The apartment in the photograph had no furniture. That was what Audrey liked about it.
Nobody had left a sweatshirt over the chair because there was no chair. Nobody needed her to find a receipt, replace the milk, remember a birthday, or know when the car registration expired. The afternoon light fell across a clean rectangle of floor, asking nothing.
She had stopped at the open house on her lunch break. Ten minutes, perhaps twelve. She hadn't given the leasing agent her number. She had taken the brochure because he handed it to her, and now it lay on the kitchen table beneath a shopping list for a trip she was no longer sure she wanted to take.
Ben came in carrying a bicycle wheel.
"Don't put that on the table," she said automatically.
He stopped halfway through the motion. "I wasn't going to."
They both looked at the clear space beside her mug.
"I was thinking about it," he admitted.
On another evening she would have laughed. She almost did now.
He leaned the wheel against the wall and kissed the top of her head as he passed. A familiar kiss, delivered on his way to the refrigerator. Audrey had once loved that absentminded affection. Lately it made her feel like a room he was walking through.
"Did Max call?" he asked.
"Yesterday. You were closing the shop."
"Everything okay?"
"His roommate bought a drum kit."
Ben closed the refrigerator. "In a dorm room?"
"Electronic. Apparently that's the defense."
"I'll call him tonight."
Their son was twenty, beginning his second year of college, and learning how to make an entire conversation about one inconvenient object. Audrey missed him fiercely. She also enjoyed having the house to herself sometimes, a truth that seemed to require more explanation than it should.
Ben lifted the shopping list to check what they needed for the trip. The brochure slid free.
He looked at it. Then at her.
"Who's moving?"
The question was so ordinary that she nearly supplied an ordinary answer. A colleague. A friend. Someone whose life could be discussed without changing theirs.
Instead, she said, "I went to see it."
He set the list down carefully.
"Why?"
Audrey looked at the wheel beside the wall. A dark mark from its tire touched the paint. Tomorrow she would probably wipe it off while waiting for the kettle. Ben would not know it had ever been there.
"Because I wanted to know what it felt like to be somewhere quiet."
"It's quiet here. Max is gone most of the time."
"That isn't the kind I meant."
He pulled out the chair opposite her and sat. It was the first deliberate thing he had done since entering the room, and she hated how much she noticed.
"Are you telling me you're leaving?"
"I'm telling you I looked at an apartment. I haven't signed anything. I haven't even filled out a form."
"But you thought about it."
"Yes."
The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a neighbor started a leaf blower and stopped it almost immediately, as if reconsidering his priorities.
Ben rubbed his palms over his knees. His hands were broad and marked by work, a small streak of grease beside one thumb. She knew those hands. She knew the way he held a mug, the way he checked a bicycle brake twice, the way he used to reach for her in a crowded place without breaking conversation.
She loved him. It would have been less confusing if she didn't.
"I thought we were tired," he said.
"We are tired."
"I thought things would settle down when Max went back."
"I think we keep waiting for something else to settle down."
He looked toward the bags lined up by the hall. They had booked the anniversary trip months ago. Five days along the Oregon coast, a route they once talked about driving when their salaries barely covered the rent. Twenty-one years of marriage, finally with enough time and money for the sort of modest holiday that had once seemed extravagant.
"Is that why you don't want to go?"
"I didn't say I don't want to go."
"You haven't sounded excited."
Audrey folded the corner of the brochure, then flattened it.
"I don't want five lovely days to become proof that nothing is wrong."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. She could see him looking for something he could repair: a booking, a date, an insufficiently scenic road.
"What is wrong?" he asked at last.
It was such a large question that every small example sounded petty before she said it. The dinner he had forgotten when her project was approved. The appointment he assumed she had put in his calendar. The stories she began at night and stopped halfway through because he was answering a message from the shop.
"I don't feel like you are here with me very often," she said. "Even when you are in the house."
"I work six days a week to keep the shop going."
"I know."
"And I do things here. I'm not sitting around expecting you to—"
"Ben. I'm not asking whether you're a decent person. I know you are. I'm telling you I miss my husband."
The words came out more quietly than she intended. They left her with nowhere to hide.
He looked down at the table.
After a while, he said, "I miss you too."
She wanted to believe that this was the beginning of a solution. She was sensible enough to know it was the beginning of a conversation.
They sat there until the light changed. The shopping list remained between them. There was no dramatic resolution, no demand for promises neither knew how to keep.
Finally Ben stood and moved the wheel to the garage. When he returned, he wiped the mark from the wall with a damp cloth.
Audrey watched without commenting. One mark was one mark. It still mattered that she had not pointed it out.
"I'd like to go on the trip," he said. "With you. Knowing this, not pretending you didn't tell me."
"I don't want to spend five days arguing."
"Neither do I. Could we spend some of them talking?"
She looked at the brochure again. The empty room had offered silence. She wasn't sure she wanted silence as much as she wanted someone to hear her.
"Yes," she said. "But I need you to understand something."
He stayed standing by the table, waiting.
"I'm not asking you to be better on vacation. I'm asking what happens when we come home."
He nodded slowly. "I hear you."
She did not tell him that he would have to prove it. He knew. She could see that he knew, and for tonight she let that be enough.
They made dinner together. Ben asked what needed doing, then caught himself and opened the refrigerator to see what was there. Audrey chopped onions. He put water on for pasta. They ate at the kitchen table with the brochure set aside, not hidden and not displayed as a warning.
Later, he called Max. She heard laughter from the living room, followed by Ben's grave assessment of the drum-kit problem.
Audrey went upstairs and finished packing her own bag.
When Ben appeared in the doorway, he held two shirts.
"Never mind," he said before asking anything. "I can choose a shirt."
This time she did laugh.
It wasn't much. It was a sound they both turned toward.
