I leave the wrong burner on low. The working one Ishut off after scrambling eggs. The broken one — the one that clicks and won't catch — I leave open, and three hours later Cole walks in, smells gas, not enough to be dangerous but enough to notice, and reaches past me for the knob. His arm brushes mine. We both step back like we've been shocked.
"You left the burner on," he says.
"I turned it off."
"The left one. The right was still on."
"It doesn't work."
"It still uses gas." He turns and walks out.
Our exchanges have the economy of radio traffic. Necessary information, stripped of everything else.
"She needs the afternoon dose in twenty minutes."
"I know."
"You moved the nebulizer."
"It was in the way."
"It was exactly where it needed to be."
I didn't move the nebulizer. I nudged it two inches so I could plug in my phone charger, and when Cole came in to set up the evening treatment he spent thirty seconds hunting for it before he spotted it and gave me a look that could've frozen the Pennsylvania summer in its tracks.
We snap and retreat. Snap and retreat. The house is too small for two men who don't know how to talk to each other, and the July heat makes everything worse. The ceiling fan pushes a thin current of warm air down on our heads, accomplishing nothing except reminding us the air exists and it's full of medicine and old wood and the closed-up smell of a house where the windows stay shut because opening them lets in pollen Eileen can't handle.
Cole spends hours in the garage when he isn't at Mick's shop. I hear him out there, the soft clatter of tools, the occasional scrape of something heavy. He comes in for meals and medication checks and to help Eileen to the bathroom, and each time he passes through the kitchen or the hall the air changes — gets denser, charged with something entirely different from anger and everything to do with the fact that we're grown men who still can't share a room without the temperature climbing five degrees.
Three days in, I'm eating dinner standing at the counter because sitting down feels like surrender. Something I cobbled from the wreckage of yesterday's groceries — eggs, toast, a slice of cheese walking toward its expiration date with the dignity of a man heading to the gallows. I'm halfway through, fork in hand, staring at the wall because the wall has nothing to say and that's exactly what I need, when Cole comes in.
He's here to refill Eileen's water glass. A thirty-second task. He moves to the sink, turns on the tap, and we end up facing each other across eighteen inches of counter because the kitchen is the size of a closet and geometry is not our friend.
He's been in the garage. His hair is pushed back, damp at the temples. A smear of grease on his right forearm, dark against the tan, shaped like a thumbprint where he wiped his hand without thinking. His eyes are hard and tired — the tired that comes from months of sleeping in fifteen-minute increments between medication alarms — and they find mine and hold.
The silence stretches.
One beat. The tap runs, filling the glass, water on plastic like very small rain.
Two beats. His hand on the faucet, mine on the counter edge. Eighteen inches between us. I can smell the garage on him — motor oil, metal, concrete that never dries — and under it something warmer, something that belongs to him alone and that I've spent ten years trying to forget.
Three beats would be too many. At two and a half he shuts off the tap. The glass is full. He doesn't pick it up right away. For half a second I think he might say something — break the pattern, drop the act, name the thing in the room, which is that we're close enough to touch and neither of us is breathing right.
He doesn't. He takes the glass and walks back down the hall toward Eileen's room, footsteps measured. The back of his shirt is dark with sweat between the shoulder blades.
I set my fork on the edge of the plate. The eggs are cold. The toast's gone soft. I don't pick the fork up again.
I dump the eggs and rinse the plate. The drain gurgles in protest. I stand at the window and watch the side yard, where nothing grows but weeds and a strain of regret that thrives in neglected soil.
When Cole comes back through five minutes later, headed for the garage, we don't look at each other. We've mastered that much — the art of being present and absent at once, two men in a house sharing oxygen, each pretending the other is made of glass.
Evenings have a rhythm too. Cole handles the night meds — the ones that help Eileen sleep, that ease the coughing fits that wake her at two — and I've taken the early shift, sitting with her through dinner and the first round of breathing treatments. Nobody divided the day into shifts. It just happened, the way things happen in a house where two people orbit the same dying star and neither will admit they're caught in the same pull.
I'm coming out of her room as Cole is going in. The doorframe is narrow, and neither of us moves fast enough. I'm stepping into the hall, he's stepping into the room, and we meet in the threshold like actors hitting a mark they didn't rehearse.
Cole's hand comes up to brace against the frame — automatic, the gesture your body makes moving through a tight space. Except his hand doesn't find the frame. It finds my forearm.
His fingers close around the muscle there. Not hard. Not a grip. Just contact — his palm against the inside of my wrist, fingers curling over tendon and bone. His thumb rests on the pulse point. I can feel my own blood moving under his skin.
