ESTEPHANOUS WAS BORN midway through fall and each year he would mourn the transition to winter with a birthday cake and candles. This year he drove up the 400 towards Sudbury in a rental far too big for him and his wife Heidi, leaving behind the straight lines and jagged edges of Toronto’s concrete skyline. Two hours deep into the country, the sight of big city buildings and the gleam of sun off glass five hundred feet above had well passed and all before them on either side of the highway were deciduous trees, red oaks and maples and the occasional magnolia. Their leaves had turned a deep auburn and had started to fall about them.

Steph and Heidi had made it a tradition to drive out to a place they’d never been to on his birthday weekend and explore new land. At night, they’d go back to their motel room and talk through the hours of all the places they’d seen and things they’d done, until their words inevitably failed them and Steph could only fill the void of the comfortable silence by reaching for a kiss. So many moons had passed since then.

Sixteen years they’d been together and thirteen years they’d been married. Thirty-two different cities and towns they’d explored by Steph’s count. Today, they would drive up to visit Steph’s mother at his childhood home in Barrie before they made their way northwest to Tobermory with a few pieces of snorkelling gear in the trunk. Heidi had signed them up for a scuba diving session to explore the shipwreck of the Northwind along the northern channel of Lake Huron.

Most years it was Heidi who chose the destination and Steph who would plan the trip, but this year was different. Heidi’s disposition towards Steph had changed in the past few months, enough for Steph to notice. She no longer picked at his choice of clothes in the morning or rolled her eyes and told him to do his job when he complained of a defiant patient. Neither did she fight back when he questioned her cooking or challenged her whereabouts on the days she came late from work. She’d become oddly compliant. Though strange, he didn’t dare question a good thing.

---

HEIDI TURNED the air conditioning off and cracked the window open. “I need a little fresh air,” she said, and pulled her cellphone from her purse.

They were approaching the McTier exit when the GPS indicated that there was construction on the highway up ahead.

They rolled off the highway at the next stop.

“Not good,” Steph said.

“I thought you liked adventure.”

Steph’s eyes flitted back and forth between the road and his wife and he smiled. “I’ve got enough pain from this ingrown toenail. I don’t need another headache.”

Steph exited onto a side street and stopped at a deer crossing. He looked back at the highway to see that it was empty save for the construction workers pouring fresh concrete onto the fractured and stripped road below.

“Who you texting?” Steph asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I would.”

“The girls from work want to meet for drinks next Saturday.”

“Tell them you’re already going out for drinks with the big guy.”

“I thought I was going with you?”

Steph feigned a smile.

They passed a small stone church that looked to be abandoned, save for the gravedigger in the adjacent cemetery. The man leaned on his shovel and wiped his brow before he continued digging.

Steph knew the pain that came with digging holes. It was his tenth birthday when he and his father dug a trough along the perimeter of the garden of his old family house, a garden that his father would eventually fill with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, peppers and patches of mint. In the middle of the yard was a separate hole. His father bought him a tiny maple tree that had been all but stripped of its baby leaves and told him they would plant it the next day.

“You bought me a tree?” Steph asked.

“See Adel, I told you,” his mother said. “What kind of man buys his son a tree?”

“What am I supposed to get him, a Nintendo? So he can be like his idiot friend Paolo?”

“That’s what boys do, Adel. What is he going to do with a maple tree?”

“He can appreciate it. He can sit under the tree and read a book in its shade after it grows. I’m going to raise this kid to be a doctor. Not a loser like Paolo.”

“You always do this. You buy something for yourself and pass it off as a gift, like that vacuum you bought me for my birthday.”

“Didn’t you tell me you wanted a vacuum?”

“I told you we need a vacuum. I told you I want to go on a vacation.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Listen Adel, he’s ten years old. You have to let him live.”

“He will. To live is to work and he can do that under the tree.”

His mother rolled her eyes and flicked her wrist at her husband. “Happy birthday, habibi,” she said, kissing her son’s forehead. “Next week we’ll go to the mall and I’ll get you something you actually like.” She stepped inside the house to retrieve the cake she had made him and slid the glass door closed behind her.

“Baba?” Steph said.

“Yes, habibi.”

“Why do you and Mama always fight?”

“It’s called love, habibi.”

“That’s love?”

His father took a seat on a weathered plastic chair alongside their short patio, crossed one leg over the other and shaded his eyes from the sun with his palm.

“Listen Steph, I’m going to give you the most important advice you’ll ever get in your life. Any time something happens to you, you have only two choices. You either live or you die. You break your leg, you live or you die. You have a math test you didn’t study for, you live or you die. Mama yells at you for not doing your homework, you what?”

“Live or you die.”

“Good boy. And that ditch over there,” his father said as he pointed to the hole he had dug for the tree. “Does that look comfortable to you?”

“No.”

“Imagine sleeping there forever.”

“That sounds so bad.”

“I agree. That’s why I choose life. I can deal with a little yelling. That’s how love works.”

Steph tried to understand what his father meant but the idea was too foggy, too foreign for his tiny mind. It was later in the night, after he’d heard his father snoring next to his mother, that Steph snuck out of his room and went downstairs, opened the glass sliding door and stepped outside. First, he sat in the trough. Then he lay in it. The night was as still as the dirt save for the worms and potato bugs and all the creeping things that wriggled and crawled beneath him. He looked up at the sky and the stars and the space between and felt the cool wind kiss his skin as it came and passed. He felt the borders of dirt that hugged his arms and decided that he did not want to live in that hole forever. He wanted love, even with the yelling.

And he’d often found love when he’d searched. There was Theresa in tenth grade, who wrote him letters every day and gave them to him before homeroom. Then Shadia with the thick lips and green eyes, who was good at math and science and who pointed out his every flaw as he pointed out hers. Then Savannah from Georgia, who called herself a peach.

And finally came Heidi, who he’d met on a bus on the way to York. Small and contemplative with an angular jaw that Steph found strangely intriguing. Tawny skin and curly black hair like his own. There was only one seat left when he got on. She smiled as he sat down next to her and looked back out the window. In his mind, he ran through all the things he could possibly say before the words spilled from his mouth like vomit. “Is it just me or does this bus smell like cabbage?”

---

STEPH AND HEIDI DROVE down the side street parallel to the 400. The sun had only grown stronger as the day progressed. Steph lowered his car visor and asked Heidi to fetch him his sunglasses from the glove compartment. She opened the compartment, grabbed a pair of aviators, took them out of their case, flicked their arms open and gently pressed the bridge to Steph’s forehead before she slid it down his face, her smooth skin grazing his.

Lake Huron stretched along the beach to the west and licked at the shoreline. The GPS on the front screen, which was projected from Steph’s phone, froze before the words “Signal Error” flashed on screen.

“Is your GPS working?” Steph asked.

Heidi opened the GPS app on her phone. “My GPS is down and so is my signal. I told you we needed to switch to Bell.”

“There’s no time for this. We need to find a way back onto the highway.”

“Keep driving until we find a gas station.”

They drove a long way down the side street before they realized the highway that was once parallel to them had gradually moved northeast and was lost to the horizon.

“Sarnia all over again,” Heidi said.

Steph kissed his teeth as he watched the side of the road for any gas stations, but there were none. Only trees and fields of grass and the occasional farm, horses and cows and swine about the fields.

“Your mom’s not gonna like us being this late.”

“What can you do?” Steph said, raising his palm off the steering wheel.

“Maybe we can skip it for now? Go straight to Tobermory?”

“We can’t do that now, Heidi. Mama’s not in the best place after Dad’s passing. It’d help her if we came. You know she thinks the world of you.”

It was true that his mother appreciated Heidi, but no one had loved her more than his father.

A few months after they’d started dating, Steph took Heidi to meet his parents.

“She’s too beautiful for you,” his father said, as he took her hand and kissed her on each cheek. Heidi blushed and followed his father into the family room as Steph put away her shoes and trailed behind. A pair of badly worn green leather couches sat on either end of the family room. Steph and Heidi sat on one couch while Steph’s father sat on the other next to a small prayer table that held an Arabic Bible and a Coptic rosary. Along the wall above the table was a cloud of icons of Oriental patriarchs and matriarchs that Steph’s father had collected from several trips to Egyptian monasteries over the years. One saint riding a horse as he slayed a dragon, another boiling alive in a giant clay pot, and another with her hands tied before her as a masked man raised a cleaver above his head. All of them smiling with round heads and wide bright eyes open to the watcher as they stepped onto the precipice of infinity.

“Interesting collection,” Heidi said.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? The way their eyes search you as you stare back. They see what we don’t.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m still trying to find that out.”

Steph’s mother walked in with a tray of tea and kunafa and set it on the wooden table between them before she welcomed Heidi with a kiss on each cheek.

Heidi and Steph’s father spoke of everything from school to sports to her upbringing. “I’m so glad he found the one nice Coptic girl on the bus,” he said. “I was terrified he’d end up with a white girl.”

Steph saw Heidi’s nerves unwind the more his father talked. “Would you like to see my maple?”

He led the two outside to the tree, which had grown to be about ten feet tall. Steph ran his hand over the rugged greyish-brown bark and felt his skin snag on its rough edges, just as it had when he was a child, and he thought back to the cool autumn evenings he’d sat with a textbook on his lap under the shade of the maple, when he dreamed of the white coat wrapped around his back and the stethoscope around his neck and all the good things that would come with them if he listened to his father and worked hard enough.

“Steph used to do his homework under this tree when it wasn’t cold. That’s how he got into med school.” His father smiled and squeezed his son’s shoulder.

---

STEPH AND HEIDI DROVE a few kilometres north before they saw the sign for the onramp.

“There we go,” Steph said. They followed the sign toward the highway.

They drove a few minutes in silence as Heidi fiddled with her now-functioning phone.

“Who are you texting?”

Heidi rolled her eyes. “You already know.”

“Cindy, Pooja.”

“Yes, and Nesrine. All of them.”

“Manpreet?”

“Yes.”

“Eduardo.”

Heidi clicked her phone off and set it on her lap. “Again?”

“Handsome guy.”

“Eduardo says hi every now and then as he passes my desk. He’s a delivery guy. Even if I wasn’t married to such a beautiful doctor man,” she slid her palm into Steph’s and squeezed, “I am not getting involved with a delivery guy. The way he looks at women, he’s practically a street dog.”

“A handsome street dog.” He squeezed her hand in his.

“I guess. Besides, he’s a goofball. The girls and I call him Betsy after this ditzy girl who was fired for leaning on the fire alarm. You know he tried to put out a stove fire with olive oil?”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me one time at lunch. It was like the only time we ever talked. The man’s as dim as that lightbulb in the kitchen that you won’t fix.”

They saw a diner in the distance about five hundred metres from the onramp.

“Can we stop at the diner? I’ve been needing to pee for a good hour.”

Heidi shoved her cellphone into the back pocket of her jeans as Steph pulled off the sideroad and into the lot before the diner. Heidi kissed him before she grabbed her purse, opened her door and stepped out of the car. She closed the door so quickly behind her Steph barely noticed the weak thud of her cellphone as it fell onto the felt rug. It must have slipped out of her back pocket as she bent forward to stand. Steph would have called after her, but she’d already run inside.

He unbuckled his seatbelt, stretched over to pull the cellphone from the ground and placed it on the seat next to him. The lockscreen lighted with a selfie of him and Heidi on beach chairs in Acapulco, smiling deep and hard into the camera, just a few months prior. He’d gotten sick from the food and had stayed in their hotel room for the latter half of the trip while Heidi was out on the beach. She’d had her cellphone then too. There was wi-fi on the beach.

Heidi’s phone buzzed. He picked it up and stared at it. Considered.

He pressed the first few numbers of her passcode before he stopped himself, shook his head, turned the screen off and set the phone on the seat next to him. There was nothing right in this. It could only be wrong. Heidi never kept anything from him. She would never plug in his passcode and check his messages without his consent. But then, how would he know that? For all he knew, she might have checked his phone while he slept. No. She trusted him and he trusted her. They had nothing to hide.

He picked her phone up again and tapped the screen alive. He plugged in her passcode and unlocked it. A pair of unread messages populated her screen.

Betsy
Is he still going on about his ingrown toenail lol
Betsy
Let me know when your back in town. I bought that vanilla lavender massage cream you like 😉

Steph stared at the screen for a moment too long before he clicked it off. He leaned back against his seat with his mouth agape and stared at the open skies. Not a cloud about.

He dug his head into the headrest behind him and shut his mouth, but his eyes were wide to the dying light.

Heidi ran out of the diner with a box of takeout. Steph threw her cellphone onto the floor before she opened the door.

“I got us some food,” she said as she stepped inside. “Drive and I’ll feed you.”

Steph sat for a moment with the back of his head buried deep into his seat.

“What are you waiting for?”

Steph pulled his head from his headrest and paused a moment before he put the car in gear. He wanted to speak but there was a force within him that he couldn’t name, which rested his tongue along the roof of his mouth, and he could only drive.

He pulled out of the lot and back onto the street before they made it onto the highway. Heidi opened up a Styrofoam box filled with fries and tried to feed Steph but he shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Not hungry.”

“But what’s wrong though? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She shuffled her feet and kicked at something. “What’s on the floor?” she asked as she reached to the ground and grabbed her cellphone. She turned to Steph. “This was here the whole time?”

“Was it?”

Heidi shrugged as she unlocked her phone. Her face blushed as she read through her text messages.

“What’s wrong?” Steph asked, a clandestine smile sneaking across his face. He turned his head for a short moment and her green eyes caught his dark stare.

The same eyes that had met him at the altar. The same eyes that smiled at him when they planned out their children’s names. Anastasia and Tim and Penelope and Zaghloul. That last name always made her smile. For the first two years of their marriage they’d tried to conceive and the process that was once spontaneous became planned and rigid. Steph wore loose-fitting boxers to ‘let the air in.’ They followed Heidi’s cycle religiously with ovulation tests and used lubricant that claimed to encourage conception. They researched the best positions to bring life and practiced them religiously, checking every month, often multiple times within the month to see if a seed had planted. For years they were disappointed until that warm day in April when Heidi snuck off into the bathroom, sure of another negative result. She peed on the end of the applicator, laid it on top of the sink next to the faucet and came back within the hour.

Steph came home well into the night wreaking of formaldehyde and sweat to see Heidi sitting on the couch in a white robe with her legs crossed on the coffee table.

“Positive,” she said with the applicator in her hand and a wide smile as she laid back on the couch and slipped her legs apart.

“Really?” Steph said, rooted in place like an old vase.

“I guess you’ll have a second mouth calling your name soon, daddy.”

Steph threw off his windbreaker and rushed to the couch.

“I don’t want to poke the baby,” he said before he slid between her legs and kissed her.

They’d bought a dog to celebrate, and decided to keep the news a secret until after the chance of a spontaneous abortion attenuated, at the passing of the first trimester. That is, until they sat hand in hand before the fertility doctor a few months after the positive test, Heidi bearing no physical changes to her body.

“False positive,” the doctor said with the conviction of a stop sign. He turned to Steph and looked deep into his eyes. “You have a condition.”

Heidi squeezed Steph’s hand reassuringly, though the paths of crimson lines carved into her sclera undid the lie of peace she put on.

Heidi told him it didn’t matter. She’d made a promise at the altar and she would be true to her word.

---

“WHAT’S WRONG?” Steph asked.

“Nothing. The girls are up to no good again.”

“Those clowns,” he said.

Heidi laughed and turned her screen off and slipped it into her purse. She hid her legs underneath her seat as they drove up a slight incline. The car slowed and Steph pressed harder on the gas. They drove north in silence save for the crescendo of the crickets’ song that built as the day’s light dimmed. Heidi ate her fries, finishing them quickly as if she had somewhere to be. She fidgeted in her seat but didn’t take out her phone for the rest of the ride. They drove deep into Barrie before they pulled off the highway and drove through the main roads and onto the side streets. They pulled up in front of an unassuming two-storey home with a maroon garage that matched the house.

Steph and Heidi stepped out of the car and Heidi rang the doorbell. Steph’s mother welcomed them both with a kiss on each cheek as they entered, and invited them to sit on the same tattered green leather couches they’d had since Heidi first met Steph’s family more than a decade prior, the tears now sewed together and the couches covered in thin white cloth.

“Beautiful, always beautiful,” his mother said as she squeezed Heidi’s wrist and kissed her cheeks.

Heidi smiled as she stared at the wall behind Steph’s mother.

“Sit down and let me get you drinks. I picked mint from the garden. Do you want mint tea, habibti?” she said, looking at Heidi.

“I’d love some.”

“And I made a torta for the birthday boy.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Steph said, as he stood next to the couch.

“Anything for you, habibi. But I just need something small,” his mother said, pulling on Steph’s jacket sleeve before he could sit. “I need you to get something for me from the old bedroom.”

“What is it?”

“There’s an unopened box of dessert spoons Adel got from Egypt. Gold spoons. They’re laying on the floor of our closet. Get it for me.”

“Why are you keeping spoons in a closet? Get it yourself.”

“I’ve been telling myself to get them for weeks and I can’t, Steph. You know I can’t go in that room anymore.”

“Fine,” he said as he marched upstairs.

“Gold spoons in a white box,” his mother yelled after him.

He walked to the end of a short hall that led to what was once his parents’ bedroom and opened the door and stepped in. The space smelled of stagnant cologne and mothballs.

The room was exactly the same as he remembered it save for the unsettling silence and the dust that covered the surfaces of everything. His father’s files lay just as they had the day he was taken to the hospital. Next to them sat bottles of Gemzar and Adrucil which hadn’t worked to prevent the disease from metastasizing. His father stopped taking them once the oncologists told him there was nothing left to do, and he was left only with fentanyl to numb the pain until the shadow passed over him in a dark room in palliative care.

Family pictures were strewn across the dresser. A black and white still of his father at seven years old under the watchful eye of Steph’s grandfather. A Christmas card of Steph’s sister, her husband and three children in ugly Christmas sweaters as they all smiled save for the baby who wailed in his mother’s arms. A framed picture of his father and mother on their wedding day as they received their crowns at the altar. His father smiled but his mother did not. Steph picked up the framed picture of he and Heidi’s wedding that sat next to the picture of his parents. Heidi’s smile was just as deep, as wide, as sincere as Steph’s during their crowning ceremony.

“I guess I’m stuck to you forever now,” she’d whispered to him at the altar. He tried to hide his smile to keep his air of dignity. Five years from that day and three years after the unfortunate news from the fertility doctor, they sat on beach chairs in the shade of the maple on a mild but bright Saturday in June, sipping lemonade Steph’s father had made with full lemons and ice and mint, before his father finally blurted the question Steph knew would eventually come.

“How long are your mother and I going to wait for grandkids?”

Steph’s stare fell from his father’s eyes to the grass as he thought of what he could say.

“I can’t –”

“I’m trying to focus on my career for now,” Heidi said as she grabbed Steph’s wrist.

Steph wanted to stop her. To thank her for taking the blame, but she did not need to lie. He wanted to tell his father of his condition and absorb the shame he’d be given. But the words were too raw to speak.

“Why would you do that?” his father said. “You could always move up later in your career. Kids are a blessing.”

“Maybe in time, but I’m focusing on myself right now,” Heidi said.

“That’s selfish. Think of the joy you’re missing out on. Think of Steph.”

“I need to think of myself at this time.”

Steph wanted to speak as his father and his wife argued about the truth of the lie, but just like Steph’s attempts to pass down his father’s last name, his words failed.

That night after they’d returned home and settled into their bed, they lay at arm’s length across from each other and each stared into the other’s eyes a moment too long before Steph mustered the will to speak.

“You didn’t need to do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

Steph searched her green eyes, saw himself in their glassy reflection. He wondered if she could see herself in his eyes too. “Why’d you do it?”

“Wouldn’t you have done the same for me?” she asked.

Steph smiled. “Probably not.”

Heidi slapped him on his shoulder.

---

“STEPH, DID YOU FIND IT?” his mother called from the bottom of the stairs. Steph sighed and set the framed picture down on the table. He walked into his parents’ old closet to fetch the box of gold spoons. He found it on a shelf in the closet and made his way downstairs, where he saw Heidi sitting alone on the green couch.

“Give those to your mom in the kitchen and let’s go outside. It’s a bit musty in here.”

Steph followed Heidi through the hall and into the kitchen. His mother pulled a tray of kunafa from the oven and thanked him as he set the box of dessert spoons on the kitchen table next to a small vanilla cake with chocolate icing.

Heidi and Steph opened the glass sliding door and stepped outside. They pulled beach chairs underneath either side of the maple.

They sat in silence as the darkness approached.

The blanket of night had fallen. Steph’s mother came out with the cake she’d made, spotted with candles.

Gold spoons sitting on dessert plates lay on a tray next to the cake along with three paper cone hats. His mother started to sing “Happy Birthday” as she crowned Heidi with a cone hat, lightly snapping the elastic around her jaw, before she did the same to Steph. Heidi sang with Steph’s mother, smiled, and grabbed the knife off the tray to cut a piece of cake. She pulled the piece onto a dessert plate with a gold spoon and gave it to Steph.

“Make a wish,” Heidi said.

Steph looked around at the fallen auburn leaves of the maple. He thought of the coming cold and the frost that would nip away at the leaves until they browned and withered and broke up into specks of dreck only to return to the dirt from where they came. He knew immediately what he wanted. He wished for the coming winter to hold itself, to tread slowly so he could keep what was left and what would fade of the dying season.

“What did you wish for?” Heidi asked.

“More life,” Steph said.

Heidi kissed Steph’s cold cheek with her cold lips and wished him more life and more happiness and a hundred more years.

Steph forced a smile. He and Heidi and his mother spoke into the night as the stars showed themselves speck by speck. His mother yawned and excused herself. “It’s no time to speak for an old lady,” she said before she grabbed her dirty plate and wished them a good night.

Steph’s mother left and the night was quiet again. Heidi looked up at the stars in silence, never having taken off her cone hat, and she smiled as if she were happy, and in the moment, Steph believed she was. She looked like she did in the kindergarten photos her mother showed him the first time he met her parents, her eyes wide and bright against the muted light of the stars as they flickered.

He lost himself to the innocence in her eyes, the sense of wonder at the infinite and the understanding of the possibilities, and he remembered the video of her as a child at the alpaca farm which her mother had shown him. How Heidi kissed the alpaca, called her Mindy though her name was Mandy. How she told the alpaca she loved her as she pet her. Mandy mewed and hummed and spat on Heidi’s face. Heidi cried and her mother laughed from behind the camera.

“You can’t trust them,” her mother said as Heidi wept and wiped the spit from her eye.

Heidi laughed as she watched the video with Steph. “I didn’t blame her,” she said. “Mindy was just getting over a breakup.”

“You’re so goofy, it’s painful,” Steph said, and he knew in that moment he could only marry her.

Fifteen years later as they sat in the darkness under the maple tree in his parents’ yard, he remembered Eduardo. It was the Friday before Christmas and Heidi’s office held a Christmas party. Tall and chiselled and stoic and dumb, Eduardo’s eyes followed the ladies as they passed. He smiled at Heidi when he said hello and introduced himself to Steph. A smile of knowing. A smile that kept its secrets.

Steph wondered if Eduardo saw the glint of hazel in Heidi’s green eyes. He wondered if Eduardo appreciated the lines that ran down the sides of her lips. The soft bit at the base of her belly that she called her pooch. Did he notice the pair of dimples at the base of her back? Did she laugh at Eduardo’s jokes with an occasional snort that would turn her cheeks red as she’d done with Steph when he told her a particularly funny story? Did they fight over misspoken words and inconsiderate actions so often that the fights became normal and peace the exception?

Did he make her cheeks flush at the peak of her ecstasy?

That last question lingered far too long in his mind, no matter how much he fought it.

“Heidi?”

“Yes, habibi.”

“I’m not going to Tobermory.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m going back to Toronto.”

“Why would you do that?”

He sat in the dark with her question unanswered too long before he could speak.

“I saw the texts Eduardo sent you. Or was it Betsy?”

Heidi ran her palms over each other. “How dare you?” Heidi said, a quiver in her soft voice.

“I know, I’m sorry. I broke your trust.”

Heidi’s eyes shone in the moonlight against the still form of her silhouette. “It’s not what you think.”

“What is it then?”

“You think I would cheat?” she asked.

Steph held his composure until Heidi couldn’t.

“What for?” she said. “It’s not like you stopped paying me attention.”

He looked deep in her eyes as the darkness swallowed their colour.

“It’s not like you came home and stopped asking about me. It’s not like you stopped taking me out and asking me how I was when you knew I wasn’t okay. It’s not like you watched me vacuum with your feet up on the couch and asked for dinner and never looked at me.”

“I’m looking at you now.”

“It’s not like you promised me what you could never give.”

Steph’s eyes flared open as he stopped himself from rushing out. “What did I promise that I couldn’t give you, Heidi?”

Heidi sat, her lips slipped open as if she was about to speak but she did not. Her shoulders rested, her breathing slow and measured. He felt her eyes searching him in the darkness.

Heidi bent her legs back underneath her seat. “So, what now?”

Steph’s eyes took in Heidi’s sullen form as he searched his mind for an answer. He tried to bring himself to speak but he had no words.

Instead, he stood up, grabbed the remnants of the cake and the dirtied plates and stepped inside the home. He placed the cake in the fridge and washed the dishes in the weak light of night that bled through the slats in front of the sink. Heidi followed, her steps quiet as she approached like a thief in the night. She wrapped her arms around him from behind and hugged him as he poured liquid soap onto the plates. She kissed his neck. He felt her tears fall like the blood of a grape as it slipped through a tear in its body. She washed her tears over his skin with her hair.

“We never promised we’d be perfect.”

“What did we promise?”

“We promised we’d fix our mistakes when they came.”

“Some mistakes we can’t fix,” he whispered. He set the plates on a rack to dry and wiped his hands. He pressed his palms to the counter and leaned over it as the heat of her breath and the saltwater of her tears absorbed into his skin. He wanted to move but the weight of her head rested on his shoulder.

“Come to sleep,” she said.

He wiped his hands on a towel, stepped away from her and made his way upstairs to the guestroom. She followed.

In the guestroom the long shadow of the maple ran along the hardwood floor, its branches rustling and the leaves dancing in the wind like the shadows of men, and he thought to himself that this was not life. This was not how to live. They emptied their pockets of their wallets and phones and keys and laid everything on the dresser before they got into bed. They were naked save for their clothes.

---