Spare Room

Joss had four mugs on the shelf and then, overnight, seven. I counted them while the kettle cooled, because I was trying not to listen to her through the wall.

She was in the shower, singing something with too many notes for the way she hit them. The wall was thin. It had always been thin. Before she moved in I’d liked that I could hear the street. Now I could hear her missing the chorus and starting over, cheerful about it.

I poured the tea and left it. Downstairs the shop was already warm. Late summer, windows open up here and the back door propped with a brick down there. I took a sign for a dentist and stood it on the bench and told myself the lettering was the only thing that mattered. Gold leaf on black. The D wanted a steady hand. I gave it one.

Halfway through the second line I stopped and listened again. The shower had quit. Footsteps, then the cabinet. I went back to the D.

By the time she came down I had the outline done and my shoulders up around my ears. She stood in the doorway in her work clothes, hair wet at the ends, one of the new mugs in her hand.

“You left tea,” she said.

“It went cold.”

“I’ll drink it anyway.” She did, and made a face, and smiled at me over the rim like the face was a private joke. “Dentist?”

“Open by Friday if I don’t ruin it.”

“You won’t.” She set the mug on the bench, not on the shelf where it belonged, and went out the front. The bell rang. I moved the mug to the sink and stood there longer than the mug required.

Upstairs that evening I took the far cushion. She took the near one and put her feet on the trunk and talked about a parcel map that wouldn’t lie flat. I answered when she needed an answer. When she got up for water I got up too, rinsed a glass I didn’t need, and went to my room with the door shut. The system worked. It had worked for four months. Same couch rule, same kitchen rule, hands busy, mouth closed. I lay on my back and listened to her put the glasses away, one soft click and then another, and I did not get up again.

On Thursday we went out with Mara and Devon to the late movie, the one that started after ten because Mara couldn’t leave the office any earlier. Nothing special. We stood in the lobby with paper cups of water and argued about whether the trailer had given the ending away. Joss said it had. I said it hadn’t. Devon said we were both unbearable and bought the tickets.

The theater was cold. Joss sat on my left and laughed in the wrong places, which was how I knew she was actually watching. Halfway through she leaned over and said, low, “That man is lying,” and I said, “Everyone in this movie is lying,” and she sat back satisfied. Our arms touched on the rest between us. I moved mine to my lap and kept it there until the lights came up.

The walk home was the long way, because Mara lived past the river and Devon peeled off at the bakery. The street was empty. Windows open above the shops. Someone’s radio, then nothing.

Joss took my arm the way she had for eleven years, easy, already talking about the ending.

“See,” she said. “The trailer did it.”

“The trailer did half of it.”

“Half is the part that matters.” Her hand was warm through my sleeve. I felt the old pull to match her step and stay there, and I felt the newer one, the one that had gotten worse since spring, the one that made four months of spare-room rules necessary.

My shoelace was fine. I stopped anyway.

“Hang on.”

She let go. I bent and retied a knot that didn’t need it, slow, looking at the pavement. When I stood she was watching me. Not the look she used when I was being funny. Longer than that. The streetlight put a line across her mouth and left her eyes in the dark.

She didn’t say anything.

I started walking. After a second she caught up and did not take my arm again. We climbed the stairs over the shop without talking much. She said goodnight at her door. I said it back. I shut mine and stood with my hand on the knob until her light went out under the crack.

I slept badly. At two I gave up and went for water.

The kitchen was dark except for the streetlight through the open window. Joss was sitting on the counter in an old T-shirt, bare legs, one heel hooked on a drawer pull. She’d been waiting. I knew it the way you know a room has been arranged. My note was still by the toaster. EAT. She hadn’t moved it.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.

“I figured.”

I got a glass and filled it at the tap. The water ran loud. I shut it off and didn’t drink.

“You’ve been really careful around me,” she said.

I tried the joke I’d been saving for months, the one that usually worked. “I’ve been careful around your mugs. They’re a hostile takeover.”

She didn’t smile. She waited. The refrigerator hummed and a car went by below and neither of those things helped me.

“How long?” she said.

The glass was cold in my hand. I set it down.

“It’s not important. You just got divorced.”

“I know I did. I was there.” She shifted on the counter, and the drawer pull clicked. “I’ve been thinking about something for two months. I’d like to be asked what.”

The window curtain lifted and settled. I could hear my own pulse in my ears, which was stupid, because nothing had happened yet except words, and words I could survive. I had survived eleven years of them.

“All right,” I said. “What?”

She didn’t answer.

She reached out and took the front of my shirt and pulled me in. The counter put her a little above me. Her mouth found mine before I had decided anything, and then deciding was over. She was shaking a little. Not a performance of it. Her hand on my shirt had a tremor I could feel through the cotton, and she didn’t stop. She kissed me like she’d made up her mind in the dark and wasn’t going to unmake it for my sake.

I kissed her back. My hand went to her face, then into her hair, which was dry now and caught on my fingers. Her other hand found my wrist and stayed there, holding on. I felt the edge of the counter against my hip and the heat of her knee against my side and the fact that this was Joss, my Joss, the person who sang badly through the wall, and I did not step away.

When she stopped, her hand stayed on my face. Her thumb rested near the corner of my mouth. She was still shaking, less now. Her eyes were open. Mine were too. We were close enough that I could see the little crease she got when she was concentrating.

“So that’s what,” she said.

The refrigerator hummed. The window was open. Down in the shop a sign for a dentist was drying on the bench, and upstairs the spare room was still hers, and the thin wall was still between our doors, and none of that had moved. Her hand hadn’t moved either. I covered it with mine, because if I let go I didn’t know what my mouth would do, and the night had already said enough.