She kept washing Abe’s dirty cereal bowl every morning. He kept leaving it. She washed her dishes and made them dirty again. She stood over the sink and sighed. “It doesn’t end, does it? The mess we make.”

One night I overheard Abe on the phone. “But the temp job was working out just fine!” he said in a louder voice than usual. Then, more quietly: “I guess you’re right.”

He told me he had a two-week business trip that he hadn’t been able to shunt onto anybody else. I wasn’t sure I believed him. The house felt lonely and overfull at once. It felt hard to breathe. I didn’t blame him for wanting out.

He was going to Detroit. His was the kind of business that happened in huge, forgotten places—cities you’d never go to unless you were buying or selling something there, unless you’d grown up there or loved someone who did. I wondered if he was doing this for me, if he thought I wanted this—for him to get up from the bed where he was always lying, waiting. And maybe I did want this, and he knew it better or earlier than I did, that I needed the vast winter of Detroit between us.

He left the keys to his car, a green sedan that hummed like an insect, and Tilly started driving down the coast. For kicks, she said, but her voice deflated when she said it. She came back with little trinkets from seaside towns: lighthouses made from shells, wind chimes with clacking resin dolphins, a macramé planter with beads like shiny brown nuts. She never invited me to go with her. At least she was leaving the house. She said she was driving faster without fear. “I like it shuddery,” she said. “That way you can really feel the ride.” I made her promise she wouldn’t drive when she’d been drinking, but this made me feel as if I’d implied that all the other drinking was fine.

She started planning a garden for the communal courtyard. “I’ll let the raspberries grow wild like pubes,” she said, but never bought any seeds.

She watched even more television than before. “I don’t watch all the time,” she said. “Just when I get lonely.”

But it was always on. Sometimes I joined her. I wanted this to feel like I was giving her some company, at least, like I was helping, but mainly I felt like part of a story about giving up.

She still liked shows about nature and the workings of our planet. One day it was a show about deep-sea creatures coping with impossible situations, thermal vents so hot we couldn’t measure them. Squids got trapped in the heat and worms came for their corpses, feeding off sheaths of bacteria they shed like snake-skin. “Hell for one beast is heaven for another,” a low voice told us. Blue eels swarmed around the geyser vents, ruffled like fabric, and the world was named for them: Eel City. Tilly tapped my arm like a child. “Abe and I saw a dead one,” she said. “A dolphin. A baby.” Her voice cracked in the middle like a twig. She’d been crying right beside me, and I hadn’t even noticed.