The two sleeping bags have hung in the garage loft for seventeen years — bought the summer they met, one with a left-hand zip and one with a right, so that joined edge to edge the pair became a single bag built for two.
For her birthday he gets them down, beats the loft's dust out of the nylon on the back porch, and won't say where they're going until the truck has already passed the turn for the lake.
The rain starts while he's driving the second stake, and by the time the fly is pulled taut they're both soaked through at the shoulders, laughing about it in the unhurried way of people who stopped being surprised by their own luck a long time ago.
Inside, the bags are wrong the way they've always been wrong — his zip pull on her side, both tabs facing in instead of out — and they kneel over the half-joined mess by headlamp, knee to knee, her hair dripping onto his wrist.
"You're holding it wrong," she says. "I've always held it wrong," he says, and doesn't move his hand.
The track catches an inch from the bottom and won't give, and they work it the way they've worked every other stuck thing in seventeen years — unhurried, four hands finding the same half-inch of teeth until something lets go.
When it finally runs closed it closes them with it, one bag instead of two, her knee against his thigh, his palm still flat where it landed helping her past the tab.
The rain gets louder for a minute against the fly, then settles into the steady kind they used to fall asleep to in a tent half this size, on a lake neither of them has mentioned in years.
She reaches past him and switches off the headlamp before he can ask if she's ready.
Neither of them says anything about the dark. The rain keeps talking for both of them — the same rain, the same two zippers, seventeen years from the first night and no distance at all.