"You're not late."
"Yeah."
She closes the door. She hangs her jacket on the peg. She takes off her boots at the mat and sets them heel to heel. Her hair is wet along the line where it went under the collar of her jacket. She is in a dark fleece over a dark henley, dark jeans, and she looks tall in the doorway of a kitchen she has presumably always looked tall in, and she is angry.
The anger is not at me. I know that at once. I don't know how I know. I know.
She is angry at something that happened before she walked through the door.
I watch her set a paper bag on the counter. She does not look at me while she does this. She takes things out of the bag in order, the way you take things out of a bag when you do not want to drop any of them. A container of soup. A small roasted chicken in foil. A loaf of bread. A small jar of jam. Milk. A carton of eggs. A packet of tea. She lines them up on the counter in the order she took them out.
"Town," she says. "I stopped."
"Okay."
"You eat?"
"I had the stew."
"All right."
She opens the fridge. She puts the milk in. She puts the eggs in. She stands with the fridge open a second longer than she needs to and she closes it.
"Long day," I say.
She looks at me.
Her eyes in this light are blue, and I noted them as blue yesterday morning with the cataloging flatness of a woman who has been surrounded all her life by other women who notice eye color, and noted them and set it aside. In the kitchen light, angry and tired, her eyes are the color I didn't see yesterday. I sit at the table with my hands around my mug and I look at her and I realize I am looking at her and she is handsome. Gorgeous, really. Even when she is angry. Or especially when she is angry.
"Long day," she says.
"What happened."
"Nothing I want to bring into this kitchen."
"All right."
"I'm going to eat," she says. "And I'm going to sit down."
"All right."
She pulls out the chicken. She slices half of it onto a plate. She cuts bread. She stands at the counter and eats the first two bites over the counter without sitting down, the way you eat when you have forgotten to eat earlier, and then she remembers me and brings the plate to the table and sits across from me.
I don't know what to do with my hands.
I sat across from her yesterday at breakfast and I was half a person yesterday and my hands knew what to do because my hands were wrapped in gauze and around a mug. Tonight I am a whole person and my hands are a thing. I set them in my lap. I move them back to the mug. I take them off the mug. I put them in my lap. She makes me nervous. Something about her makes me nervous.
She sees it.
"You don't have to do anything," she says. "Sit."
"Okay."
“Did you read?” she asks, her eyes moving to her bookshelf.
"Some."
"Which book?” she asks.
