In the master bedroom, the bed is unmade, the sheets strewn like something violent happened. He stands in the threshold, listening to the ticking of a quiet house, wanting and not wanting to hear something more. As he waits, he can feel his blood pressure going up. He has meds for it, and he takes them dutifully every morning. But a tiny pill can do only so much when someone’s been living in, and messing up, your home.

Those little white pills—he charges into the master bath and throws open the cabinet. He shakes one bottle after another, hoping for a rattle. They ate everything but the stool softener. “No respect,” he says to himself.

Closing the cabinet, Michael catches his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Blue eyes rimmed pink, jowly, a carbuncly nose that keeps getting bigger, his hair bright white—he sees very little of that young man from the TOPPS card staring back at him. He’d been handsome, he’d been strong. He looks down at his wrist, the threaded bracelet embroidered with the letters W-W-J-D-D. What would Joe DiMaggio do?

He wouldn’t blow his fucking cool, Michael reminds himself. So he ignores the ringed tub and the towels wadded on the floor. He steps back into the bedroom and closes the bathroom door so hard the whole room shudders. The pictures of his kids and grandkids, the black-and-white wedding photos of his folks and Audrey’s had been knocked askance anyway.

WWJDD. “Audrey,” he calls down the dim corridor, “I’m coming.”

Audrey is in the kitchen. “They melted plastic onto the range,” she says, picking at the stove’s coils with a polished nail. She gives herself a manicure every Thursday, the same color of pale pink for the past twenty-two years. When a fleck of the color breaks off and skips across the range, she makes a concerned face but keeps going.

“And look.” She holds up a crystal pitcher, a wedding gift from his long-deceased grandmother. “It’s chipped. And they cracked the Mr. Coffee.” She points to the carafe, and her eyes run over the counter. Michael watches them skim, skitter, and jump.

“What? What is it?” Michael says.

“Oh, it’s … nothing,” Audrey says, in a way that, Michael knows, after forty-eight years of matrimony, means it absolutely is something. Her eyes dart again, there and back.

“What? Tell me.” His voice is stern, but then he sees what her eyes are unable to avoid: the turned walnut bowl that had previously held their spare keys. Now, save for some gum wrappers, a withered apple, and an oozing brown banana, it is empty.

He feels a curse rising from the grumbling pit of his belly. Of course Michael left a spare key to the Cadillac sitting in the bowl. It’s his house, for fuck’s sake, and you leave your keys, to your car that is parked in your garage, attached to your house, in your fucking fruit bowl. He storms across the kitchen, throws open the door to the garage, and faces a big, empty space where his new car had been.