So we talked about that. Then he went to check out of his hotel and came back with a tidy, expensive suitcase. I sweated in the kitchen. How many years since there were two plates on that table when dark fell? Not since it belonged to someone else. Through the kitchen window, I watched him pick the peaches from the tree in the yard and put them in a bowl. The grass reached the knees of his well-cut trousers, and his wool jacket pulled up in rich folds beneath his shoulders as he reached for the flushed fruit.

I set the table around the fish jug. The salt and the dressings and the bread, still hot. I had to look for the good napkins. The three I use in cycle seemed suddenly faded. I found the bright ones in the back of the linen closet.

The Rennel who faces me across a table is someone it seems I’ve always known. Once when I was ensconced with a man in an old gray house that shared its leeward wall with a church, Rennel came to visit. In those days I thought myself ended, culminated, that my future would be a continuation of that present. I baked apple pies with baroque crusts and was the only female in the house. I ruled a supper table of soft faces, and Rennel’s was often among them, with his childish, almost sideways grip on his fork, crumbs always caught in the corners of his mouth, his jaw contriving somehow to chew and talk at the same time. The inclination to wave the fork all around the conversation, the too-long pauses before answering a stranger’s question, designed to lead a stranger to think he’s forgotten their question. When I was groveling and begging Rennel offered me money, and when I thought I’d got myself another soft billet I invited Rennel to come and admire me. When I first came to this house and didn’t yet enjoy being alone I called Rennel long distance and told him I was afraid a murderer waited outside my windows at night. And all this time I’ve been comfy here I have distributed austere teas to him on the last Saturday afternoon of the month, and imagined myself somehow superior to him, even though any elevating quality I once possessed has become vague and nameless, even to me.

Rennel knows me. He sits tonight and shakes his head over his fork while I dramatize my tantrum with Jean. He tells me about his prostate infection and I ask him whether he thinks premenstrual rages are a likely forerunner of anile psychosis.

He eats the periwinkles and I dip my bread in the sauce. We split the peaches and sit, two large, gray creatures, both of us grown heavy in our arms and torsos. The peach juice drips into the creases around our mouths.

“Do you think I’m getting too fat?” he asks.