Anchor

“You left the door open,” she said, and he said he’d close it, but neither of them moved.

They were in the kitchen. Thursday. The pot on the stove was too large for two people’s worth of anything but she’d been using the large pot since September and hadn’t switched to the small one because switching would mean something she wasn’t ready for it to mean.

He was at the table with the crossword. The local paper’s — he’d picked them up in October when the evenings got quiet enough that you could hear the fridge cycle on and off. Before that he’d watched TV with Sam, the two of them on the couch arguing about whether the detective show had gotten worse or they’d just gotten smarter. The TV was off most nights now.

“Soup’s almost done,” she said.

“I can smell it.”

“It’s the rosemary.”

“I know what rosemary smells like, Ellen.”

She stirred the pot. The spoon hit the bottom with a sound that was too loud for the amount of liquid. She added water from the tap, holding the pot at an angle because it was too heavy to lift one-handed when full.

He was stuck on 17 across. She could see it from the stove — six letters, blank. His pen was on the table next to the paper and his hands were in his lap.

“Was it cold?” she said.

“Was what cold?”

“Up there.”

“I didn’t notice.”

She set two bowls on the table. The bread was from yesterday but ten minutes in the oven had brought back enough of the crust. Two glasses of water. No wine — they’d stopped buying wine without deciding to.

They ate. The kitchen window was dark. In summer you could see the yard, the maple, the fence Sam had helped paint when he was eleven — old enough to hold a brush, young enough to miss spots that showed as pale squares on the wood by August. In November the window just reflected the kitchen back at them.

“He called,” she said.

“I know. Me too.”

“What did he say?”

“The apartment’s fine. His roommate’s fine. Classes are fine.”

“Fine.”

“That’s the word he used.”

“He sounded tired to me.”

“He’s twenty. They’re all tired.”

She broke the bread. It flaked onto the table and she swept the crumbs into her palm, a motion she’d been doing since there’d been people at the table to make them.

“Did you go in on purpose?” she said. “Or —”

“I heard something. The window latch.”

“That latch has been loose since before summer.”

“I went in to check it.”

“And?”

“The latch is fine.”

She looked at him. He was looking at the crossword again, pen still on the table. 17 across, six letters.

“What was it like?” she said.

He turned the spoon in his empty bowl.

“Smaller,” he said.

She didn’t ask him to say more. She knew what was in there. The twin bed, still made with the sheets from high school. The desk. The shelf with the soccer trophies that petered out in ninth grade and the books that stayed. Four small rectangles of blue tape residue on the wall where the poster had been — the tape that was supposed to not damage the paint but did.

He put his bowl in the sink and ran water in it — something he’d started doing recently, a man who’d left dishes in the sink for twenty-three years.

“I should close it,” he said.

“Probably.”

He stood at the sink with the water running over a bowl that was already clean.

“I’ll fix that latch this weekend,” he said.

“Okay.”

He turned off the water. Dried his hands on the towel with the frayed edge she kept meaning to replace.

They watched the news, or had it on. She read. He did the crossword. At some point she looked over and 17 across was still blank.

“Anchor,” she said.

“What?”

“17 across. It’s anchor.”

He picked up the pen. Wrote it in.

“I’m going up,” she said.

“I’ll be up in a minute.”

She went upstairs. The hallway was dark except for the light from their bedroom at the far end and — the other light. From Sam’s room. His window faced the street and the streetlight cast an orange bar across the hallway carpet that she hadn’t seen since September. Since the door had been closed.

She stood at the door. The room was dark except for the streetlight. The bed, the desk, the shelf. The blue tape marks. It smelled like his room. Still. After three months of closed air.

She put her hand on the doorframe. The pencil marks were there, going up the right side — Sam at five, six, eight, ten, twelve, the leaps getting smaller each year until the last one, seventeen, only half an inch above sixteen. She remembered him stretching, willing it, and her saying —

She left the door open.

He came up ten minutes later. She heard him pause in the hallway. She knew he was looking at the orange light on the carpet.

He came to bed. The thin line of light from the hallway was just visible under their bedroom door — a line where there hadn’t been one.

Neither of them closed it.