"I did."
"Good."
She came around the bed, past Moose on the rug. I heard her bare feet down the hall and into the kitchen, and I heard the coffee start.
I rolled out of bed and pulled yesterday's shirt back on.
She had two mugs poured by the time I got to the kitchen. She handed me mine.
"What's the plan?"
"Nothing."
"That's a plan?"
"That's the plan."
She smiled at her coffee.
"I like that plan."
I drank half my coffee at her counter.
"I gotta run home for a clean shirt."
"Take your time."
I kissed the side of her head on the way out.
The house was cold at the threshold. A piece of mail on the floor by the slot. The clock in the kitchen ran at the same beat for twelve years.
The boxes were in the hallway, flat, taped at the bottom, and stacked along the wall where I set them down the day I brought them home from the storage place outside of town. A roll of packing tape was on the floor by the side table. A black Sharpie I bought at the hardware store on Main two days after the funeral. Eighteen months of packing tape and a Sharpie, and neither one was used.
I stopped.
I thought about the slot at 295. Shane had given me until February. The crew was waiting. It was a line a firefighter spent his whole career trying to get on, and Shane handed it to me over a phone call on a Tuesday morning three months ago because he needed a man he trusted at the back of the truck.
The boxes had a date on them that I set myself.
I let myself look at the date.
Then I let myself look past it.
I thought about her hand on my chest. The gray shirt on her shoulders. The yellow eye of the cat I carried across Maple in my jacket on a Tuesday night six weeks ago, and her hands patching up mine with the bone of her hip under them. Cast iron on the burner.
I didn't pick up a box. I didn't move one. I didn't call Shane.
I stood in my own hallway with my keys in my hand, looked at a bunch of flat cardboard boxes, and let myself not do any of it.
Not yet.
I let the words sit in my own head where they were, and I didn't say them out loud to a single person in this lifetime, including myself.
The guitar case was leaning against the wall by the coat hooks. I picked it up by the handle on the way out and locked the deadbolt behind me.
I crossed Maple.
She was on the couch when I came back through her front door. Feet tucked under her, the wool blanket across her lap, a book open on her thigh. Moose was on the rug at her feet.
