The dock chairs were already stacked when she pulled up the drive, which meant he’d beaten her here, which meant the whole weekend was going to be a negotiation over who got to leave first.
They’d split the closing list by text in September, in the clipped shorthand of two people who still knew each other’s handwriting without seeing it: she’d take the water line, he’d take the porch. Neither of them had mentioned the bedroom window.
By four they’d bled the pipes dry, hauled the wicker under the eaves, wrapped the grill in its tarp like something being put down for a long sleep. It was the kind of ordinary afternoon that could have belonged to any two careful people.
The last job was the storm window over the lake — the one that had warped a little more every October for eleven years and never caught on the first try, not even when they were still trying, in every sense of the word.
It took two hands to close: his hooking the frame from the porch roof, hers pressing the sash down from inside the bedroom, the two motions timed to a count they hadn’t said aloud together in longer than either wanted to admit.
“On three,” she said, through the glass, in the voice she used to use for other things.
The pane was cold where her palm met it and warm nowhere near his — an inch of window between two hands that used to need no instructions at all. She watched his forearm tighten. He watched her mouth shape the count.
The clasp caught on the second try, the way it always eventually did, and for a moment neither of them let go — her palm flat against the glass, his fingers curled just beneath it, the last warm thing in a house about to go dark for the winter.
“Same time next year?” he said.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t move her hand yet, either.