands on his jeans, and looked at the cloth. "Candles," he said. "Candles fix everything."

They compromised: she ironed the two panels that would show, and he lit four tea lights and set them in jars along the center. The apartment smelled like garlic and browned butter. On the stove, a pot of white beans had been simmering since two o'clock, and Dev kept lifting the lid to check on them, which Marisol had asked him twice not to do.

"You're letting the steam out."

"I'm bonding with them."

She laughed and handed him a bunch of parsley to chop. They'd lived together fourteen months in this second-floor place on Delaware Avenue, long enough that the arguments about dish soap had settled into a rhythm, short enough that hosting still felt like playing house. Her mother asked about rings; his father asked about the lease. Neither of them had answers, and neither of them minded much.

At six-forty Dev put on a clean shirt and Marisol swept the crumbs off the counter with the side of her hand. She caught him checking his reflection in the microwave door.

"You look fine."

"I look like a man who's been cooking beans for four hours."

"That's what I said."

The buzzer went off at ten to seven — Priya and Tom, always early. Dev pressed the button. Marisol blew out a match, and the two of them stood a moment in the small warm kitchen, listening to footsteps on the stairs.


The first thing Marisol noticed when she got home from her shift was the smell—garlic browning too fast, that sharp edge before it turns bitter. She dropped her keys in the bowl by the door.

"Danny," she called. "Your garlic's dying."

"It's fine," he said, from the kitchen, in the voice of a man who knew it wasn't fine. She found him standing over the skillet with a wooden spoon, still in his work shirt, sleeves shoved up past the elbows. He'd scraped the pan onto a plate to cool.

"Start over," she said, kissing the side of his neck on her way to the stove. "We've got time. Who's coming, six?"

"Six-thirty. Priya texted, she's bringing her cousin. And Rob's running late because Rob."

Marisol pulled out a fresh head of garlic and set it on the cutting board. Danny went to change his shirt and came back in the gray henley she liked, carrying the folding chairs from the hall closet because their table only sat four honestly and six if everyone was friendly.

They moved around each other in the small kitchen the way they had for three years now in the apartment on Fillmore, and then for two more in this rented half-a-duplex with the sticking back door. He washed the good glasses. She salted the water. He asked if they should hide the laundry basket and she said just shut the bedroom door, nobody's going in there.

At six-fifteen she lit the two candles they owned, which didn't match. Danny put on a record and then took it off and put on something else.

"It smells right now," she said.

"It does." He leaned against the counter, looking at the table, the mismatched chairs, the bread in a dish towel. "Think it's enough food?"

"It's plenty."

The doorbell rang at six-twenty. Priya, early, apologizing. Danny wiped his hands on his jeans and went to let her in.


Maya heard the front door stick and unstick, then Dev's keys hitting the ceramic bowl. She didn't look up from the cutting board.

"They had no shallots," he said. "I got the little red onions instead."

"That's fine." She wiped her hands on the dish towel hanging off the oven handle. "Did you get ice?"

He held up the bag, already sweating through the plastic, and shoved it into the freezer, breaking it against the shelf with his palm. Their freezer had never fit a full bag of ice in the four years they'd lived in the apartment, and neither of them had ever addressed this.

"Ravi's bringing his new girlfriend," Maya said.

"I know. Since when do we own a tablecloth?"

"It was my mother's. It was in the hall closet."

Dev looked at it, ironed and slightly too large, hanging past the corners of the table like a bedsheet. He decided not to say anything, which was, he thought, evidence of personal growth.

He put on music, then turned it down when Maya glanced over. He set out the wine glasses, four matching and two not, giving the mismatched ones to himself and to Dev's brother, who wouldn't notice. He found the candles in the drawer with the batteries and takeout menus.

"Twenty minutes," Maya said. "Can you do something about the bathroom?"

He wiped the sink, hung a clean towel, closed the shower curtain over the shampoo bottles. In the mirror he saw a shirt with a wrinkle across the chest and changed it.

When he came out, she'd changed too, and had put her hair up, and was tasting something off a wooden spoon with her eyes narrowed.

"More lemon," she said, holding it toward him.

He tasted it. "More salt."

"Both," she said, and the buzzer went off downstairs, ten minutes early, the way Ravi always was.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar and the last time they'd used it, Thanksgiving, when Dev's mother had come and criticized the gravy.

"It's wrinkled," she called down the hall.

"Everything's wrinkled," Dev said. He was standing at the stove in an apron he'd owned since college, the strings looped twice around his waist, tasting the braise off a wooden spoon. "It's fine. It's rustic."

"It's rustic when it's linen. This is polyester."

"Then nobody will notice."

She spread it over the table anyway, smoothing the folds with her palms, and set out the mismatched plates—four from his old apartment, three from hers, one they'd bought together at a flea market in Asheville because Dev insisted it looked like a plate a person in a movie would own. Six friends coming at seven. It was six-twenty.

"Did you tell Priya that Ben's bringing the new guy?" she asked.

"I texted her. She sent back a thumbs up, which could mean anything."

Marisol lit the candles, then blew them out because it was still light outside and she didn't want them burned down to nubs by dessert. Dev came out to wipe a ring off the counter and paused behind her, hand briefly on the small of her back, then went to change his shirt.

He came back in the blue one. She said, "That one," and he said, "I know, that's why," and she rolled her eyes.

At six-fifty-two the doorbell rang, ten minutes early, which was Ben, always. Dev shouted from the kitchen, "Can you—" and Marisol was already moving, socks on hardwood, tugging her sleeves down, calling out that the door was open, come in, come in.


Marisol found the good tablecloth wadded in the bottom of the linen closet, creased into a grid like a map of somewhere she'd never been. She shook it out over the dining table anyway, smoothing the folds with her palms, deciding the candles would distract from it.

In the kitchen, Dev was arguing with a chicken. He'd bought it whole because the recipe said whole, and now he was discovering that removing the backbone required either a pair of kitchen shears they did not own or a level of confidence he did not possess.

"We have those scissors in the junk drawer," Marisol called.

"Those are for coupons."

"They're for whatever we need them for."

He found them, wiped them on a dish towel, and got to work. Marisol came in behind him and started washing the wine glasses, which had gone dusty on the top shelf since the last time they'd had anyone over, which had been sometime before the promotion, before the sixty-hour weeks.

"Kayla's bringing that guy," Dev said. "Trevor."

"Travis."

"That's what I said."

"You said Trevor." She set a glass in the rack. "Be nice to him. He does something with insurance."

"I'm always nice."

They worked without talking for a while, the radiator ticking, the oven light casting a small orange square across the floor. Marisol lit the candles at seven-fifteen and turned off the overhead so the room went warm and forgiving. Dev slid the chicken in, set a timer on his phone, and stood there a second, hands on the counter.

"It looks good in here," he said.

She looked at the table, the mismatched chairs, the tablecloth with its stubborn grid. It did look good. It looked like people lived there.

The buzzer went off downstairs. Dev wiped his hands. Marisol went to hold the door.


Marisol had been chopping onions for ten minutes when she realized she was crying and couldn't tell anymore whether it was the onions or just Thursday.

"You okay?" Dev asked, coming in from the dining room with a stack of mismatched plates.

"Fine. These are aggressive onions."

He set the plates down and reached past her for a paper towel, which he handed over without comment. That was the thing about Dev. He didn't ask twice.

They'd been in the house on Bellweather Street for two years now, long enough that the neighbors had stopped asking when the wedding was. The kitchen still had the previous owner's wallpaper, yellow with small blue roosters, which Marisol had hated in June and grown fond of by October.

"Ruthie's bringing her new boyfriend," she said.

"I know."

"You're going to hate him."

"Probably." Dev started setting the table, counting places under his breath. "But I'll be nice."

"You'll be *polite*. There's a difference and Ruthie can tell."

He laughed. He was thirty-four and going gray at the temples in a way he pretended not to notice, though she'd caught him examining it in the bathroom mirror more than once.

The oven timer went off. Marisol pulled out the chicken, which had gone slightly darker than she'd intended, and stood looking at it.

"It's fine," Dev said.

"It's not fine."

"They're going to eat it and drink four bottles of wine and nobody will remember the chicken." He came over and looked at it seriously, the way he looked at things at work, and then said, "Okay, it's a little burned."

"Thank you."

Headlights swung across the front window. Marisol wiped her hands on her jeans, and Dev turned on the porch light, and outside somebody was already laughing at something in the driveway.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded in the linen closet behind the beach towels, still creased from Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev stood at the stove, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon and making a face.

"Too much vinegar?" she asked.

"Too much me." He added a pinch of sugar and stirred. "I get nervous and start improvising."

They'd lived in the duplex on Ferndale for two years now, long enough that the neighbors had stopped asking when the wedding was. Tonight it was just Priya and Theo, Marisol's coworker Jean, and Dev's brother, who always arrived twenty minutes early and stood in doorways.

Marisol counted out five plates, realized they needed six, and pulled the mismatched one from the back—the blue one with the chip. She'd give herself that one.

"Did you get bread?" Dev called.

"I got bread. I got two breads, because I couldn't remember if you said sourdough or the seeded thing."

"I said either."

"You said it in a way that meant sourdough."

He laughed, which she took as a confession. She lit the candles on the windowsill, then blew one out because the smell was competing with the garlic. In the bathroom she found his running shorts on the floor and kicked them behind the door, then reconsidered and carried them to the hamper, because Priya was the type to wash her hands and notice things.

Dev put on a record, something with horns, and turned it down until it was just texture. He wiped the counter twice. Marisol changed her shirt, then changed back.

At 6:52 the doorbell rang, early as promised. They looked at each other across the kitchen—the sauce simmering, the table set, the whole small life of it arranged and waiting.

"Ready?" she said.

"No," he said, and went to answer the door.


Maya was chopping shallots when Devon came in with two grocery bags and the smell of cold air on his jacket.

"They were out of the good bread," he said. "I got the sourdough from the bakery counter instead. Nine dollars, by the way."

"For bread?"

"For *artisan* bread." He set the bags down and started unloading. "Also I ran into Priya's husband at the store. He says they're bringing wine, so we don't have to worry about that."

Maya scraped the shallots into the pan. "Did you tell him we already bought wine?"

"I did not, because now we have extra wine, and that's a good problem."

She laughed. The apartment was small enough that they had to move around each other in the kitchen like dancers who'd rehearsed for years — four of them, in this case, since they'd signed the lease together. Devon reached past her for the colander and she leaned back without looking.

"The table only seats six," she said.

"I know. I'm going to bring in the desk chair and the folding one from the closet. Nobody will care."

"Josh will care."

"Josh will comment. That's different."

While the chicken roasted, he set out plates that didn't match and she lit the two candles they'd been saving since her birthday. He put on a playlist, then changed it when she made a face. She wiped the counter twice. He picked up his socks from the living room floor and, after a pause, actually carried them to the hamper instead of stuffing them behind the couch.

At six forty, the buzzer went off.

"Ready?" Maya asked.

Devon looked around at the crowded table, the candles, the mismatched chairs. "It looks like people live here."

"People do live here."

He pressed the button to let them up.


Marisol had the oven at 375 and a timer she'd already reset twice. The chicken was going in late, which meant the potatoes would come out early, which meant she'd be reheating something at the last minute and pretending she hadn't.

"Do we have a serving spoon that isn't the plastic one?" Dev called from the dining room.

"Third drawer. Behind the whisk graveyard."

He came back holding two spoons, examining them like he was choosing a weapon. He'd changed his shirt twice, settling finally on the gray henley she liked, and had been quietly moving the mail pile from the table to the counter to the drawer where mail piles go to be forgotten.

Their apartment in Ravenswood was small enough that hosting six people required strategy. Dev pulled the folding chairs from the closet, wiped the dust off the seats with a paper towel, and arranged them so nobody would be sitting directly under the radiator, which clanked like a haunted ship.

"Cass is bringing wine," Marisol said, checking her phone. "And she says Trevor's running late because of the Kennedy."

"Trevor's always late because of the Kennedy. Trevor lives eleven blocks away."

She laughed, and he took the moment to reach past her for the salt, resting a hand briefly on her hip. The kitchen was too narrow for two people and they'd never once complained about it.

By six-forty the potatoes were out, foil-tented. Dev lit the two candles they owned, both mismatched, and put on a playlist he'd spent an unreasonable amount of the afternoon curating. Marisol untied her apron, hung it on the pantry door, and looked around at the small assembled evening—the crooked chairs, the good napkins, the smell of rosemary.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

The buzzer went off downstairs. He got the door; she got the wine glasses.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, folded beneath a stack of towels she kept meaning to donate. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev knelt at the oven, squinting at a thermometer.

"It says three-fifty but it runs hot," he said. "I think it runs hot."

"It runs hot," she confirmed. They'd been in the apartment two years, long enough to know the oven's moods, the way the radiator clanked at four in the morning, which floorboard by the bathroom would wake anyone sleeping on the couch.

He'd made a braised chicken thing from a recipe his mother had emailed him in a document with the font size set to eighteen. Marisol had handled the sides, which meant roasted carrots and a salad she was still deciding about.

"Should I put walnuts in this?"

"Elena's allergic."

"Elena's allergic to pecans."

Dev stood up, wiped his hands on a dish towel. "Are you sure?"

She wasn't. She left the walnuts in the pantry.

At six-fifteen he changed his shirt twice. At six-twenty he came out in the first one again and she didn't say anything. She was lighting candles she'd bought at the grocery store, unscented, because Dev got headaches.

"There's a stack of mail on the chair," he said.

"I know. I'm going to put it in the bedroom and close the door."

"That's what I was going to suggest."

They moved around each other in the narrow kitchen with the unremarkable choreography of people who had figured it out: he reached over her for the colander, she stepped left without looking. Somebody's playlist came on, one of those they'd both added to and neither could remember starting.

The buzzer rang at six-forty. Marisol looked at Dev. He shrugged, tasted the sauce one more time, and went to let them in.


Marisol set the last fork down and stepped back to survey the table. Four places, mismatched plates, a jar of zinnias from the yard doing the work of a centerpiece.

"You moved my speaker," Danny called from the kitchen, where something was hissing in a pan.

"I moved it three inches. It was in the butter dish."

"It was near the butter dish."

She came in and leaned against the counter. He had a dish towel over one shoulder and flour on his forearm, and the chicken was browning unevenly, one thigh darker than the rest. He'd been talking about this recipe for a week, ever since his sister sent it, and had gotten to the stage of the evening where he no longer trusted it.

"It looks good," she said.

"It looks like something."

"It looks good, Danny."

She stole a green bean off the cutting board and he swatted at her without conviction. Outside, a car door slammed, but it was only the neighbor's kid coming home. They'd lived here two years now, in the rented half of a duplex with the porch that sagged toward the street, and they had learned each other's sounds well enough to know which car doors mattered.

"Did you get more wine?" he asked.

"Two bottles. And the seltzer for Priya."

"You're a professional."

"I'm a woman who reads texts."

He wiped his hands and kissed the side of her head, quick, already turning back to the stove. She went to change her shirt, then thought better of it and just rolled the sleeves. In the bedroom mirror she practiced looking like someone who hadn't spent forty minutes arranging zinnias.

At 6:40 the real knock came, three beats and a laugh already audible through the door. Danny yelled that he was coming. Marisol got there first.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled in the linen closet, wrinkled from the last time they'd used it, which had been Thanksgiving, which had been eleven months ago. She shook it out and held it up to the kitchen light.

"It's fine," Dev said from the stove. "Nobody's inspecting the tablecloth."

"Kayla will."

"Kayla will be too busy telling us about her divorce." He tasted the sauce, made a face, and reached for the salt. "Which, by the way, we should have a plan for. A signal. If she starts crying I'm going to need you to ask about her dog."

"She'd cry about the dog too. The dog was Marcus's."

Dev set down the spoon. "God. Okay. New signal."

Marisol laid the cloth over the table anyway and started smoothing it with her palms. Their apartment in Somerville was small enough that the dining table was really just the kitchen table, pushed out from the wall for company. Six chairs, four of them matching, two borrowed permanently from Dev's mother's basement.

"Did you get bread?" she called.

"It's in the car."

"It's been in the car for two hours."

"Then it's room temperature bread. That's a thing people pay for." But he was already wiping his hands on the dish towel, already patting his pockets for keys.

While he was gone she lit the candles, then blew two of them out because it looked like they were trying too hard. She found the wine glasses, six of them, one with a chip on the rim that she set at her own place. Through the window, the maple in the courtyard was down to its last stubborn leaves.

The door banged. Dev came in with the bread and a bunch of grocery-store tulips, orange, slightly bent.

"They were by the register," he said, a little defensively.

Marisol took them and looked around for something to put them in.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, exactly where she'd shoved it after Thanksgiving. She shook it out and held it up to the kitchen light.

"There's a wine stain," she said.

Dev looked over from the stove, where he was tasting the sauce with a wooden spoon. "Put a candle over it."

"It's the size of a dinner plate."

"Put a big candle over it."

She laughed and started ironing it anyway, on the counter, over a dish towel, which she knew was the wrong way to do it and did every time. The apartment smelled like garlic and browning onions. Outside, the November dark had come down at four-thirty and made the windows into mirrors, so she could see herself and Dev doubled against the glass, both of them still in socks.

"Did Priya say six or six-thirty?" he asked.

"Six-thirty. But Tom will come at six because Tom always comes at six."

"Tom is a menace."

They had lived together three years in the second-floor unit on Chestnut, long enough that the negotiations had stopped being negotiations. He cooked; she cleaned and made the playlists. Her mother still asked, every few months, in a tone of studied lightness, whether they'd talked about anything. They had, actually. They just hadn't decided anything, and there was a difference, and Marisol had given up trying to explain it.

She set the table with the mismatched chairs, the good plates, the one candle that would cover the stain. Dev came behind her, wiped his hands on his jeans, and put the pot on a trivet.

"It's good," he said. "You should try it."

She took the spoon from him and tasted it and made a face.

"What?"

"More salt."

He was already reaching for the box. The buzzer went off at 6:04.

"Tom," they said together.


Marisol tasted the sauce and made a face. Too much acid. She reached for the sugar bowl, then stopped—last time she'd overcorrected and Danny had spent twenty minutes pretending the pasta was fine.

"Try this," she said, holding out the wooden spoon.

Danny came in from the dining room with a fistful of mismatched forks. He blew on the spoon, tasted, considered. "More salt. Maybe a little butter at the end."

"That's your answer to everything."

"It's a good answer."

She added salt. He went back to the table, laying out the forks, then rearranging them because they'd only bought six matching plates and now Priya was bringing her sister, which made seven. He found a plate in the back of the cabinet, a survivor from his college apartment, chipped along one edge.

"I'll take the ugly one," he called.

"You always take the ugly one."

"Someone has to."

The apartment was small enough that they kept bumping into each other, the way they had for four years now—her reaching past him for the colander, him stepping back into her, both saying sorry automatically and meaning none of it. There was a rhythm to it by now. The lease had their two names on it. So did the vet bills.

At six-forty Marisol changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. Danny put on music, then turned it down, then turned it up when she said she couldn't hear it. He lit the one candle they owned, a lavender thing from a wedding they'd been to in Ohio.

"How's it look?" he asked.

She surveyed the table, the crooked napkins, the chipped plate at his place setting.

"Like people live here," she said.

The buzzer went off. Danny wiped his hands on his jeans, and Marisol pressed the button to let them up.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, smelling faintly of cedar and last Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table while Daniel argued with the oven, which had a habit of running forty degrees hot no matter what the dial said.

"Did you take the chicken out at four like I asked?" she called.

"At four-fifteen." He said it defensively, though fifteen minutes hardly mattered. He'd been on a call with his sister in Tucson, listening to her explain, again, why she couldn't come for Christmas.

They had lived in the duplex on Ellwood Street for two years now, long enough that Marisol's mother had stopped asking pointed questions and started simply sending them dish towels. The kitchen was too small for both of them, so they had worked out a choreography: he took the stove, she took the counter by the window, and they passed behind each other with a hand on the small of the back, a warning and an apology at once.

At six-thirty she put on earrings and he changed out of the shirt with the paint on it. Wesley and Anne were bringing wine. Priya was bringing her new boyfriend, whom nobody had met, which Marisol found thrilling and Daniel found exhausting.

"The green beans look sad," he said.

"Add lemon."

"That's your answer to everything."

"It works on everything."

He squeezed half a lemon over the pan and tasted, and she watched him consider it, then nod, and something in her chest loosened the way it did maybe twice a week, unpredictably, when he was just standing there being unremarkable.

The doorbell rang at 6:52. Wesley always came early.

"Ready?" Daniel asked, wiping his hands.

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


Marisol wiped the counter for the third time, though it was already clean. Outside, a gray Tuesday evening was settling over their street in Fort Collins, and the potatoes weren't done.

"They're not done," she said.

Theo looked up from the record crate he was digging through. "They've got twenty minutes. People are always late."

"Dev is never late. Dev arrives eight minutes early and sits in his car so he won't be early."

"Then Dev can help peel." Theo pulled out an old Bill Withers album, considered it, put it back. He'd been trying to build a playlist for two days and had discarded every option as either too obvious or trying too hard.

Marisol crossed the kitchen and moved the stack of mail off the table to the counter, where it would sit until Saturday. The apartment—two bedrooms, one of which held a treadmill neither of them used and a stack of Theo's unframed prints—had a way of collecting evidence of their four years together. The hooks by the door held both their coats. The fridge held her oat milk and his whole milk and a wedding invitation from her cousin, which they had not discussed.

"Wine's open," Theo said. "Do we have enough glasses?"

"We have five real ones and then the jam jars."

"Jam jars are charming."

"Jam jars are what you say when you don't have glasses."

He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at the roasting pan. "Those look good, actually."

"They look pale."

"They look rustic."

The buzzer went. Marisol swore softly, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and looked at him. Theo grabbed the towel from her, tossed it into the sink, and pressed the button.

"Eight minutes early," she said.

"Told you," he said, and went to prop the door.


The kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt rosemary. Dana pulled the tray of potatoes out and frowned at the edges.

"They're fine," Marcus said, not looking up from the cutting board.

"You haven't even seen them."

"I've seen every potato you've ever made. They're fine."

She set the tray on the stove and started opening windows anyway, because the smoke alarm in the hallway had a personality. Outside, the November air came in cold and smelled like somebody's wood stove. Their apartment was the top floor of a house in Providence, slanted ceilings, radiators that clanked like someone was down there hitting them with a wrench.

Marcus scraped shallots into a bowl. "Did you tell Priya seven or seven-thirty?"

"Seven. But she'll come at seven-forty and apologize for eleven minutes."

"So we have time."

"We do not have time. There's a laundry basket in the bathroom."

He wiped his hands and went to deal with it, which meant shoving it in the closet, which she knew, and which she had decided years ago not to fight. They'd been together six years, in this place for three. His mother still asked about weddings at Thanksgiving. Dana's father had stopped asking, which was somehow worse.

She lit the candles on the table — mismatched, one from a gift set, two from the hardware store. Marcus came back with a stack of plates and started setting them down in the wrong order until she moved two of them, and he let her, and put his hand briefly on the small of her back on the way past.

"Wine's open," he said.

"Pour me a little."

They stood a minute in the doorway with the glasses, looking at the table, the crooked candles, the good tablecloth with the stain they'd stopped noticing. Downstairs, the buzzer went off — 6:52. Someone always came early.

"That's Priya," Marcus said.

"It is absolutely not."

It was Nick, holding a pie.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, exactly where she'd shoved it after Thanksgiving. She shook it out on the dining room floor and frowned at the crease running diagonally across the middle.

"Iron's under the sink," Daniel called from the kitchen. He was standing over a pot of something that had started as a plan and was becoming an improvisation. The recipe had called for chicken stock. They had, it turned out, bouillon cubes of uncertain vintage.

"You put the iron under the sink?"

"You put the iron under the sink. In March. During the thing with the curtains."

She remembered the thing with the curtains. She got the iron.

By six-fifteen the apartment smelled like garlic and burnt sugar—the burnt sugar was a separate incident, involving carrots, which Daniel had decided not to discuss. Marisol set out mismatched wine glasses, four from a set they'd bought at Target and two that had migrated home from a wedding neither of them could place.

"Do we have enough chairs?"

"We have five chairs and one of those folding ones from the closet."

"That's six people and six chairs."

"Unless Priya brings Aaron."

Daniel looked up. "Priya's bringing Aaron?"

"She said 'we.' In the text. I've been thinking about it all day."

He wiped his hands on a dish towel and went to look at the closet, as though a seventh chair might have materialized. It hadn't. He came back with the piano bench from the corner of the living room, which nobody had ever played, and set it at the end of the table like it had always belonged there.

Marisol lit two candles. Daniel turned the overhead light down and the music up. At 6:52 someone buzzed from downstairs, early, and they both said "of course" at the same time and laughed, and she went to press the button.


Marisol found the good tablecloth crumpled at the bottom of the linen closet, exactly where she'd shoved it after Thanksgiving. She shook it out and held it up to the window light, checking for the wine stain she remembered.

"It's fine," Dev said from the kitchen doorway, a wooden spoon in one hand. "Nobody's going to inspect the tablecloth. Ravi eats standing over the sink."

"Ravi's not the one I'm worried about." She meant his sister, who noticed things, but she didn't say it, and Dev knew anyway.

He went back to the stove. The chicken had been braising since four, and the kitchen of their rented half-duplex in Grand Rapids had gone humid and fragrant, windows fogging at the corners. Dev tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted again, and decided it needed twenty more minutes and a little more thyme than the recipe claimed.

Marisol laid the table for six, then moved the extra chair from the bedroom because they only owned five. She lit two candles, blew one out because the pair looked like they were trying too hard, then lit it again.

"You changed shirts," Dev said when she came in for the corkscrew.

"I spilled olive oil on the other one."

"You look nice."

"I look like someone whose apartment smells like garlic."

"House," he said. "We upgraded, remember."

At six-fifteen she vacuumed the living room while he sliced bread. At six-thirty he asked whether they should put music on before people arrived or after, and she said before, obviously, so it seemed casual. He put on something with no lyrics.

The first knock came at 6:52, early, which meant it was Ravi. Marisol looked at Dev; Dev shrugged and wiped his hands on a dish towel. She got the door, and cold March air came in with three people and a bottle of red, and the evening started without either of them deciding it had.