Marcus found the shoebox in the hall closet while looking for the good extension cord. Inside were the paper napkins from the courthouse, still faintly grease-stained from the diner they'd gone to afterward.

"Twenty years," he said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Dana was rinsing lettuce. "You kept these."

She dried her hands and took one, holding it up to the window light. "I kept everything. There's a parking stub in there somewhere."

They'd talked around the anniversary for weeks. Dana's sister had suggested a cruise. Marcus's coworkers kept mentioning a steakhouse downtown with a two-week waiting list. Neither idea had stuck.

"What if we didn't do anything big," Dana said, sitting down at the table. "What if we just went back?"

"To the courthouse?"

"To Feldman's. If it's still there."

He pulled out his phone. It was still there, in the same strip mall in Bellefonte, though the reviews mentioned new owners and a remodel. Three and a half stars.

"It'll be worse than we remember," Marcus said.

"Probably. That's sort of the point."

They made a weekend of it—drove up Saturday morning, stayed at a hotel off the highway that Dana booked with points. Feldman's had booths in a different color now, mint green instead of the cracked orange vinyl she remembered, and the woman behind the counter was maybe twenty-five and had no idea the place had ever been anything else.

They ordered what they'd ordered before: a patty melt for him, French toast for her, coffee for both, at two in the afternoon.

"It's not as good," Marcus admitted.

"No." Dana stole a fry off his plate. "But we're better."

He laughed, a short surprised sound, and she grinned at him across the table, and outside the window a truck backed up beeping in the parking lot where they'd once sat in a borrowed Corolla, married ninety minutes, not knowing what came next.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from the Loew's on Fourth Street, dated eight years back, faded almost past reading.

"Look at these," she said, holding them up as Daniel came in with the grocery bags.

He set the bags on the counter and squinted. "Was that the one where the projector broke?"

"Twice. And you kept apologizing like you'd built the thing yourself."

Their tenth anniversary was three weeks out, and they'd been circling the question for days without landing on anything. Daniel had floated a weekend in Asheville. Marisol had mentioned, twice, that the roof still needed attention before winter.

"We could just do the theater again," Daniel said, unpacking eggs. "See whatever's playing."

"It closed. Turned into a climbing gym."

"Of course it did."

She leaned against the counter. What she wanted, she realized, wasn't a re-creation. It was something they'd both remember in another ten years. "What if we cooked?" she said. "The whole thing. That paella your mother made when we visited Valencia."

Daniel paused with a carton of milk half-lifted. "That took her four hours. And she yelled at me for stirring it."

"So don't stir it."

He laughed. "We'd need the pan. And the good saffron."

"I'll order the saffron. You call your mother and get the actual recipe, not the one she pretends is the recipe."

He considered it, and she watched him warm to the idea the way he always did—slowly, then all at once. "We'd have to start early. Two, maybe."

"I'll clear the afternoon."

"And nobody else. Just us."

"Just us," she agreed.

On the day, the kitchen filled with smoke twice and the rice came out slightly wrong at the edges. They ate it anyway, at the small table by the window, and Daniel admitted that his mother would have had opinions. Marisol said she'd never tasted anything better.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, wedged behind the winter hats. Inside: ticket stubs from a minor league game, a laminated diner menu, and the receipt from the U-Haul they'd driven from Tucson to Cleveland fifteen years ago that October.

"You kept the receipt?" Dana said from the doorway, still in her scrubs, hair flattened from a twelve-hour shift.

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

Dana sat down on the floor beside her, back against the closet door, and took the U-Haul paper. "Ninety-four dollars. We thought that was a fortune."

"It was a fortune."

They'd been circling the anniversary for weeks without landing on anything. Marisol's sister kept suggesting a cruise. Dana's coworker had recommended a resort in Michigan with a wine cellar. Neither of them wanted it. Money was tight since the roof, and besides, neither of them liked the ocean much.

"What if we drove it again," Dana said. "Not the whole way. But out to that turnoff by Zanesville where the tire blew."

Marisol laughed. "You want to celebrate the tire blowing."

"I want to celebrate that we got it changed. In the rain. And you didn't leave me on the side of I-70."

"I considered it."

They settled on a Saturday. Dana traded a shift. Marisol packed sandwiches in wax paper the way her mother used to, and they took the Corolla east with the windows cracked because the AC had a smell. At the turnoff, there was nothing to see—a guardrail, some sumac going red, a gravel shoulder wide enough to pull onto.

They stood there anyway for a while. Dana put her arm around Marisol's shoulders.

"Fifteen years," Marisol said.

"On this exact patch of nothing."

They ate the sandwiches on the hood, watching traffic, and were home before dark.


Marisol found the receipt in the junk drawer, folded into a soft square, the ink so faded she had to hold it under the kitchen light. Eight years old. Two coffees and a slice of lemon cake from a bakery in Providence that had closed during the pandemic.

"You kept this," Dev said, coming in with the mail.

"I keep everything. It's a character flaw."

They were supposed to be planning. Ten years married in three weeks, and every conversation about it had ended in a shrug and a rerun of something they'd already seen. Dev had floated Lisbon. Marisol had floated a hotel downtown with a bathtub big enough to lie down in. Neither idea had survived the second mention.

"What if we did nothing," Dev said.

"That's depressing."

"No—I mean deliberately nothing. No restaurant. No airport. We take the Friday off, we don't set an alarm." He set the mail down. "We drive out to that orchard your sister mentioned. We come home. I make the thing with the short ribs."

Marisol turned the receipt over. On the back, in her own handwriting from a decade ago: *ask him about his mother's garden*. She'd forgotten writing it. She'd forgotten she'd been nervous.

"The short ribs take five hours," she said.

"I've got five hours."

She thought about the ten years—the apartment with the sloped floors, the year his father was sick, the argument about the car that had somehow lasted eleven months. None of it had happened in Lisbon.

"Okay," she said. "But I'm making the cake. Lemon."

"You don't bake."

"I'll learn. I've got three weeks."

Dev laughed and took the receipt from her, studying it. Then he opened the junk drawer and put it back, folded, exactly where it had been.


The kitchen still smelled like the coffee Ellen had burned that morning. Marcus wiped down the counter while she sat at the table with a legal pad, drawing a line down the middle.

"Okay," she said. "Column A: things we've done before. Column B: things we haven't."

"That's a very lawyerly approach to a twentieth anniversary."

"I am a very lawyerly person." She wrote *dinner at Pignoli's* under A. "We've done that nine years running."

"Ten. You forgot the year the babysitter canceled and we ate in the car."

Ellen laughed and added a tally mark. Marcus dried his hands and sat across from her, pulling the pad closer. Under Column B he wrote *Portugal*, then crossed it out. Their daughter's tuition payment was due in August, and they both knew it.

"What about the cabin?" he said. "The one Ruth and Danny rented on the lake. She said it was cheap in October."

"October's not our anniversary."

"October's when the leaves are good."

Ellen considered this. Twenty years ago she had gotten married in a Presbyterian church in Dayton with rain hammering the roof so loudly the vows were barely audible. They had never been sentimental about the date itself, only about the fact of it — the accumulated ordinary days, the arguments about the thermostat, the summer Marcus's father died and Ellen drove him to Cleveland every weekend for three months.

"We could do both," she said. "Pignoli's on the actual day. Cabin in October."

"That's twice the money."

"It's one nice dinner and a cabin in the off-season. We're not chartering a yacht."

Marcus took the pen from her and wrote *both* at the bottom of the page, underlining it twice.

"Fine," he said. "But I'm not paddling a canoe."

"You'll paddle the canoe."

He didn't argue. He knew he would.


Marcus found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner on Route 9 where he and Delia had eaten pancakes at two in the morning after their courthouse wedding, twenty-five years ago that Saturday.

"You kept this?" he called down the hallway.

Delia came in wiping her hands on a dish towel. She looked at the receipt, then at him, and laughed. "Four dollars and eighty cents. You tipped a dollar."

"I was showing off."

They'd been arguing gently about the anniversary for two weeks. Delia's sister wanted to throw a party — rented hall, a slideshow, her nephews handling the music. Marcus had been quietly dreading it. He was sixty-one and tired in a way that made crowded rooms feel like work.

"I'll tell Renata no," Delia said, sitting down on the closet floor with the box in her lap. "She'll be wounded for a week and then she'll be fine."

"You don't have to. If you want the party—"

"I want pancakes." She held up the receipt. "I want to see if the place is still there."

It wasn't. They found that out Thursday, on the internet, in the kitchen with coffee going cold. A vape shop now. Delia said something unrepeatable about the state of the world.

So Saturday morning Marcus got up at five, which he hadn't done voluntarily in years, and made pancakes badly — too much baking powder, one burned. Delia came down in her robe and ate them anyway, and put four dollars and eighty cents on the table beside her plate, plus a dollar.

"Showing off," she said.

Later they drove out to Route 9 and parked across from the vape shop and sat there a while, not saying much, the heater ticking, the light coming up gray and ordinary over the road they'd driven home on.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from a movie neither of them could name anymore, dated fifteen years ago that March.

"We should do something," she said, holding them up when Diane came in from the garage, sawdust still on her forearms.

Diane took one, squinting at the smeared ink. "Something," she repeated. It had become a joke between them, the way anniversaries kept sneaking up. Last year they'd realized on a Tuesday and eaten takeout pho on the porch steps, which had honestly been fine.

But fifteen felt different. Fifteen years since a courthouse in Boston, before it was legal in half the country, before Diane's mother came around, before the house in Providence with its crooked back door that Diane kept promising to fix.

"We could fly somewhere," Marisol offered, though she was already counting the cost in her head—the school year wasn't out, her students had exams.

Diane sat down at the kitchen table. "What if we didn't go anywhere?"

"Meaning."

"Meaning we finish the back deck. Together. And then we eat dinner on it." She said it a little defensively, as if bracing for disappointment.

Marisol considered. She thought about the pile of cedar boards that had been sitting under a tarp since October, about Diane's persistent belief that a house could be a way of saying things.

"That's the least romantic anniversary plan I've ever heard," she said.

"I know."

"I love it."

They spent that Saturday measuring and cutting, arguing pleasantly about spacing, Marisol getting a splinter that Diane extracted with tweezers on the kitchen counter. By six the deck was done, unstained but solid. They carried out two chairs and a bottle of wine and sat until the mosquitoes drove them in.

"Sixteen," Diane said. "We're doing the bathroom."

Marisol laughed and didn't argue.


Marisol found the shoebox first, tucked behind the winter coats in the hall closet. Inside were the ticket stubs, the receipt from the diner on Route 9, the photograph someone had taken of them at the courthouse in Albany with her hair coming loose from its pins.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt edges off the toast. "Do you realize? Twenty years next Saturday."

He set down the knife. "I was going to bring it up. I keep thinking we should do something — actually do something, not just order Thai and fall asleep during a movie."

"The Thai was good, though."

"The Thai was excellent. I'm saying we could aim higher."

They spent the week floating ideas across the dinner table and through the wall between the bathroom and the bedroom. Dev wanted to fly somewhere — Charleston, maybe, or back to Albany for the sheer sentimentality of it. Marisol pointed out that the roof needed work and their daughter's tuition bill had arrived looking hostile. Dev conceded the point without much fight; he'd been half-hoping she'd talk him out of it.

What they landed on was simpler. Saturday morning they drove ninety minutes north to the state park where they'd hiked on their second date, when Marisol had worn entirely inappropriate shoes and Dev had pretended he knew the trail. This time they brought good boots, a thermos, and sandwiches Dev made badly but with enthusiasm.

At the overlook they sat on the same flat rock, or one close enough. The valley had more houses in it than before. Marisol leaned into his shoulder.

"We got old," she said.

"We got here," Dev said.

They stayed until the coffee ran out, then walked back down, arguing pleasantly about where to stop for dinner.


Marcus found the calendar note first, though he'd known the date for weeks. Twenty years since the closing on the house on Delmar Street, the little bungalow with the sagging porch they'd bought when they were twenty-eight and reckless.

"We could do dinner at Ferraro's," Elena said, standing in the kitchen doorway with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "Or we could not."

"You have an idea."

"I have several. That's the problem."

He wiped his hands on a dish towel. She had that look—the one that meant she'd been thinking about something during her commute and had constructed at least three versions of it.

"Okay," she said. "Option one, we drive up to the lake, stay in that cabin place. Option two, we invite the Hendersons and Kim and just have people here. Option three—" She paused.

"Say option three."

"We finish the porch."

Marcus laughed, but she didn't. Twenty years, and the porch railing was still the temporary version, plywood painted white, replaced twice when it rotted.

"That's not a celebration," he said. "That's a Saturday."

"It's four Saturdays, probably. And then we'd sit out there with a bottle of wine and it would be ours." She shrugged. "But it's not romantic. Forget it."

He thought about the cabin. He thought about the Hendersons, who would stay too late and talk about their kitchen renovation.

"We could do both," he said. "The porch, and then the cabin in October when it's done. Something to look at when we get back."

Elena took her glasses off her head and set them on the counter, which was how he knew she was pleased.

"You'll complain about the miter saw."

"I'll complain the entire time," he agreed. "You'll pick a stain color and then change it."

"Probably twice."

They ordered the lumber that weekend.


The Twentieth

The invitation had been sitting on the refrigerator for three weeks, held by a magnet shaped like Ohio. Someone's daughter was getting married in Cleveland the same weekend.

"We could skip it," Dara said. She was standing at the counter, cutting the tops off strawberries, dropping the green crowns into the compost bin. "It's a second cousin. I've met her twice."

Nia looked up from the laptop. "Twenty years, though. Feels like we should do something that isn't a Marriott ballroom."

They'd been together twenty-three years, actually, but the wedding had waited on the courts, and they'd never quite decided which number to count. This year they'd settled on the license — the tenth of June, 2005, in a Massachusetts town clerk's office with Nia's brother as witness and a photograph nobody had thought to frame until 2011.

"What about the cabin?" Dara asked.

"The one with the mice?"

"They fixed the mice."

Nia typed something, then turned the screen around. A rental listing in the Berkshires: a screened porch, a woodstove, a lake close enough to walk to. Four hundred a night, which was ridiculous, and available.

"Two nights," Dara said, considering. "Not three. Three and we start reorganizing their kitchen."

"We absolutely start reorganizing their kitchen."

They booked it that evening, sitting on the couch with the laptop between them and the strawberries in a bowl, hulled and unrinsed. Dara wanted to bring the good coffee and the French press. Nia wanted to bring nothing, to buy everything there, to be the kind of people who improvised.

They compromised: coffee, and improvisation about everything else.

Later, Dara took the invitation off the refrigerator and slid it into the recycling, and neither of them said anything about it, and the magnet from Ohio stayed where it was, holding nothing at all.


Marguerite found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two of them, faded to the color of weak tea, from a movie neither of them could remember the plot of anymore. Fifteen years ago that November.

"We should do something," she said, holding them up when Desmond came in from the garage, sawdust on his forearms. "Not something big. But something."

He took the stubs from her, turned them over. "The theater's a vape shop now."

"I know."

They talked about it over dinner, and then over dishes, and then not at all for three days, which was how most of their decisions got made. Desmond floated a weekend in Asheville. Marguerite pointed out that Asheville in November meant either rain or crowds, possibly both, and that they'd spent their tenth anniversary arguing about parking in a city neither of them particularly liked.

"So what, then. Dinner at Pastore's?"

"We could." She didn't sound convinced, and he didn't push.

It was Desmond who came back to it, on a Tuesday, while she was grading papers at the kitchen table. He'd been thinking about the house—how they'd bought it half-finished and spent the first two years living around ladders and drop cloths.

"The screened porch," he said. "We never finished the screened porch."

Marguerite set down her pen.

"Not the whole thing. But I could get the frame up over a weekend. You pick the color for the trim."

She considered it. There was something unromantic about it, and something exactly right, which she suspected was the same thing.

"Sage green," she said. "And we eat out there in the spring, even if it's cold."

"Even if it's cold."

They spent the anniversary itself at the hardware store, arguing amiably about hinges. It rained the whole drive home. Neither of them minded.


The Anniversary

Marcus found the notebook while cleaning out the hall closet—the one Diane had kept during her mother's illness, back in 2019. Grocery lists, medication schedules, and on one page, in handwriting that shook: *Fifteen years today. Forgot to say it.*

He brought it to the kitchen where she was scrubbing the coffee pot.

"You never told me you wrote that down."

Diane dried her hands and took the notebook. She read it twice, then set it on the counter. "I was embarrassed. You'd made dinner. I ate three bites and fell asleep on the couch."

"You'd been at the hospital for eleven hours."

"Still."

Twenty-one years now. The number felt improbable to both of them, like something reported about strangers. They'd talked vaguely about a trip—Charleston, maybe, or the cabin in the Poconos where they'd honeymooned badly, with a leaking roof and a raccoon problem.

"I don't want to drive anywhere," Diane said.

"No?"

"I want to be here." She gestured at the kitchen, the water-stained ceiling they'd never fixed, the height marks penciled on the doorframe from when their nephews visited. "This is the thing we made. Not Charleston."

Marcus leaned against the counter. "So what, then?"

They settled on it over the next week, in pieces. Saturday, they would cook the meal from their wedding reception—the mediocre chicken marsala, the green beans nobody touched. Diane would make her mother's rolls. They'd eat at the good table, use the china that had been in the box since 2004.

And afterward, they agreed, they would each write something down. Not a card. Something longer. The things they'd forgotten to say during the eleven-hour days.

"That's sentimental," Marcus said.

"It's twenty-one years," Diane said. "We've earned sentimental."

He didn't argue. He went out Thursday and bought two notebooks, plain black, and left one on her side of the bed without a word.


The Anniversary

Dana found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the ticket stubs—thirty-one years of them, from the first movie they'd seen together to last spring's disappointing sequel.

"You kept these," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Marcus was cubing potatoes.

He glanced over. "Of course I kept them. I keep everything. That's why the garage looks like that."

Their thirty-second anniversary fell on a Thursday. They'd already agreed—no big trip this year, not with the roof needing work. But Dana had been quietly worrying that "no big trip" would slide into "nothing at all," the way it had two years ago when they'd both been swamped and only remembered at nine p.m.

"I have an idea," she said.

Marcus set down the knife. He'd learned to give her ideas his full attention; the good ones came fast and left faster.

"We do a tour. All of it. The theater on Lyndale where we saw that terrible French film. The apartment on Hennepin. The courthouse."

"The courthouse is a parking ramp now."

"So we park in it. Reverently."

He laughed, the short surprised one she'd been chasing since 1993. "The diner's still there. On Nicollet."

"Then we end at the diner. Pie."

They did it on Saturday instead, because Thursday was Marcus's late shift and neither of them wanted to rush. It took four hours and cost eleven dollars in parking. The old apartment building had been painted an aggressive yellow. Marcus stood on the sidewalk a long time, hands in his jacket pockets.

"You proposed right there," Dana said, pointing at nothing.

"I proposed badly right there."

"You proposed fine."

At the diner she ordered banana cream and he ordered lemon meringue and they split both, the way they always had, without discussing it.


Marcus found the calendar note first, though Priya had written it three months earlier in her cramped engineer's handwriting: *Ten years — do something.*

"That's helpful," he said, holding it up over breakfast. "Very specific."

She laughed into her coffee. "Past me was optimistic about future me having ideas."

They batted options around for a week. Marcus wanted to go back to the lake house in Michigan where they'd honeymooned, but Priya pointed out that the place had been sold and turned into a wedding venue, which felt like being a tourist at your own history. Priya suggested a real trip — Lisbon, maybe, or Mexico City — but Marcus did the math out loud, factoring in the new roof and Devi's braces, and they both went quiet.

"What did we actually do," Priya said finally, "the year we were happiest?"

Marcus thought about it. The apartment on Ashland with the radiator that clanked. Splitting a sandwich because that was dinner. Driving out to the forest preserve on Sundays with a thermos and a bad map.

"We were broke," he said.

"We were broke and we were fine."

So they took a Saturday. Marcus made the coffee and Priya packed sandwiches — turkey and provolone, the same combination, which struck them both as ridiculous and also correct. They drove ninety minutes to a state park neither had visited, walked four miles on a trail that turned out to be muddier than advertised, and ate on a flat rock overlooking a river neither could name.

"We should have looked up what river this is," Priya said.

"We can look it up in the car."

"That feels like cheating."

They stayed until the light went orange. On the drive home Marcus put on the album they'd worn out in 2014, and Priya fell asleep during track six, and he let her, and thought that this was probably the whole thing, right here.


Marguerite found the receipt in a coat pocket she hadn't worn since March: a diner in Nebraska, two coffees, one slice of pie. October 12, five years ago. The day the transmission gave out on I-80 and they'd sat in a vinyl booth for six hours waiting on a tow, arguing about whether to turn back.

She brought it to the kitchen where David was rinsing beans in a colander.

"Do you remember this?"

He dried his hands and squinted at the faded thermal print. "The pie was terrible."

"It was rhubarb."

"It was terrible rhubarb." He handed it back. "That was the day you said you'd move."

"I said I'd think about it."

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

They'd been talking for weeks about what to do for the tenth of their marriage, which fell in three days. David had floated a hotel downtown. Marguerite had floated nothing at all, which he'd correctly read as a veto.

"What if we drove somewhere," she said.

"Nebraska?"

"God, no. Somewhere with better pie."

He leaned against the counter. "There's that place in Milford. The bakery with the sour cherry."

"That's forty minutes."

"So we make a day of it. Leave early, take the state road instead of the highway. Stop wherever." He shrugged. "You always say we never stop anywhere."

Marguerite considered it. Ten years felt like it should require something with a reservation, a dress code, a photograph worth keeping. But she thought about the six hours in the booth, how they'd stopped arguing around hour three and started talking about her mother, and how by the time the tow truck came she'd known something she hadn't known that morning.

"Okay," she said. "But I'm not sitting in the car for forty minutes without coffee."

"Obviously," David said. "That's the whole point."


The Twentieth

Dana found the shoebox while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten after the courthouse ceremony. Two omelets and a coffee. Eleven dollars and forty cents.

"Marcus," she called down the hall. "Come look at this."

He came in wiping paint from his hands—he'd been touching up the porch railing all afternoon, twenty years of Ohio winters having done their work. He sat on the edge of the bed and turned the receipt over.

"I forgot you kept this."

"I keep everything. It's a character flaw."

They'd been arguing about the anniversary for a week, though arguing wasn't quite right. Marcus wanted to go somewhere—Chicago, maybe, a real hotel with a concierge and towels that weren't threadbare. Dana wanted to stay home. She hadn't been able to explain why without sounding like she was being difficult.

"The diner's still there," she said now. "Renata's. It's a Vietnamese place now, but same building."

Marcus considered this. He'd learned, over two decades, that when Dana circled something twice she was usually onto it.

"You want to go back."

"I want to eat somewhere cheap and then come home and sit on the porch you just painted." She looked at him. "Is that pathetic?"

"It's a little pathetic."

"Marcus."

"I said a *little*." He handed the receipt back. "Chicago will still be there when we're seventy."

So on Saturday they drove twelve minutes to a strip mall and ordered bún chả and split a Vietnamese coffee because Dana couldn't finish one alone. The waitress, who was maybe nineteen, took their picture in front of the menu board when Marcus asked.

They were home by eight. The paint had cured. They sat on the steps until the mosquitoes found them, saying almost nothing, which was, they'd discovered, the whole trick of it.


Marisol found the shoebox while clearing out the hall closet, and inside it was the receipt from the U-Haul they'd rented eleven years ago. Twenty-two dollars for a dolly they never used.

"Dev," she called. "Come look at this."

He came in from the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder and took the slip of paper, squinting at the faded thermal print. "God. That was the day it rained."

"That was the day you dropped the box of dishes."

"That was the day the box *fell*, and I have never accepted your version."

They'd been talking for weeks about what to do for their anniversary. Marisol had suggested Charleston, then walked it back when she remembered the transmission was making a sound. Dev had floated a nice dinner downtown, which sounded good until they priced it out. Neither of them said the obvious thing, which was that the year had been thin and tiring, and that a hotel bill would sit in the back of their minds the whole time.

"We could just drive out to the old apartment," Dev said. "Get sandwiches from that place on Ellis, if it's still there."

"Sal's."

"Sal's, right. Sit in the car like teenagers."

Marisol turned the receipt over. There was nothing on the back but she looked anyway. "That's kind of sad."

"Is it? I liked that apartment."

"You hated that apartment. The radiator."

"I liked *you* in that apartment."

She laughed, which he'd been counting on. Outside, someone's dog was barking at the mail carrier, the same argument it had every afternoon.

"Sandwiches," she said. "And then we come back here and you make that pasta."

"The one with the anchovies."

"The one with the anchovies."

He kissed the top of her head on his way back to the sink. She put the receipt in her pocket instead of the trash.


Marisol had been dreading the question all week, so David asked it first, over Sunday coffee.

"Twenty years," he said. "What do you want to do?"

She set down her mug. The kitchen still smelled like the burnt edge of the toast he'd rescued too late. "Honestly? Not a restaurant. I don't want to sit across from you being formal."

"Thank God." He laughed. "Rita keeps telling me to book that place downtown with the tasting menu. Nine courses. I'd fall asleep by course four."

"You fell asleep at your own birthday dinner."

"That was a long day."

They tossed ideas back and forth while the dog nosed at the back door. A weekend in Asheville, but the drive was six hours and David's back had been bad since November. A party, but Marisol hated planning parties and knew she'd end up in the kitchen refilling ice while everyone else talked. A cruise, which they both dismissed within four seconds.

"What did we do on the actual day?" Marisol asked. "Twenty years ago."

"City hall. Then we got sandwiches from that place on Third. You had mustard on your dress and cried about it."

"I did not cry."

"You teared up."

She was quiet for a moment. "That place closed."

"There's a new one. Same block. Terrible name — Bread Winners or something."

So that's what they settled on. They'd take the Friday off, sleep late, drive into the city, get sandwiches, walk the park where they used to walk when the apartment was too small to be in on Sundays. Come home. Maybe watch something bad on TV.

"That's it?" David said, as if testing it.

Marisol shrugged. "That's twenty years. It wasn't nine courses. It was mostly sandwiches."

He reached over and took her hand across the table, thumb moving over her knuckles, and didn't say anything, which was the right answer.


Marcus found the ticket stubs in a shoebox while looking for the extension cord. Ten years old, faded to the color of weak tea, but he could still read *Ryman Auditorium* and the date.

"Renée," he called up the stairs. "Come look at this."

She came down in her work clothes, hair still wrapped, and took the stubs from him. Her face did the thing it did — that slow softening around the mouth.

"You kept these."

"I kept everything." He gestured at the box. Movie tickets, a parking receipt from Gatlinburg, a napkin with her phone number on it in handwriting she'd since abandoned.

Their anniversary was three weeks out. They'd agreed, tentatively, on dinner somewhere with cloth napkins, but neither had made a reservation, which Renée thought said something about how tired they both were. Twelve-hour shifts for her at the hospital. Marcus's shop hemorrhaging money since the second Firestone opened on Dickerson Pike.

"We could go back," she said. "See who's playing."

"Tickets are a hundred and eighty a pop now. I looked."

"Of course you looked."

He shrugged. She sat down on the second stair with the box in her lap and started going through it properly, and after a minute he sat beside her, their shoulders touching in the narrow stairwell.

"What if we just did the rest of it," she said. "The parts that were free. Walked around Centennial Park. Got hot chicken. Came home."

"That's not much of an anniversary."

"That was the whole night, Marcus. The show was an hour and a half."

He thought about it. Outside, a car passed, headlights sweeping the wall.

"Prince's or Hattie B's?"

"Prince's. I'm not driving to Midtown."

"Then it's settled," he said, and put the ticket stubs in his shirt pocket, where he'd forget about them until the wash.


Marcus found the recipe card in the back of the junk drawer, the one his mother had written out in blue ballpoint before the wedding. Fifteen years of grease stains had made the paper translucent in places.

"You still have this," Dana said, looking over his shoulder. She was holding the mail, thumb hooked under the flap of something from the mortgage company.

"I was thinking we make it Saturday. The whole thing, the way she used to."

Dana set the mail down. The kitchen was small, the same kitchen where they'd argued about the backsplash tile in 2011 and where she'd told him about the second miscarriage sitting on the floor with her back against the dishwasher. "That takes six hours."

"We have six hours."

"We could go somewhere. That place in Beacon everybody talks about."

He turned the card over. On the back, his mother had written *tell Marcus not to skimp on the butter.* "We could."

Dana pulled out a chair and sat, and he watched her think it through the way she thought through everything, with her jaw set slightly to one side. Fifteen years. They'd spent the tenth in a hotel in Charleston that neither of them could really remember now, except for a mediocre breakfast.

"Both," she said finally. "We cook Saturday, and we eat at the actual table, not on the couch. And in October, when work slows down, we go to Beacon."

"That's not an anniversary. That's just October."

"It's whatever we decide it is." She reached over and took the card from him, holding it up to the window light, reading his mother's cramped handwriting. "She really underlined *butter* twice."

"She was serious about it."

Dana handed it back. "Then we'll need to go to the store."


The morning of their tenth anniversary, Renata found Beto already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with the good notepad, the one they only used for taxes and grocery lists that mattered.

"I made a list," he said.

"Of course you did."

He turned it toward her. Restaurant downtown. Overnight in Asheville. Concert tickets, though the only band playing was one neither of them liked.

Renata poured coffee and sat across from him in the chair with the wobble they'd been meaning to fix since 2019. "What about the house?"

"What about it?"

"We bought it eight years ago. We've never finished the back bedroom."

Beto laughed, then stopped laughing when he saw she was serious. "You want to spend our anniversary drywalling."

"I want to spend it doing something we'll still see in twenty years." She tapped the notepad. "The restaurant's gone by Tuesday."

He considered this. It was the kind of thing she did — turning a celebration into a project, romance into labor. It had annoyed him early on. Now he understood it as a dialect, one he'd learned to speak.

"Compromise," he said. "We work in the morning. Then I take you somewhere with cloth napkins and I don't tell you how much anything costs."

"Deal."

They drove to the hardware store at eight and argued pleasantly about paint chips in the lighting aisle. Beto wanted a gray so pale it was basically white. Renata wanted a green her mother would have called ugly. They bought the green.

By two, the room smelled like latex and both of them had it in their hair. Beto stood in the doorway with the roller still in his hand.

"It's ugly," he said.

"It's ours."

"Both things can be true."

She kissed him on the jaw, the only clean spot she could find, and went to shower before dinner.


Marcus found the boxes in the garage on a Saturday morning, hunting for the good extension cord. He hadn't meant to open the one labeled WEDDING—MISC in Priya's careful handwriting, but the tape had already given up.

Inside: cocktail napkins printed with their names, a program nobody had kept but her, and the disposable cameras they'd left on tables that had never been developed.

He brought the cameras inside. Priya was at the kitchen table with her laptop and a mug of chai gone cold, arguing with a spreadsheet.

"Twenty years," he said, setting the cameras down. "Any of these still work?"

She picked one up and turned it over. "There's a place in Falls Church that develops them. Sanjay used them for his kid's birthday."

"That's the plan, then."

"That's not a plan, that's an errand." But she was smiling. "I was thinking we'd go back to Chincoteague. The place with the crab shack."

"That closed. Ellen told me."

"Then we find a new crab shack." She closed the laptop. "Or we stay here. Honestly, Marcus, I don't want to drive four hours to eat mediocre seafood and pretend it's romantic."

"So what do you want?"

She thought about it. "I want to develop those. And I want to invite the people who are still around. Not a party. Just—dinner. Whoever can come."

"Your mother will come."

"My mother will absolutely come and she'll bring too much food and complain about the humidity."

"Fine by me."

They made a list that afternoon on the back of an envelope. Twelve names, then nine after the honest edits. Priya dropped the cameras off Monday. Three of the four rolls came back usable—overexposed, thumbs in frames, her uncle mid-laugh at a table they'd forgotten existed.

They printed the best ones and taped them up along the hallway, unframed, in no particular order, and left them there long after everyone went home.


The morning of their tenth anniversary, Priya woke to the smell of burnt toast, which was how she knew Marcus had gotten up early to try something ambitious.

"I was going to bring you breakfast in bed," he said from the doorway, holding a plate with two slices of toast scraped clean of char. "Then I remembered you hate crumbs in the sheets."

"I do hate crumbs in the sheets."

They ate at the kitchen table instead, in the house they'd bought four years ago in Dayton, the one with the crooked porch step they still hadn't fixed. Outside, the maple in the front yard had gone half-yellow.

"So," Priya said. "The plan."

The plan had been debated for weeks. Marcus wanted to drive to Chicago, stay somewhere nice, see the lake. Priya had floated the idea of the restaurant in Yellow Springs where he'd proposed, though she admitted the food hadn't actually been that good.

"I've been thinking," Marcus said. "What if we did neither?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"What if we took the day off and just—drove. No destination. Stop where it looks interesting. We haven't done that since before your mom got sick."

Priya set down her coffee. Her mother had been gone two years now, and there were still whole weekends that vanished into grief without her noticing.

"That's either the laziest anniversary plan I've ever heard," she said, "or the best one."

"I made a backup reservation in Chicago. Just in case you hated it."

"Cancel it."

They left at ten. Somewhere past Springfield they found a farm stand selling cider and pumpkins, and Marcus bought a pumpkin they had no plans for. In Urbana they walked through a cemetery reading headstones aloud, guessing at lives.

They got home after midnight, the pumpkin rolling around the trunk, and Priya said it was the best day she could remember. Marcus said he'd make her toast in the morning. She said please don't.


The Twentieth

Maya found the receipt in a shoebox of tax documents she'd been meaning to shred for six years. Nineteen dollars and change, Golden Dragon, dated the night she and Dev had eaten dinner in a strip mall in Ypsilanti because the fancy place downtown had lost their reservation.

"I was going to propose that night," Dev said, when she showed him. He was at the kitchen island, sleeves rolled, deboning a chicken. "The ring was in my coat. I chickened out because the fluorescent lights made you look like you had the flu."

"I did have the flu."

"See. Wisdom."

Their twentieth was in three weeks. Maya's sister had already sent links—a resort in Tulum, a lodge in the Berkshires with a wood-fired sauna and a two-night minimum. Dev had a competing spreadsheet, because Dev always had a spreadsheet.

"I priced out flights to Lisbon," he said. "It's not insane if we go Tuesday to Tuesday."

Maya sat down on the stool across from him and turned the receipt over in her fingers. The paper had gone soft and yellow, almost cloth.

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

He looked up.

"What if we drove to Ypsilanti."

Dev set down the knife. Their daughter was at college in Ohio now; the house was quiet in a way that still surprised them both at odd hours. He wiped his hands on a towel and considered it—she could see him doing the arithmetic, weighing the romance of a foreign city against something smaller and stranger.

"Golden Dragon closed in 2011," he said.

"Then we find whatever's there now."

"And if it's a vape shop?"

"Then we eat somewhere else and I let you tell the story about the coat again."

He laughed. He came around the island and put his chin on the top of her head, the way he had since they were twenty-six and broke.

"Tuesday to Tuesday," he said. "But we're driving."


Marcus found the box of photographs while looking for the good scissors. He sat down on the closet floor and started sorting through them, and that was how Elena found him twenty minutes later, still in his work clothes, still holding the same picture.

"That's the church basement," she said, crouching beside him.

"Fifteen years." He handed it over. In the photo they were both younger, obviously, but more than that—they looked uncertain, standing slightly apart, as though someone had told them to smile before they'd figured out where to stand.

Elena had been thinking about the anniversary for weeks without saying so. Her sister had suggested a cruise. Her mother had suggested renewing their vows, which had made Elena laugh out loud into the phone.

"I don't want a party," she said.

"Thank God."

"I was thinking we drive up to that place in the Berkshires. The one with the bad coffee."

Marcus considered it. The inn had cost too much fifteen years ago and would cost more now, but they'd been broke then and weren't quite as broke anymore. "The coffee was genuinely terrible."

"I'll bring a French press."

He put the photo back in the box, then took it out again and set it on the dresser. "Two nights?"

"Three. I have vacation days I'll lose."

They ended up eating dinner on the floor of the closet, plates balanced on their knees, going through the rest of the photographs. There was one of Marcus's father, gone six years now, wearing a tie he'd borrowed. There was one of Elena's college roommate, who they hadn't spoken to since 2011 for reasons neither could remember.

"We should call her," Elena said.

"We should."

They didn't, that night. But Elena booked the inn from her phone while Marcus washed the plates, and when he came back she read him the description out loud, laughing at the part about the "charming rustic ambiance," which they both knew meant the radiators clanked.


Marguerite found the receipt in the junk drawer while hunting for batteries — a faded slip from Delmonico's Pizza, dated March 14, 2009. She brought it to the kitchen table where Priya was grading lab reports.

"Fifteen years since our first date next month," Marguerite said. "You kept this?"

"You kept it. I just never throw anything away." Priya set down her red pen. "What do you want to do?"

They had done the big things already. The tenth had been Lisbon, which they'd saved for two years to afford and which Priya still described as the best week of her life, though she'd gotten food poisoning on day five. The twelfth had been a party in the backyard with forty people and a rented tent that leaked.

"Something small," Marguerite said. "I don't want to plan anything."

Priya considered this. "The pizza place closed."

"I know. There's a laundromat there now."

They went back and forth over the next few days, in the fragmentary way of people who live together — a suggestion offered while brushing teeth, rejected at breakfast, revived on a Tuesday drive to the hardware store. Priya wanted to hike the ridge trail where she'd first said she loved Marguerite, standing in the rain like an idiot. Marguerite pointed out that her knee was not what it had been in 2011.

What they settled on: a Saturday with nothing scheduled. They slept until eight. Priya made eggs badly, as she always did, and Marguerite ate them anyway. They drove out to the reservoir and walked the flat loop, twice, arguing amiably about whether to replace the water heater now or wait.

In the afternoon they ordered pizza — a different place, worse pizza — and ate it on the porch while the light went orange over the neighbor's fence.

"Fifteen years," Priya said.

Marguerite reached over and took her hand. "Fifteen years."


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the ticket stubs — the community theater production of *Our Town* where they'd met, both volunteering to paint sets, both terrible at it.

"Twenty years next month," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen.

Dev didn't look up from the stove. "Twenty years since the play, or twenty years since the wedding?"

"The play. The wedding's in October."

"So we get two." He tasted the sauce, frowned, added salt. "I'm not complaining."

They'd talked vaguely about Lisbon. Marisol's sister had gone last spring and wouldn't stop sending photos of tiled buildings. But Dev's mother was in the rehab facility in Toledo now, and neither of them said out loud that a week overseas felt like tempting fate.

"What if we did the thing," Marisol said. "The community theater. They're doing *Our Town* again this fall. Fiftieth anniversary season."

Dev turned around. "You want to be in a play."

"I want to paint sets."

He laughed, then stopped laughing, because she wasn't joking. He wiped his hands on the dish towel and leaned against the counter, considering it — the smell of turpentine, the folding chairs, the terrible coffee in the lobby, the specific quiet of a rehearsal room at ten at night when everyone else has gone home.

"We were so bad at it," he said.

"We were the worst. Gerald said our barn looked like a shipwreck."

"Gerald's dead."

"Gerald is *retired*, in Sarasota."

Dev picked up one of the stubs, held it to the light like it might be counterfeit. Sixteen dollars. He remembered thinking that was steep.

"Okay," he said. "But I'm not doing the barn again."

Marisol was already reaching for her phone, scrolling for the volunteer email, and Dev turned back to the sauce, and neither of them mentioned Lisbon again.


Marcus found the box in the hall closet while looking for the extension cord — the shoebox of ticket stubs Dana had been saving since before they'd bought the house. He carried it to the kitchen table where she was paying bills.

"Twelve years next Saturday," he said.

Dana set down her pen. "I know. I've been thinking about it."

They'd done the restaurant thing for years. The one downtown with the tasting menu and the sommelier who talked too long. Last year they'd both admitted afterward, in the car, that they'd spent most of the meal wishing they were home.

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

Marcus opened the shoebox and started laying stubs across the table like a hand of cards. A minor league game in Toledo. The community theater production of *Our Town* where the lighting failed in the second act. A concert at a bar that no longer existed.

"We could cook," he said. "The thing with the short ribs."

"That takes four hours."

"We have four hours."

Dana picked up a ticket — the Toledo game, the one where it had rained and they'd stayed anyway, sharing a poncho meant for one person. "I want to go through all of these," she said. "Out loud. Every one. And you have to tell me what you remember, and I'll tell you what I remember, and we'll see how much we disagree."

"That could get contentious."

"It will absolutely get contentious."

So that's what they did. Saturday, Marcus browned the short ribs while Dana read stubs aloud from a stool by the counter. They argued about whether the theater lights had failed in act two or act three. They found one neither of them could place at all — a museum in Cleveland, February 2016 — and spent twenty minutes failing to remember, and laughed about it, and put it back in the box.


Marguerite found the calendar page first, though Desmond had circled the date weeks ago in the same blue pen he used for everything—grocery lists, crossword puzzles, the notes he left on the counter when he worked early.

"Twenty-two years," she said, tapping the square. "We should do something."

"We should do something," he agreed, not looking up from the sink, where he was scrubbing a pot she'd already scrubbed. It was an old argument neither of them bothered having anymore.

They considered the restaurant downtown with the tasting menu, but Desmond's stomach had opinions about tasting menus now. They considered a weekend in Asheville, but the dog was fifteen and didn't travel, and neither of them could stomach the thought of a kennel. Marguerite floated the idea of a party—their friends, the neighbors, the good folding chairs from the garage.

"You hate parties," Desmond said.

"I hate other people's parties."

In the end it was Desmond who suggested the drive. Two hours north, to the state park where they'd hiked on their second date, back when Marguerite had worn entirely inappropriate shoes and refused to admit it for four miles. They packed sandwiches. She made the deviled eggs he liked, with too much paprika. He brought a thermos of coffee and the wool blanket from the hall closet, the one that still smelled faintly of their old apartment.

The trail was steeper than either remembered. They stopped twice, once for water and once because Marguerite wanted to look at a stand of birches, or said she did.

At the overlook they ate on the blanket and didn't talk much. Below them the valley went gold, then amber, then something harder to name.

"Same shoes?" Desmond asked.

"Better shoes," she said, and leaned into him, and they stayed until the light was gone.


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors. Inside were the ticket stubs, the cheap plastic ring Danny had bought from a gumball machine outside the courthouse in Reno, and the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten breakfast at four in the morning, still married for less than five hours.

"Twenty-five years," she said, setting the box on the kitchen table.

Danny looked up from his crossword. His reading glasses had slid down his nose. "We said we'd do something big."

"We said that at ten. And fifteen. And twenty."

"And we went to Olive Garden."

"We like Olive Garden."

He laughed, took the glasses off, rubbed his eyes. The kitchen in the Cleveland house had yellow walls now; Marisol had painted them the summer his mother died, when he couldn't stand to sit still. "Sarah says we should go to Portugal."

"Sarah is twenty-three and thinks credit cards are free money."

"She gets that from your side."

Marisol sat down across from him and pushed the shoebox toward the center of the table, the way she pushed a bowl of chips at people she loved. "What do you actually want to do?"

Danny turned the gumball ring over in his fingers. It had gone chalky and pale. "I want to drive to Reno," he said. "Not fly. Drive. Take a week, stop wherever. Find that diner if it's still there."

"It's not still there."

"Then we'll find another one and pretend."

She was quiet. Out the window, the neighbor's dog was working himself into a state over a squirrel.

"I'd want to leave on a Tuesday," she said finally. "Traffic's better."

"Tuesday's fine."

"And you're not driving the whole thing. Your back."

"Half."

"Sixty-forty."

He put his glasses back on and returned to the crossword, smiling at it. "Deal," he said.


Marisol found the shoebox first, wedged behind the winter coats. Inside were the receipts from their first apartment on Halsted Street—the one with the radiator that clanked like someone was trapped inside it.

"Twenty years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen where Dev was scraping burnt edges off toast. "We should do something."

"We should do something," he agreed, which is what he'd said in March, and again in June.

They had a running list on the refrigerator. *Napa*, someone had written in optimistic capitals. *That inn in Door County*. *Iceland???* Every entry was a version of the same idea: go far, go expensive, make it count.

Dev set down the toast. "What if we didn't leave?"

Marisol looked up.

"I mean—hear me out. We drive to Chicago. We park on Halsted. We look at the building." He shrugged. "It's four hours. We could do the whole thing in a weekend."

She thought about the radiator. She thought about the summer they'd eaten cereal for dinner because the stove had broken and neither of them had wanted to call the landlord, who was terrifying.

"Sanchez's is still there," she said. "The taqueria."

"Is it?"

"Kim checked last year. She sent a picture."

They made the plan at the kitchen table over cold toast: leave Friday after Dev's last meeting, stay at whatever hotel had a decent rate, walk the old block, eat at Sanchez's, come home Sunday. Marisol wrote it on the refrigerator list beneath *Iceland???* and drew a box around it.

"It's not very romantic," Dev said.

"It's extremely romantic. It's just cheap."

He laughed. She put the shoebox on the counter where they'd both keep tripping over it, which meant they wouldn't forget.

Friday came. They went.


Marisol found the shoebox while looking for the good scissors.

"You kept these?" she called from the hall closet.

Danny came out of the kitchen, dish towel over his shoulder. The box held movie stubs, a parking garage receipt from Sacramento, a napkin with her handwriting on it—*call me, I mean it*—from the night they met at his cousin's wedding.

"I keep everything," he said. "You know that about me."

Twenty years next month. They'd talked around it for weeks. Her sister kept pushing for a party, something with a rented hall and a slideshow. Danny's mother had already asked what she should wear.

"I don't want a party," Marisol said, sitting down on the hallway floor with the box in her lap.

"Thank God."

"But I don't want nothing, either. Twenty years isn't nothing."

He lowered himself down beside her, knees popping, and picked up the napkin. The ink had gone brown at the edges.

"What if we drove up there," he said. "Sacramento. Same route."

"The hotel's a Days Inn now."

"So we stay at the Days Inn."

She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and looked at him, considering it seriously, the way she considered everything—turning it over, checking the weight.

"Three days," she said. "We leave Friday after I finish the Kellerman file. We stop at that place in Lodi with the peaches."

"They might not have peaches in October."

"Then we stop and find out they don't have peaches."

Danny nodded slowly. "I'll tell my mother we're doing something small."

"Tell her we're doing something private. Small sounds like she can talk you out of it."

He got up, offered his hand, and pulled her to standing. She kept the napkin, folded it once, and put it in her back pocket. It stayed there through dinner, and she found it again in the laundry two days later, softened but still legible.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a Tuesday matinee in 2013, the movie so forgettable neither of them could name it now. He brought them to the kitchen where Dev was slicing peppers.

"Ten years next Saturday," Marcus said.

Dev set down the knife. "I know. I've been thinking about it."

They'd talked around it for weeks. Dev's sister kept hinting about a party, and Marcus's coworkers assumed there'd be something big, a rented hall, a slideshow. But the anniversary they cared about wasn't the wedding—that had been three years ago, quick and joyful at the courthouse with fourteen people. This was the anniversary of the Tuesday they'd met, when Marcus had shown up late to a movie he didn't want to see and taken the last seat next to a stranger who offered him popcorn.

"I don't want a party," Dev said.

"Thank God."

They landed on the plan over dinner: they'd drive out to the theater, which had closed in 2019 and become a furniture outlet, and stand in the parking lot for exactly as long as it took to feel ridiculous. Then dinner at the Vietnamese place two blocks down, the one where they'd gone afterward and talked until the staff started stacking chairs.

"That's it?" Dev asked. "That's the whole plan?"

"We could get a cake."

"We should get a cake."

Saturday came humid and gray. They stood in the parking lot for four minutes, holding hands, feeling exactly as ridiculous as expected. A woman loading a bookshelf into her hatchback gave them a curious look.

At dinner, Dev raised his glass of iced tea. "To bad movies."

"To free popcorn," Marcus said.

They stayed until the staff started stacking chairs.


Marguerite found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer—a faded slip from Woo's Garden, dated eleven years ago, the night before Daniel drove her to the hospital with a fever of 103 and a diagnosis nobody had expected.

"Look at this," she said, holding it up.

Daniel came in from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag. He squinted at the paper, then laughed. "Mu shu pork. You made me get extra pancakes and then didn't eat any."

"I remember feeling awful and pretending I wasn't."

They stood in the kitchen of their house in Fort Collins, the late October light coming in gold through the window over the sink. Ten years since remission. That was the anniversary neither of them had known how to name. It wasn't a wedding date. It wasn't a birthday. It was the anniversary of a phone call from Dr. Ellsworth, a Tuesday in November, and the strange quiet that had followed.

"We could go somewhere," Daniel said. "Actually go somewhere. Santa Fe. Or that place in Moab you circled in the magazine."

Marguerite considered it. She was fifty-four now, her hair grown back thick and streaked with gray she refused to color. "I don't want a trip. I want—" She stopped, trying to find it. "I want to invite people. The ones who showed up."

Daniel nodded slowly. "Your sister. The Nakamuras. Pastor Bill, even though he talks too much."

"Especially Pastor Bill."

So they made a list, thirty-one names, and Daniel built two long tables out of sawhorses and plywood in the backyard, and Marguerite ordered mu shu pork for thirty-one people from Woo's Garden, which confused the owner considerably.

On the night, the tables were crowded and loud, and Daniel stood to say something and couldn't. Marguerite took his hand. Everyone waited. Eventually he just said, "Thanks for coming," and sat down, and that was enough.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two faded rectangles from the Uptown Theater, September 14, 2009. She brought them into the kitchen where Dev was scrubbing a pan.

"Fifteen years since our first movie," she said.

He dried his hands and squinted at the paper. "That's next Saturday."

They'd planned nothing. The last few years had eaten their planning muscles—his father's illness, her promotion, the roof they'd finally replaced in April. Anniversaries had become texts sent from separate offices.

"We could go back," Dev said. "The Uptown's still open."

"It's a Marvel movie now. It was a Kurosawa retrospective when we went."

"You slept through most of it."

"I did not sleep. I closed my eyes to concentrate."

They sat at the table with coffee and argued pleasantly about options. Dev wanted to drive to the coast, four hours each way, stay in the same motel with the broken ice machine. Marisol pointed out they'd both be exhausted and irritable by Sunday, and that the motel had likely been demolished.

"Then what do you want?"

She thought about it. "I want to cook something ridiculous. That duck thing you tried in 2016 that set off the smoke alarm."

"That was a disaster."

"It was the best night of that whole year."

So they made a list. Duck, the good wine from the shelf they'd been saving for a reason neither could name, and the projector Dev's brother had loaned them, aimed at the garage door so they could watch *Seven Samurai* in the driveway with blankets, the way they'd once watched movies in his old apartment before they could afford anything else.

On the fourteenth, the duck came out edible. The neighbors wandered over around the second hour and stayed. Marisol fell asleep during the rain battle, her head on Dev's shoulder, and he let her.


Marcus found the calendar page still turned to March, three weeks into April, and laughed at himself before flipping it forward. There it was, circled in Dana's handwriting from January: *Twenty years.*

He found her in the garage, sorting through a box of paint cans she'd been meaning to deal with since the Obama administration.

"So," he said. "The fifteenth."

Dana didn't look up. "I know. I've been avoiding thinking about it because every idea I have costs too much or sounds like something from a magazine."

"Napa?"

"Too expensive. And you get sleepy after two glasses."

"That's called being relaxed."

She set down a can of primer and finally turned around. Her hair was pulled back with a rubber band, which meant she'd been out here longer than she'd admit. "What if we didn't go anywhere?"

Marcus leaned against the workbench. "Say more."

"We drove to Asheville for our first anniversary because it was the only place we could afford. We ate at that diner with the terrible coffee. Remember? You spilled some on the map."

"I remember you laughing so hard the waitress checked on us."

"So we do that again. But here. We cook the thing we cooked when we moved into the first apartment—the chicken with too much rosemary. We put the record player in the backyard. We invite nobody."

He considered it. Twenty years of school pickups, a miscarriage, two job losses, a kitchen renovation that nearly ended them. It seemed strange to mark all of that with rosemary chicken.

Then again, it seemed strange to mark it with anything else.

"I'll get the rosemary," he said.

"Get too much."

"I always do."

She went back to the paint cans, but he noticed she was smiling, and he stood there a moment longer than he needed to, watching her work.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two crumpled rectangles from a movie theater that had closed six years ago.

"Look at this," he said, holding them up as Ellen came in with grocery bags. "Our first date. You made me sit through that documentary about beekeeping."

"You said you liked it."

"I lied. I was trying to impress you."

She set the bags on the counter and took one of the stubs, turning it over. "Ten years next month."

They'd talked about the anniversary in vague terms, the way they talked about repainting the guest room. Ellen wanted to go somewhere—Charleston, maybe, or the little coastal town in Maine where her sister had gotten married. Marcus kept doing the math on flights and pet-sitting for their ancient beagle, Rutherford, who couldn't be boarded anymore.

"What if we didn't go anywhere," he said that night, from his side of the bed.

Ellen put down her book. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning we cook. Actually cook, not the thing where I stand there and hand you onions. And we invite the people who were at the wedding."

"That's forty people."

"The people who *stayed* at the wedding. Till the end."

She laughed. "So, eleven."

"Twelve. Your uncle came back for the cake."

They spent the next three weeks planning. Ellen made lists in the notebook she kept by the coffee maker; Marcus called his brother in Sacramento, who agreed to fly out. They argued once, briefly, about whether to hire someone to help serve, and then agreed they'd rather not have a stranger in the house.

On the day, it rained. Rutherford slept under the dining table through all of it. Ellen burned the first batch of rolls and Marcus ate one anyway, and around eleven o'clock the last guest left and they stood together in the kitchen looking at the dishes, not touching them yet.


Marisol found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the winter hats. Inside were ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten breakfast at 3 a.m. after the courthouse.

"Fifteen years," she said, carrying the box into the kitchen. "What do you want to do?"

Dev was standing at the stove, pushing eggs around with a spatula. He'd been up since five, unable to sleep, though he hadn't said why. "I keep thinking about Portugal," he said. "But then I think about the roof."

"The roof isn't going anywhere. That's kind of the problem."

He laughed. "Right."

They ate at the counter, the box open between them. Marisol pulled out a photo — the two of them on the courthouse steps, Dev in a borrowed blazer that didn't fit, her holding a bouquet from the grocery store. Her mother hadn't come. His had, and had cried the entire time, which they'd interpreted generously.

"What if we just did the diner again," Dev said. "The 3 a.m. thing."

"You go to bed at nine-thirty now."

"I could stay up. For this."

She considered it. The diner was still there, on Route 9, with the same cracked vinyl booths. They'd driven past it a hundred times without stopping.

"Okay," she said. "But we're taking a nap first. And you're not wearing that blazer."

"I don't even have that blazer."

"Good."

They set an alarm for one in the morning. When it went off, Dev was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, holding out her coat. Marisol took it, still half-asleep, and followed him down the stairs and out into the cold, where the car was already running.


Marisol found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer — two faded rectangles from a 2009 showing of a movie neither of them could remember choosing. She brought them to the kitchen where Devon was scraping burnt edges off the pancakes.

"Fifteen years," she said, holding them up.

"Since the drawer was cleaned? Feels right."

"Since the first date, smartass."

He set down the spatula. They'd been talking around the anniversary for weeks, the way they talked around most big things — obliquely, in fragments, until one of them finally said the actual sentence.

"I keep thinking we should do something," Devon said. "Something big. Chicago, maybe. That hotel with the rooftop."

Marisol did the arithmetic in her head, the one that always ran underneath: the water heater making its noise, Kayla's braces consultation in March. "We could."

"But you don't want to."

"I want to sit somewhere quiet with you and not look at a phone."

Devon laughed. "That's the cheapest anniversary in history."

"That's not why."

He knew it wasn't, mostly. He came around the counter and leaned against it beside her, close enough that their arms touched.

"What if," he said slowly, "we drove out to Hollow Creek. Where we got caught in the rain that time."

"With the terrible sandwiches."

"I'll make better sandwiches. Fifteen years of improvement."

She turned the ticket stubs over in her fingers. Outside, a neighbor's dog was losing its mind about something.

"I'd like that," she said. "Bring the good blanket. Not the one from the car."

"The car one's fine."

"The car one smells like the car."

They settled on Saturday, weather permitting. Devon went back to the pancakes, salvaging what he could, and Marisol tucked the ticket stubs into the corner of the mirror by the door, where she'd see them every morning until then.


Marcus found the receipt while cleaning out the junk drawer — a faded slip from the Bluebird Diner, dated March 12, 2009. Two coffees, one slice of pie. Four dollars and eighty cents.

"Dana," he called. "Look what survived fifteen years."

She came in from the garage still holding a paintbrush, and when she saw it she laughed, then went quiet. "That was the night I told you about the job in Denver."

"And you cried into the pie."

"You ate the pie."

They had planned nothing for the anniversary. Both of them had assumed the other would raise it, and neither had, and now it was eleven days out and their calendar showed only a dentist appointment and Dana's mother's birthday.

"We could do the coast," Marcus said. "That place in Cannon Beach."

Dana set the brush across the lip of a jar. "It's four hundred a night in March. And I'd spend the whole time thinking about the deck."

The deck had been rotting for two years. They both knew it.

"So we don't go," he said.

"I didn't say that."

He looked at the receipt again. "What if we just went back? The Bluebird's still there. Cheryl still works Thursdays."

Dana considered it, and he watched her do the thing she did — the small sideways tilt, the tongue against her molar. "Coffee and pie," she said. "And then we come home and I want you to help me pick out the composite boards. The gray ones."

"That's your anniversary present? Decking?"

"No. The pie is the present. The decking is what I want to do after, with you, because I like doing things with you." She picked the brush back up. "Also, you're the one who measured wrong last time."

"I measured fine. The lumber was warped."

"Sure it was," she said, and went back to the garage.


Marcus found the note taped to the coffee maker at 5:40 a.m., which was the only reliable way to catch him before his shift at the hospital.

*Twenty years. Don't book anything. I have an idea. —D*

He laughed out loud in the dark kitchen, then texted her a single question mark. Deb was still asleep upstairs, which meant she'd written it sometime after midnight, probably after grading the last of her seventh-graders' persuasive essays.

The idea, it turned out, involved a rental car and a cooler.

"We're driving to Erie," she said Saturday morning, holding a road atlas she'd bought at a truck stop specifically because she thought it would be funny. "The whole route. Every place we stopped that first summer."

"Deb, half those places are Wendy's parking lots."

"Two of them are Wendy's parking lots. And one is that overlook where you told me you'd never get married, and I said good, neither would I."

Marcus poured coffee into the thermos she'd left on the counter. "In my defense, I was twenty-four and had a ponytail."

"You had a *lot* going on."

They left at nine. Somewhere outside Youngstown, the AC gave out and they drove with the windows down, shouting over the wind about their daughter's tuition, about the roof, about whether Deb should apply for the vice principal job or keep her classroom. At the overlook, the guardrail had been replaced and someone had built a subdivision in the valley, but the light was the same, gold and low, and they ate turkey sandwiches out of the cooler standing up.

"I was wrong, by the way," Marcus said. "About the marriage thing."

Deb wiped mustard off her thumb. "You've had twenty years to bring that up."

"I'm a slow processor."

She leaned into his shoulder. Below them, a lawnmower droned somewhere in the new houses, and neither of them said anything for a while.


The Twentieth

The invitation had been sitting on the refrigerator for three weeks, held by a magnet shaped like a lobster.

"Ellen's throwing us a party," Marcus said, scraping the last of the eggs onto Priya's plate. "She's already booked the back room at Antonelli's."

Priya set down her coffee. "Did we agree to that?"

"I said I'd ask you. Which I'm doing now, badly."

She laughed. Twenty years of marriage, and he still did this—committed to things sideways, then negotiated backward. "Twenty-two people in a room with a set menu," she said. "Or."

"Or?"

"Or we drive to Point Reyes and sleep in the car like we did in 2004."

Marcus sat down across from her. Outside, their neighbor's sprinkler ticked against the fence. "We had a Corolla in 2004. We have a Subaru now. It's actually comfortable."

"That's the boring version of the story."

"The boring version is the one where we don't wake up with backaches."

They went back and forth over the second pot of coffee. Priya wanted the fog, the cold sandwiches, the specific loneliness of a headland at dawn. Marcus wanted Ellen not to be hurt, and also, he admitted, he wanted the toasts—wanted to stand up in front of people and say something about her he'd been rehearsing since roughly year eleven.

The compromise came together the way most of theirs did: not elegant, but theirs. The party on Saturday, small, with Ellen's set menu and Marcus's toast. Then Sunday morning, early, before anyone was awake, the drive north. Two sleeping bags in the back. Coffee in a thermos that leaked.

"You'll complain about the cold," Priya said.

"Constantly," Marcus agreed. He wrote *Point Reyes* on the calendar in pen, which in their house meant it was real.

She took the invitation off the fridge and wrote *yes* on the back.


Marguerite found the invitation on the kitchen counter, tucked under a bag of coffee beans. Twenty-five years at the elementary school, and the district wanted to throw a dinner in the gymnasium. Rubber chicken, she assumed. A plaque.

"They spelled your name wrong," Yusuf said, coming in from the garage with sawdust on his forearms. "Margarite. With an A."

"They always do." She set the invitation aside. "It's the same weekend as ours."

He wiped his hands on a rag and did the arithmetic he already knew. Twenty-two years, that October. They had married in a courthouse in Sacramento with two witnesses and a lunch afterward at a Vietnamese place that had since become a vape shop.

"So skip it," he said.

"I can't skip it. Ruby's retiring, they'll want me to say something about her."

"Then we do ours the night before."

That was how they landed on it. Not a restaurant—they'd tried a restaurant for their twentieth and spent ninety dollars feeling like they were auditioning for someone else's life. Instead Yusuf drove out to the Armenian market on Fulton and came back with lahmajoun, string cheese, olives, and a jar of the pickled cauliflower Marguerite pretended not to love. She made a cake from her mother's recipe card, the one with the water stain shaped like Florida.

They ate on the back steps because the evening was warm. The neighbor's dog barked at nothing. Yusuf had brought out the folder of photographs from the courthouse day, and they went through it slowly, arguing about whether Marguerite's cousin had actually cried or just had allergies.

"Next year we should go somewhere," she said.

"You say that every year."

"I mean it every year."

He nodded and cut her another slice of cake, and neither of them moved from the steps until the mosquitoes found them.


Marguerite found the shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the winter hats. Ten years of ticket stubs, a wilted corsage, the receipt from the diner where they'd eaten breakfast after the courthouse.

"You kept the receipt," Dev said from the doorway, still in his work clothes, tie loosened.

"I keep everything. It's a character flaw."

They'd been circling the question for a month. Ten years felt like it demanded something. Dev's sister had suggested Lisbon. His coworker had booked a hot air balloon for his own anniversary and hadn't stopped talking about it since.

"We could go back to the diner," Marguerite said.

"It closed. Two years ago. It's a vape shop."

"Right." She sat down on the floor with the box in her lap. "Okay. What do you actually want?"

Dev thought about it honestly, which was one of the things she'd married him for. "I want to not be in a car. Or an airport. I want to sleep in our bed."

"So nothing."

"Not nothing." He sat down across from her, knees cracking. "You know what I keep thinking about? The first apartment. When the stove didn't work and we made everything in that electric skillet for four months."

"You made saag paneer in a skillet."

"It was terrible."

"It was not terrible." She was smiling now. "You want to cook."

"I want to cook everything we made that year. The whole terrible menu. And eat it on the floor because that's where we ate it."

"We have a table now."

"I'm aware."

She looked at the receipt in her hand, the faded ink, the two coffees and one order of hash browns they'd split. "Saturday," she said. "I'll get the paneer. You handle the rest."

"On the floor."

"On the floor," she agreed, and put the shoebox back in his hands to return to the shelf.


Marcus found the calendar in the kitchen drawer, the one Priya still insisted on keeping even though her phone did everything. He'd circled April 14th in blue pen last year and forgotten why.

"Fifteen years since the apartment on Delmar," she said, reading over his shoulder. She had her coat half on, keys in hand, already late for her shift at the clinic. "The one with the radiator that screamed."

"You wanted to break the lease after two weeks."

"You wanted to buy a space heater and call it a solution."

They'd meant to plan something. There had been talk in February of Charleston, of a hotel with a courtyard, but then the transmission went out on the Honda and Priya's mother had the fall in Ohio, and by April the money and the vacation days had gone elsewhere, the way they always did.

That Saturday, Marcus drove them to Delmar Boulevard instead. The building was still there, repainted a color someone in a marketing meeting had probably called "oyster." They stood on the sidewalk across the street and looked up at the third-floor window.

"Somebody's got plants," Priya said.

"We had plants."

"We had one plant. It died in June."

They ate at a Vietnamese place four blocks down that had been a laundromat back then, and Priya ordered the thing she couldn't pronounce and Marcus ordered what he always ordered, and she took half of his anyway. Afterward they walked to the park where he'd proposed badly, without a ring, sitting on a bench that had since been replaced with a metal one bolted to concrete.

"This is better than Charleston," she said, and he wasn't sure if she meant it, but she reached for his hand and he decided it didn't matter much either way.

They were home by eight. He made tea. She fell asleep during the movie, as she always did.


The Twentieth Year

The invitation had been sitting on the counter for three weeks, propped against the fruit bowl: a hotel package in Charleston, two nights, a champagne welcome. Priya kept moving it when she wiped the counter, and it kept ending up back in the same place.

"We could just go," Nadia said Tuesday night, standing at the stove with a wooden spoon. "It's twenty years. People do things for twenty years."

"People do things," Priya agreed. She was grading papers at the kitchen table, red pen capped, her attention drifting. "Do we want to be people who fly somewhere and take a picture in front of a fountain?"

Nadia laughed. "You're making it sound worse than it is."

But she'd been thinking the same thing. They had gotten married in a courthouse in Iowa in 2005, before it was legal in most places, with Nadia's brother as a witness and a Dairy Queen afterward because nothing else was open. There had been no fountain then either.

"What if we drove," Priya said slowly. "Back to Des Moines. Stay in a terrible motel. Go to the same Dairy Queen if it still exists."

Nadia turned. "That's four days of driving."

"Yes."

"Through Nebraska."

"Yes."

They looked at each other. Twenty years had taught them how this went: one of them said the impractical thing, the other one made the objections out loud, and then they both discovered they'd already decided.

"I'll ask Dev to watch the dog," Nadia said.

They left on a Thursday in September. The Dairy Queen was a Verizon store now. They ate Blizzards from a different one two miles away, sitting on the hood of the car in a parking lot, and Nadia said the light was exactly the same, that particular flat Midwestern gold, and Priya said she remembered it too, and neither of them was entirely sure that was true, but it didn't matter.


Marcus found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer — two faded rectangles from a community theater production of *Our Town*, dated eleven years ago.

"You kept these?" Priya asked, drying her hands on a dish towel.

"I keep everything. You know this about me. It's why the garage is the way it is."

She took one, holding it to the kitchen light. Their first date, arranged by her cousin against Priya's explicit wishes. Marcus had worn a blazer that didn't fit. She had planned an exit strategy involving a fake phone call from work.

"Eleven years next Saturday," she said.

"So what do we do? Ten was the big one. Eleven feels like the anniversary nobody plans a party for."

Priya sat down at the table. "I don't want a party."

"Good, because I don't want to clean the house."

They kicked ideas around for twenty minutes. Marcus lobbied for the steakhouse downtown, the one with the leather booths, but Priya pointed out that they'd gone there for their anniversary three years running and she couldn't remember a single conversation from any of those nights. Priya suggested a weekend in Asheville; Marcus reminded her that his sister's kids were staying with them Thursday through Sunday.

"What if we just went back," Priya said finally. "To the theater. See whatever they're putting on."

Marcus considered it. "It might be terrible."

"It was terrible the first time. You fell asleep in the second act."

"I did not fall asleep. I closed my eyes to concentrate."

"Marcus."

"I fell asleep."

She was already searching on her phone. "*Arsenic and Old Lace*. Saturday, seven-thirty. Twenty-two dollars each."

"Buy them," he said. "And then let's get pancakes after, at that diner on Fifth. The one that's open late."

Priya tapped the screen. "Done."

He put the old stubs back in the drawer, under the batteries and the takeout menus, where he'd find them again in another eleven years.


The kitchen still smelled like burnt toast when Priya set down her coffee and said, "Twenty years."

Daniel didn't look up from the seed catalog. "I know. I've been thinking about it since March."

"You have not."

"I have." He turned the catalog around and pushed it across the table, tapping a photo of a dogwood. "Remember the one outside the apartment on Lyndale? The one that dropped petals all over your car?"

Priya remembered. She remembered scraping them off the windshield in April, cursing, and Daniel laughing at her from the third-floor window.

"You want to plant a tree."

"I want to plant that tree. In the back, where the swing set was."

She'd expected him to suggest Charleston, or that inn in Door County they'd talked about for six years and never booked. A tree was so unromantic it circled back around to being romantic, which was, she thought, exactly how Daniel worked.

"The Nagarajans are coming in June," she said. "My mother will want to see something."

"So she'll see a tree."

"She'll say it's too small."

"It will be too small." He shrugged. "That's sort of the point."

They went to the nursery on a Saturday, and it took longer than either of them expected—Priya insisted on walking the whole lot twice, and Daniel kept quietly moving the price tags out of her line of sight. They chose a six-foot Cherokee Princess with a slight lean to it.

He dug. She held the trunk straight and complained about mosquitoes. When it was in, they stood back farther than the tree deserved, hands dirty, and looked at it.

"It's crooked," Priya said.

"So are we."

She leaned into his shoulder. Later they ate frozen pizza on the porch, because neither of them wanted to cook, and watched the light go amber over a very small tree that would outlive them both.


The Fifteenth

Maya found the flyer under a magnet on the fridge: a wine tasting, forty dollars a head, live jazz. She'd put it there in March and forgotten about it.

"We could still go," Priya said, reading over her shoulder while stirring the dal. "It's Saturday."

"We could." Maya sat down at the kitchen table, the one they'd bought secondhand in Sacramento eleven years ago and hauled to three apartments before this house. "Or."

"Or what?"

"Or we drive out to Point Reyes and eat sandwiches on the rocks like we did after the courthouse."

Priya turned the burner down. Fifteen years since the courthouse in Oakland, the clerk with the sinus infection, the witness they'd recruited from the parking lot — a woman named Deb who'd cried harder than either of them. They'd been so broke that year. The sandwiches had been turkey and provolone from a corner store, eaten out of wax paper while the fog came in.

"I don't remember it being cold," Priya said.

"It was freezing. You wore my jacket and I complained the whole drive home."

"That does sound like you." Priya wiped her hands on a dish towel and leaned against the counter, considering. "The jazz thing is nicer. Objectively."

"Objectively," Maya agreed.

Neither of them moved. Outside, a neighbor's sprinkler ticked on.

"Turkey and provolone?" Priya said.

"Obviously turkey and provolone."

"We're bringing real coffee this time. Not that gas station sludge."

"Fine. Thermos." Maya took the flyer off the fridge, folded it in half, and dropped it in the recycling. "And blankets. We're forty-three, not twenty-eight."

"Speak for yourself. I'm forty-one."

"Barely."

Priya laughed and went back to the stove. Maya stayed at the table a while longer, looking at the empty magnet, already thinking about the drive — the long curve of Sir Francis Drake, the eucalyptus, the fog waiting for them at the end of it.


Marcus found the calendar page on the fridge, the fifteenth circled twice in red marker.

"Ten years," he said, not really a question.

Priya was rinsing spinach at the sink. "Ten years since the courthouse. Twelve since the driveway."

He laughed. The driveway — her U-Haul, his terrible attempt at parallel parking it, the way she'd sat on the bumper and eaten cold pizza while he apologized to a mailbox.

"So what do we do?" he asked. "Ravi keeps saying we should go to Lisbon."

"Ravi has no children." Priya shook the colander. "Also I don't want Lisbon. I want something small."

Marcus leaned against the counter. "Small like dinner, or small like meaningful?"

"Both. Neither." She turned around, wiping her hands on the towel. "Remember when we couldn't afford the honeymoon and we drove to that motel in Asheville and it rained for three days?"

"You said you'd never forgive me."

"I lied. It was the best week of my life." She hesitated. "Could we do that again? Not Asheville, necessarily. Just — a bad motel and rain."

"You want to plan for rain."

"I want to plan for nothing," she said. "I want to get in the car on Friday and stop when we're tired."

Marcus thought about the work email he'd been dreading, the gutters that needed clearing, Leela's soccer schedule. Then he thought about Priya on the bumper with the pizza box.

"My mother will take Leela," he said. "She's been asking."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure I don't want Lisbon."

Priya smiled and went back to the spinach. Later, after dinner, they sat on the porch and argued pleasantly about which direction to drive — west toward the mountains, or east until they hit water — and decided, finally, that they'd flip a coin at the end of the driveway.


Marisol found the folder on the kitchen table Saturday morning, labeled in Dev's blocky handwriting: TEN YEARS — OPTIONS.

"You made a folder," she said.

"I made a folder." He poured her coffee without asking how she wanted it, because he'd known for a decade. "Napa. Or that place in Asheville with the hot springs. Or—" he flipped a page, "—Lisbon, if we cash out the miles."

She sat down and read through his printouts, the neat columns of prices, the hotel photos with their identical white bathrobes. Outside, the neighbor's dog was barking at the recycling truck.

"They're all nice," she said carefully.

"You hate all of them."

"I don't hate them. I just—" She looked at the folder. "Ten years ago we had that party in your cousin's backyard and it rained and your uncle grilled anyway and someone's kid broke the cake table."

"That was a disaster."

"It was the best day of my life." She turned her mug in a slow circle. "I don't want a bathrobe. I want that."

Dev leaned back against the counter. He was quiet for a while, which was one of his better qualities.

"The yard's too small now," he said finally. "But Pete would let us use his."

"Pete's got that awful gazebo."

"Pete's got a gazebo and a smoker, and we'd only have to invite him."

She laughed. "So we throw the wedding again. Same food. Same terrible playlist."

"Not the same playlist."

"The exact same playlist."

He crossed the kitchen, took the folder off the table, and dropped it in the recycling bin. Then he sat down across from her with a legal pad.

"Guest list," he said. "Start with the people who came the first time."

Marisol started naming them. It took longer than she expected, because they had to stop and remember the ones who had died.


The invitation had been sitting on the counter for three days: a photography exhibit downtown, opening Saturday, the same night as their eleventh anniversary.

"We could go," Priya said, sliding the card across the granite toward Marcus. "Or we could do the thing you keep mentioning."

Marcus was rinsing basil at the sink, sleeves pushed to his elbows. "I mention it because you never say no, you just say 'mm.'"

"I say 'mm' because a whole day of driving to look at a lighthouse sounds like a lot of driving."

"It's ninety minutes. And there's that chowder place."

She laughed, and he knew he'd won something, though not everything. He shook the water off the basil and turned around. "What if we do both? Lighthouse Saturday morning, back by four, exhibit at seven."

Priya tilted her head, considering. She had a way of doing that—weighing a plan the way she weighed produce at the market, thoroughly, without hurry. "That's a lot of anniversary."

"It's eleven years. It should be a lot."

"Twelve is the big one. Ten was the big one. Eleven is a Tuesday of anniversaries."

"It's a Saturday."

"Marcus."

But she was already reaching for her phone, pulling up the tide chart, because she liked the beach better at low tide, when the flats went silver and you could walk out farther than seemed reasonable. He watched her scroll and felt the small, specific satisfaction of a marriage where the argument was never really an argument.

"Low tide's at ten forty," she said. "So we'd need to leave by nine."

"I'll make coffee at eight."

"You'll make coffee at eight fifteen and we'll leave at nine twenty."

"Probably."

She set the phone down and picked up the invitation, tucking it under the fruit bowl where they kept the things they meant to remember. Then she took the basil from him and started tearing it into the bowl, and neither of them said anything else about it, which was how they knew it was settled.


Marcus found the calendar in the junk drawer, the one from the hardware store with the pheasants on it, and circled October 14th in red.

"Twenty years," he said, sitting down across from Denise at the kitchen table. She was grading papers, a stack of eighth-grade essays about *The Outsiders* fanned out beside her coffee.

"I know what day it is." She didn't look up. "I've been thinking about it too."

He waited. Twenty years had taught him that Denise arrived at things sideways.

"Everybody does the trip," she said finally, capping her pen. "Cabo, Charleston, whatever. Ruth and Dale went to Ireland and Ruth spent the whole time worried about the dog."

"So not Ireland."

"Not Ireland." She pushed the essays away. "I want to redo the porch."

Marcus laughed, then stopped, because she was serious. The porch had been sagging since the Obama administration. They'd had three contractors out and each time something else came first—the water heater, Simone's braces, the transmission.

"That's not romantic," he said.

"It is to me." She reached over and turned his hand palm-up, tracing the callus at the base of his thumb. "Twenty years of sitting out there on a folding chair because we can't trust the boards. I want to sit on a porch swing with you. I want to do it for the next twenty."

He thought about the money. He thought about Cabo, which he'd never wanted anyway, and about his father's porch in Beaumont, and the way Denise fell asleep out there in July with a book on her chest.

"Cedar," he said. "Not pressure-treated."

"Whatever you think."

"And I'm picking the swing."

She smiled and pulled the essays back. "Then you'd better start looking. Fourteenth is a Saturday."

He wrote *CEDAR* on the pheasant calendar, under the red circle, and went to find his tape measure.


Marcus found the shoebox on the closet shelf while looking for the good tablecloth. Inside: ticket stubs, a dried corsage, and the receipt from the diner on Route 9 where they'd eaten at two in the morning after the courthouse closed.

"Twenty years," Dana said from the doorway. She had a dish towel over her shoulder and reading glasses pushed into her hair. "I keep thinking we should do something."

"We should." He turned a stub over. "Renata keeps sending me links to resorts in Tulum."

"Renata's forty-one and divorced twice. Her advice is aspirational."

He laughed. They'd talked about a trip in March, then the transmission went out on the Subaru, and then Dana's mother needed the hip replacement, and now it was late September and the maples on Corbin Street were going orange.

"What do you actually want?" she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Marcus thought about it honestly, which took a minute. "I want to go back to the diner."

"It's a Verizon store now."

"I know. I drove past it in June." He set the box down. "Okay. Then I want to not do anything impressive. I want to make the pot roast, and I want you to not check your email after six, and I want to watch that documentary you keep pausing at minute nine."

Dana was quiet. Outside, someone was running a leaf blower.

"I want to give you the letter," she said finally. "I wrote it a while ago. Maybe four years ago? I've been waiting for an occasion big enough."

"Twenty's pretty big."

"That's what I figured."

They ended up ordering the pot roast ingredients for delivery because neither of them wanted to go to the store. Dana read the letter aloud at the kitchen table, badly, stopping twice. Marcus didn't say much afterward. He just kept his hand flat on the table where she could reach it, and she did.


Mara found the ticket stubs while cleaning out the junk drawer—two paper rectangles from a Tuesday matinee in 2015, faded to the color of weak tea.

"You kept these," Desmond said, coming in from the garage with sawdust in his eyebrows.

"I kept everything. There's a receipt in here from a gas station in Nebraska."

He took the stubs and held them at arm's length, the way he did now that he refused to admit he needed reading glasses. "Ten years next month."

They had not planned anything. Every year they meant to and every year April arrived with its usual chaos—her students' portfolios due, his contracts running late, the water heater making that sound again.

"We could go back," Mara said. "To the theater."

"It's a vape shop now."

"Then we could go to the vape shop."

Desmond laughed and set the stubs on the counter, aligning their edges. He had a habit of squaring things. "What did we see, even?"

"Something terrible. There was a helicopter."

"There's always a helicopter."

That night they sat on the back steps with the porch light off so the neighbors' motion sensor wouldn't catch them, passing a bottle of the cheap red she liked and he tolerated. The maple they'd planted their second year had gotten tall enough to lose in the dark.

"I don't want a party," Desmond said.

"God, no."

"I want to take a day off. Both of us. No phones. We drive somewhere with a diner."

Mara leaned into his shoulder. "Nebraska?"

"Not that far."

"Pancakes, though."

"Obviously pancakes."

They didn't decide on a destination, only the date, which Desmond wrote on the kitchen calendar in his blocky capitals, and which Mara circled twice in green pen the next morning, standing barefoot on the cold tile, coffee cooling in her hand.