I wiped down the kitchen counters, threw away the unbaked cookies, cleaned the tray. I checked the floor and cabinets for bits of glass. At some point the voice would start talking to me behind the door and I didn’t want to hear it. If I kept working perhaps I would be too busy to hear it. I sharpened the knives again against the stone, scritch scritch scritch, filing the metal to such a fine point. Eating up the minutes that way along with the edge of the blade.

I finished the knives, polished the cabinet handles, wiped down the awful red rental-company refrigerator, climbed up onto the table to wipe the greasy stick off the tops of the lights. My grandmother said a man once ran his fingers over the tops of the doors in her house before he tried to kiss her, wanting first to check, he told her, how she kept her house. Of course this was terrible but I wanted the tops of the lights clean regardless. I got tired anyway though and went over to the sofa, curled myself up behind a mountain of pillows and closed my eyes.

A moment later or maybe hours, M was there in the room with me, home, he looked tired and smelled a little bit of sweat. He reached into my stack of pillows and brought his face down and kissed me behind the ear. I love you, he said. I definitely heard him say it.

We had been so young together once, I hadn’t forgotten a second of it. The being young. The way he had looked at me when we were in that golden country and had good hair and teeth and were supple just by nature and not by trying. When every day was a market and all the shelves were stocked. We could have anything we wanted! It was all true and had happened, though it was hard to believe any of it now with our life always piled up all around us in heaps and mounds, slumping and shifting, old laundry and recycling. But it was all fine now that he was home, the walls pushed back a little around me, around us both maybe and I slept.

12

We all dressed carefully the next morning. M was a little nervous, he put on the clothes he wore to the office. A shirt from Milan. He looked like himself now, in the collared shirt, which was strange because I could remember the first time he put on a suit and it looked too big and loose on him and I thought he could have walked by me on the street looking like that and I wouldn’t have recognized him. If he saw the bruise, he didn’t mention it. I was grateful for his consideration, but also it made me feel a little slippery inside, like maybe what was real didn’t stay true and fixed from one day, from one minute, to the next. Or maybe it was that what was true and real for me wasn’t true and real for both of us together. Or of course maybe it was just that I had done my make up well. How many things could be equally true all at once?