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“I’d rather have you next to me. You’ll be home by nine, Tova gets back, I’m at the rink by ten, and that’s the day. Twenty minutes in the car is all that’s left. I’ll take it.”
Her eyes come back to mine. “All right.”
She slides down off the pillows and lies facing me again, and this time the space doesn’t stay.
When I touch her cheek she moves closer and turns her mouth to the inside of my wrist. The kiss is brief enough that I feel it after she has stopped.
“Will you turn that off?”
I reach across her with my left hand and switch off the lamp, and when I lie back Astrid follows, settling against my left shoulder, away from the one that has run half my life since November, with her hand flat on my chest.
I pull the sheet over us.
Her fingers loosen against me, and I close my eyes with my wife still touching me.
Chapter twenty-five
Astrid
The two men I hired arrive at eight with a dolly and a roll of blue blankets, and I have the apartment labeled before either of them is through the door.
KITCHEN. TOVA. BOOKS. The last one is on nine boxes and all nine of them are mine.
Colt comes at ten past with coffee for four and no instructions.
“Where do you want me?”
“Downstairs. Receiving.”
“That’s it?”
“You carry what they hand you and you put it where the label says.”
“I’ve played for coaches who said less.”
He takes the first load without asking whether it is heavy. The younger of the two movers watches him go down the stairs with a box in each hand and then looks at me as though I have brought equipment.
By ten the front room is a floor again. Rooms always get larger when you empty them, which is the only cruelty of moving that nobody warns you about, because for a few minutes you can see the apartment you thought you were renting.
The dent in the baseboard is still there, under where the piano stood. My thumb is in it before I decide to put it there. We made it the week we moved in and I was angry about it for one evening and then it was part of the wall, and the landlord will take it out of a deposit I have already spent in my head.
Tova’s room in Colt’s house faces east, which I chose for her, because she wakes up like an argument and sunlight settles it faster than I do.
I put her bedding on the floor in the middle of it with the pillow on top. She will want to make the bed herself. There is no bed, because her bed is in a storage unit on Zarzamora that I am paying for by the month until I decide whether we are the kind of people who keep things.
The room is empty in a way that makes me stand in the doorway with the clipboard against my chest.
Then I go down the hall.
Half of his closet is clear. Not tidied. Emptied, with the rod wiped and the hangers all facing the same direction and a stack of his shirts folded on a chair in the corner where they do not belong and clearly do not live.
Two drawers are open with nothing in them.
He has not mentioned it. He is downstairs explaining the alarm code to a man who does not work for him.
I put four of my things on four of the hangers, so that the closet has to stop being an offer.
Then I go back down and walk his front room with a tape measure, because a piano is not furniture. It is a structure, and it has one correct wall in any house, and in this house there is exactly one.
