He knows that he drives her crazy. Alice never says anything, but it’s there, this annoyance, evident in the angle of her chin when she wipes the counter after he makes a sandwich, or when she has to ask him to move his feet so she can vacuum. It hasn’t always been there, this perpetual annoyance; it’s something that has evolved out of the long period when they didn’t know what to say to each other, or what they might have said would have been too toxic for their marriage to survive.

Ed doesn’t imagine for a minute that Alice would worry about him if he didn’t show up at noon. She’d put his sandwich in the fridge and keep moving. She might scold him about not using the cell phone to say he was going to be late, but she’d never complain that he was. It’s as if she longs for time by herself. Too much time alone, Ed knows, was a problem back then, back in those hard days when she’d become inert, as unmoving as a portrait, just the artist’s imitation of light, illuminating the idea of movement. The stillness eventually gave way to the movement of chores and purpose, but it was always under the surface, always a possibility that someday he’d come home and find her frozen in place again.

His answer to those black days had been to throw himself into work, returning to the double shifts of his youth, expending his energy in walking the floor of the machine shop, monitoring the workers whose job he once did, approving, chiding, goading, joshing the men and women, most of whom spoke little English, feeling like a shark, the reputed need to keep moving the only way for him to stay alive. When Ed realized that Alice wasn’t moving, he stopped working as much. Now he isn’t sure anymore if that helped, or if she just had to move out of that fugue state on her own schedule. He knows of some couples whose troubles have made them closer. Theirs haven’t. They both know it and have no idea what to do about it. So they go on with their day-to-day lives, living in tandem but not in companionship.

Ed squeezes the Cutlass between a Prius and a Volvo. It’s strange, this going to the hardware store on a weekday. Typically, it was the favorite errand of chore-filled Saturdays, scheduled after the dump and before the barbershop; now he just goes whenever he thinks of something he needs. It’s the result of having all this unoccupied time, time he should be putting to better use, but he hasn’t found anything that interests him enough to commit to. He isn’t keen to volunteer at the regional hospital or join the group of retired volunteers that do people’s taxes, or substitute-teach at the high school. Maybe he suffers from his own kind of inertia, which is contradictory to the fact that, in being retired so early, he still has plenty of energy. Ed reads the want ads every week, but nothing ever appears that attracts him. He doesn’t want to end up behind the counter at a McDonald’s, although he knows a couple of guys who have and seem to like it well enough. Management is management, they say. Product is product. Instead, he fills the middle of his days with made-up errands.