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Long. Interior. No window, no vent, no door at either end.

His television is on it. Sixty-some inches of it, mounted at the height of a man standing, with a leather chair at an angle in front of it that has a shape worn into the seat.

The movers are carrying in the last of the boxes. Colt is in the doorway with his sleeves pushed up.

“The piano goes here.”

He looks at the wall. Then at me.

“On Monday,” I say. “The men who move pianos move pianos.”

“Okay.”

“It needs the whole wall. Not most of it.”

“Okay.”

He does not say that there is a den. He does not say that there is a room over the garage with nothing in it. He does not offer me a different wall or tell me about the guy he knows with a truck, and the hand with the tape measure in it comes down to my side on its own, and I am the only person in this room who still thinks a conversation is happening.

He goes and gets a kitchen chair.

He does it himself, which I had not predicted. He stands on the chair in a shirt that should not be anywhere near a drill and takes the bracket off the wall, and he puts the screws in his left palm while he works, and then the screws are on the floor.

Four of them, rolling.

It is nothing. Men drop screws. A man with his arms over his head and a drill in one hand drops screws and nobody in the world finds it interesting.

He crouches and collects them with his right hand. Then he puts them in his right pocket, and he keeps the drill in his right hand for the rest of it, and he does the last two screws with his left arm hanging at his side.

I know what his shoulder does. I could draw it from memory.

I do not know what his hand did just now.

So I hold the chair while he comes down off it.

“Thanks.”

“You are welcome.”

The wall has four holes in it and a square of paint two shades darker than the rest of the room. Nobody will ever see it. The piano is taller than the mark.

He carries the leather chair out to the garage and does not come back with a suggestion.

Ruth is in the kitchen putting things in the refrigerator in containers with the lids dated in blue marker.

“Saturday’s the chicken,” she tells me. “Sunday there’s the other one, and I wouldn’t trust him to tell the difference.”

“I will manage.”

“I know you will. I’m telling you where it is.”

She says it without any particular warmth and I find I like her very much.

Ruth puts the schedule on the refrigerator before she leaves, under a magnet shaped like a boot.

It runs to April. Every date has a city beside it and a time, and about a third of them are somewhere else. I stand in a kitchen with a glass of water and read a document that says where my husband will be sleeping for the next nine weeks, and nobody made it for me, and nobody thought it was worth mentioning.

“He doesn’t look at it,” Ruth says, with her coat already on. “He knows it. They all know it. I put it up for the house.”