Two Kitchens

Ruth's kitchen is the tidy one. That's not a judgment, it's a fact both of them would agree on. Her counters are clear, her knives live on a magnetic strip, and there is exactly one mug in the sink at any moment, the one she is between uses of. Dev's kitchen, eleven minutes away by car in the older part of Guelph, has a bread machine he's never used sitting on top of a microwave he uses constantly, and a drawer that only opens if you lift it slightly. On Wednesdays she cooks. It's not a rule. It's just what happened, the way things happen when you've been together nine years and never shared a front door. "Your sister called," Dev says. He's at her table, doing the crossword badly, which he does on purpose because she likes to correct him. "On your phone?" "She said you weren't picking up." "I was at the pool." Ruth turns the heat down under the pan. "What did she want?" "She wants to know when we're moving in together." Ruth laughs, the short one, the one that isn't really a laugh. "Did you tell her?" "I told her we were waiting till the kids were out of the house." "We don't have kids." "I know. She hung up on me." They have had this conversation, in various forms, with various people, for most of a decade. Her sister. His brother-in-law. A colleague of Ruth's who, at a retirement dinner, leaned across the table and said, "But don't you get lonely?" as if loneliness were a thing that lived in square footage. Ruth had said, "I get lonely sometimes, sure. Don't you?" and the woman had gone quiet, because she was married and the answer was yes. The thing nobody wants to hear is that it isn't a compromise. It isn't a stage. They tried it, once, early on. Dev moved into her old apartment on Woolwich for four months in the second year, and by the end of it they were being careful with each other in a way that frightened them both. Careful about noise. Careful about the thermostat. Careful about how long the other one spent on the phone. Two people who had been, on their own, fairly generous, discovering that they had become accountants.

He moved out on a Sunday. They went for breakfast afterwards and it was the best conversation they'd had in months. "Six down," Dev says. "Nine letters. 'Dwelling for two, perhaps.'" "Don't." "It might be 'apartment.'" "It's not apartment." "It might be 'dollhouse.'" She puts the plate in front of him. Chicken, the way he likes it, which is slightly more done than the way she likes it, and she's never mentioned that and she never will, because on Sundays he cooks, and he does the potatoes the way she likes them, which is slightly less done than the way he likes them, and he's never mentioned that either. That's the whole marriage, if you want to call it that. Two kitchens, two ways of doing potatoes, a standing agreement not to keep score. Later, when she's rinsing the one mug, she says, "Do you ever want to, though?" He looks up. He knows what she means. He's known her long enough not to make her say it twice. "Sometimes," he says. "When it's late and I'm driving home and it's snowing." "Me too. Around then." "And then I get home and the drawer sticks and I think, she'd have fixed that drawer by now, and I'd have let her, and I'd have hated it." "You would have hated it." "I would've." She dries her hands. He finishes the crossword, mostly wrong. At half past nine he puts his coat on and she walks him to the door, which is a thing she does, and he kisses her on the forehead, which is a thing he does, and then he drives eleven minutes to a kitchen with a bread machine in it and texts her from the driveway to say he's home. She reads it, and puts the phone face-down on the clear counter, and goes to bed.