“You don’t always have to be like this.”

I nodded, because he was right, but I wanted something I said to be the final straw for him, so I didn’t have to make the decision.

“I think I’m going to go out and see some friends tomorrow night,” he said.

“Sounds good.”

Instead of telling him I was going out with Daphne, I said I had a spin class.

“Do you want to know who?” he asked.

“Tell me or don’t,” I said.

“Tell me or don’t” was not what he wanted to hear. This was our script, and it soon spiraled into familiar territory, which ended in his sleeping on the couch and my staring at the ceiling alone in our bedroom. My first instinct was usually to fix, to make him happy, to take it back, and also to berate myself quietly for being a broken person who could not be a productive part of a unit. But this time I didn’t do any of those things.

15.

The place Daphne wanted me to take her was in a part of the Valley I had never been to before. She used to go there in its heyday, and she heard it was closing. She wanted to see it one last time. It was the kind of nondescript mid-century bar you could find in parts of Los Angeles that had escaped redevelopment, the neon signs often the most interesting part. The bright neon sign above us cast a strange light on Daphne. She was wearing her wig and she looked like a different person. She kept touching it as if she was surprised to find it there, too. The light made the grooves that had gathered along her cheeks seem deeper and more severe; the shimmery blush Daphne had asked me to apply before we left her house suddenly looked clownish. As we walked up to the place she asked, “How do I look?”

“Beautiful.”

She clutched my arm as I crossed the sidewalk, and I could tell she walked with hesitation. She asked me to hold her bag and I asked her why it felt so heavy.

“My oxygen concentrator.”

She played with the zipper to get the bag open, and I saw the machine in there, turned off, the familiar clear tubing coiled around it.

This field trip felt dangerous all of a sudden.

“They used to serve dinner here,” she said.

“Are you hungry?”

“No, I’m just giving you the history.”