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“I’ve got it,” he said.

It came out on its own. It always did.

She didn’t argue. She just went to work on the car.

He stood there with the shovel. He could do the car too. And the steps, and the path out to the road, and the propane, the whole list of it, faster and more thoroughly than anyone, the way he had done every list for eleven years so that nobody would ever have to stand in the cold on his account.

Then he thought about her kitchen table, and what she had said to him there. It matters that you wanted it.

“The steps are icy,” he said. “Would you salt them? The ice melt’s in the bucket I left by the door.”

She looked at him over the roof of the car. Something in her face went soft, as if she knew exactly what that small sentence had cost him and had decided not to make him pay for it by saying so.

“I can salt the steps,” she said.

They did it together. It took twenty minutes. Alone, it would have taken him forty. He noticed that, and he didn’t know yet what to do with it, so he kept shoveling, and every time he looked up, she was there.

He left before eight, the store needed opening, the world needed its ordinary things, and she walked him to the door and handed him his jacket and he put it on and looked at her in the cottage doorway in the December morning, her hair still loose, the mug still in her hand, the lake visible behind her through the kitchen window.

He thought about something to say.

He said: “I’ll check the propane again before the weekend. Make sure you know how to do it yourself if you need to.”

She looked at him.

“Okay,” she said.

“And the pipes. I should walk you through...”

“Shane.”

He stopped.

She was looking at him with the expression she had when she was going to say something true and had decided to just say it. “Come for dinner,” she said. “Tonight. I’ll cook.”

He looked at her.

“I’m not a very good cook,” she said. “Just so you know. The pasta last night was about the ceiling of my ability.”

“The pasta was good,” he said.

“It was very simple pasta.”

“It was good pasta.”

She smiled. The full one. “Tonight,” she said.

“Tonight,” he said.

He went.

He walked down Lakeview Lane with his hands in his pockets and the December morning cold and clear around him and thought about tonight like someone who had something to look forward to, which was an experience he’d been having less of lately and was going to try to have more of.

* * *

The hardware store was quiet in the way of a Friday morning after a storm, people still digging out, roads still being cleared, the reduced traffic of a town that had been housebound and was not yet fully mobile. Doug was at the counter when Shane came in, which was normal, and looked at Shane when he came in, which was also normal, and said nothing, which was normal, and somehow managed to communicate an entire paragraph’s worth of observation in the saying of nothing, which was also, unfortunately, normal.

Shane put his jacket on the hook.