All along the road, trees raised their scrawny hands, white-knuckled against the brittle sky. Signs warned, CAUTION DEERS MATING. It was the day November dribbled into December. Henry and Tabitha were listening to a podcast about a plane crash in the Andes and the gruesome ways the survivors had clung to life in the feral winter hellscape. It gave them something to think about other than themselves. At least I’m not wearing a sock made of arm skin, thought Tabitha.
They almost missed the turnoff, and Henry swerved into the driveway of the newly renovated inn that was offering Tabitha a free stay in return for coverage in the newspaper. The alternative was to remain holed up in their Bushwick apartment, grieving. The inn, a Victorian manor painted a deep gray, was smaller than it had seemed in the pictures. The landscaping was sparse and immature. Aside from the bar and restaurant, the hotel wasn’t yet open to the public. They would be the inaugural guests.
Henry parked the van in the gravel lot and cut the engine. Then he climbed between the seats to the back of the Sprinter and gathered the bags they’d packed. He’d built the vehicle out over the years with a platform bed, shelves, and a kitchenette—crude but clever, pieced together with particle board and scrap. Tabitha opened the door and received the backpack he held out to her. They’d traveled thousands of miles in the van together. She had been there the day he’d bought it and had helped him with some of the labor, prying off the wall panels and adding sheep’s wool for insulation.
There was no one at the front desk when they entered, so they did a lap through the spaces. The lobby floor was checkered marble. Through one door was a wood-paneled library with stained glass windows. What was left of the tinted light fell on a tufted velvet settee and a crowded bookshelf. Through another door there was a wooden bar with gleaming, well-stocked shelves, and this room fed into a lounge with a pool table and a woodstove at the far end. Every element had been carefully considered, Tabitha noted, the suave austerity of the Wassily chairs orbited by antique rugs and estate-sale paintings. Pendant lights illuminated the sober craftsmanship of bentwood dining sets.
“Tabitha?”
She turned to face a grinning man in a Canadian tuxedo. “Hi, yes, that’s me.” She gestured at Henry, suddenly not sure how to identify him. “And this is Henry.”
“Derek,” said the man, giving each of them a hale handshake. He looked like he belonged on the cover of a romance novel. His teeth were perfect white squares, and she imagined a cartoon glint off them—ping. “How was your drive up? You’re coming from Manhattan?”
“Yeah—well, from Brooklyn, but it was nice,” she said, though it didn’t seem like enough verbiage. She searched her memory of that afternoon, of their funereal progress to the car and the red, ruptured rat on the asphalt—a fresh kill—and the crush of traffic in Manhattan before, finally, a cruising speed and the spare woods of the Catskills. “Scenic.”
“Fantastic.” Derek clapped his hands together. “Well, let me show you to your room so you can take a load off.”
Tabitha and Henry followed him up the carpeted stairs. The king bed in their room had a woven cane headboard framed in dark wood, and the lamp on the nightstand wore a pleated shade. Before Derek left them to their unpacking, Tabitha asked if there were any places in town open for dinner; a cursory search on Google Maps hadn’t turned up anything.
“Oh, yeah, it’s stick season, so a bunch of places are closed,” said Derek. “But our kitchen’s open downstairs. Why don’t you join us at the bar after you’re settled in, we’ll get you buzzed and fed?”
“That sounds great, thank you,” said Henry.
“Catch you folks later,” said Derek, and left with a wink.
“I’ve never heard anyone call it that,” said Henry, uncoiling the gray scarf Tabitha’s mother had given him last Christmas. She watched him do it, memorizing his broad, ruddy cheeks, the spirals of gray in his beard. “Stick season.” His gaze was fixed out the window, where the whittled trees were just visible in the deepening blue.
Downstairs, they sat together at the bar. They each ordered a spicy chicken sandwich, which came with a tin of steak fries, and shared a little gem salad. Tabitha had a negroni and Henry had a beer. There were a handful of other patrons—all locals, it seemed, talking about the water damage someone’s house had taken, and someone’s brother who had just had twins. The food was excellent. The drinks were good. Something sweet and hazy played on the vintage jukebox in the corner.
Every time Derek came by to drop off extra sauce or fill their glasses, he told them about the renovation: how they had pulled up the floral carpeting and discovered a layer of tar over the floorboards, how they’d had to spend days sanding it down.
“And get this,” said Derek as he wiped the counter, “under the floorboards, what they were using were these old newspapers. It was a literal time capsule. Reports about the naval ammunitions depot on the Hudson during World War I. Wedding announcements. Ads for stuff to make chickens lay.”
“That’s incredible,” said Tabitha, jotting down notes in her phone. She marveled at how normal she and Henry could seem, laughing at the right beats, reaching into each other’s fry tins and sopping up each other’s smears of ketchup. She would miss this feeling of presenting as a unit to a stranger: one bleary, pleasant, conjoined personality. She ordered another negroni. Henry got another beer.
“Wanna bring these to the pool table?” he asked when the drinks arrived.
“Sure,” she said, and slid off the stool.
There were many things Tabitha loved about Henry, one of them being the intelligence of his body, the clarity of his movements. As he bent low over the table, searching for the right angle with the cue, she took a photo. It was a given that she would pore over it in the next few weeks, part of her relishing the singe of pain, like the refulgent disaster of staring straight into the sun, but she would also encounter it through the years in different ways, like when she was nostalgic or trying to free up storage on her phone. She would remember the sense of being exempt from time, hidden from the whirring city that comprised their actual lives, while also running out of it.
She hit a couple clean shots—the sharp crack, the slick transfer of energy—but it wasn’t enough to stave off a loss.
“Hey, Tab,” he said, lining up the final shot, his body stretched across the green felt. When she met his eyes, he sank the eight ball without looking away.
That night they watched most of Thelma & Louise in bed because Henry had brought up the final scene, blue Thunderbird frozen in the air, and been aghast to learn that Tabitha had never seen it. Before they got to that part, their bodies swam toward each other, all tenderness and trepidation. A ribbon of awareness that there would be no more of this threaded between them, and drew taut as their movements grew more urgent. His hand wrapped around her throat. She said his name just to hear it.
The problem wasn’t that they weren’t in love. The problem was ostensibly children, although they both agreed, warily, that they wanted them. The problem was ostensibly when: Tabitha, who was thirty-two, felt keen on becoming a mother in this decade of her life; Henry, who was thirty-seven, didn’t feel like he would be ready for an indeterminate but long time.