by David Hinson

From the beginning of their relationship and into their marriage, Ashland and Vernon Tate made trades. They had met at work in the legal department of a candy company, and dating each other wasn’t allowed, so Vernon found a new job in the legal department of a toy company. In exchange, Ashland lengthened her commute and moved into Vernon’s place when they decided to live together. Vernon gave up most of his belongings in the process because Ashland had nicer things. In exchange, Ashland allowed Vernon to choose the car they would buy. For all things large and small where they couldn’t compromise and had to choose one thing or the other—from their wedding venue to wall paint colors to light bulb brightness to fire extinguisher placement—they made their trades, acknowledged them, and hoped their effort would prevent future resentments.

            One day, Ashland said she wanted to have kids, which was against what Vernon had once thought would be their permanent wishes. Ashland had at one time been staunchly against having children, for career reasons. But now, after cleaning out her newly dead parents’ home, confronting the intimate leftovers of long lives lived, and fearing an impersonal dispersion of whatever she and Vernon left behind, she said she wanted several children. Vernon didn’t believe this was a good enough reason but said he’d think about it. When he was done, he said they could have one kid. They didn’t discuss whether this would be one of their trades. If Vernon had a big thing Ashland would be at least initially resistant to, it would be that he wanted to move out of the city and into the suburbs. But they’d had that discussion before, Ashland had said no, and Vernon hadn’t fought it. If he brought it up now, she wouldn’t yield. She felt only slightly guilty for being relieved he didn’t bring it up.

            When Ashland got pregnant, Vernon certainly didn’t act as though he was at a deficit among their trades. He made no attempt to compensate by demanding lopsided trades in other areas. He didn’t try to choose which car they would buy when it was Ashland’s turn to choose. He didn’t try to monopolize decisions about which shows they would watch together or steer them toward accepting more social invitations from his friends than from hers. He kept the trades even.

            But one day, when their boy, Christopher, was ten, Vernon announced he was going to lease an apartment in the suburbs. Ashand’s initial thought was that the certainty she felt about getting to stay in the city had been misguided and that this apartment was the first step in Vernon’s plan to convince her they should move. But Vernon elaborated and said the apartment was just going to be for him. His aging stepmother, his last parental figure, was slowly losing her mobility and eyesight, and he was going to stay out near her two days a week to help his two stepsisters, Dani and Valentina, take care of her.

            Vernon’s absences went smoothly at first. The two days he was away were the same two days each week. The division of household labor remained the same by activity, though the assigned days shifted. But Ashland couldn’t shake the idea that Vernon’s time in the apartment might one day lead to them moving out of the city. Her anxiety about this revealed itself in offers to do more than what her and Vernon’s accumulated trades dictated she do.

            “I can do dropoff tomorrow,” she said one night Vernon came home particularly late from the office.

            “It’s my day. I’ll do it.”

            “You sure?”

            “Yeah, it’s no problem.”

            Ashland intended to wake up earlier than she normally did to bypass Vernon’s stubbornness, but Vernon was up even earlier than that and stopped her intervention to take Christopher to school.

            And on a later Saturday, she asked, “Do you want me to make dinners next week?” Vernon would be taking on additional assignments at work while some of his more seasoned colleagues went to court over possible copyright infringement in a competitor’s ad campaign.

            “Nope,” Vernon said, and he spent Sunday preparing food for reheating on the days he was supposed to make dinner.

            As she and Vernon were tangled together after sex one night several weeks later, Ashland, feeling stuck and wanting to clearly articulate her wishes, said, “I don’t want to leave the city.”

            And Vernon squeezed her and said, “I know,” which wasn’t “We won’t.”

            Ashland rolled over so that her tears would fall on the bedspread and not on Vernon’s body. Vernon pulled the covers up when she sniffed, and she didn’t know whether he actually thought she was cold or was telling her that he was choosing not to acknowledge that she was crying.

            Later that week, Vernon’s two days away turned into three days away without a request ahead of time, and there was a longer-than-usual gap in their text messages. Vernon said later over the phone that Valentina had accidentally sliced her hand open, and he had taken her to the hospital. “In the moment, I didn’t think to text you, and then my battery died.” Ashland wanted to ask for photos, but she was squeamish about blood. And then she thought maybe Vernon had chosen that for his story because he knew she wouldn’t ask for proof, so she asked anyway.

            Audibly irritated, Vernon said, “We wrapped it and got in the car. I didn’t waste time taking photos.”

            Ashland dropped it. It was just a coincidence that in the same week she reminded Vernon how she felt about their house in the city, he needed to stay away from it more than he ever had. She regretted making her desires plainly known.

            Vernon was soon back to the city five days out of seven, but a few weeks later, he came to breakfast with a text message from Dani, whose husband had received a promotion and was moving the family across the country to join his new immediate supervisors at the company headquarters.

            “So I’m on duty four days a week,” Vernon said.

            Ashland read the message again, as though the words might change upon review. She handed Vernon his phone without a word. They wouldn’t fight about this with Christopher in the room.

            It was a work-at-the-office day for both of them. Ashland dropped Christopher off at school, and Vernon picked him up. Ashland made dinner, and Vernon washed the dishes. Ashland cleaned the upstairs bathroom, and Vernon put away the laundry.

            And then they cuddled on the couch to watch TV.

            “Why can’t Valentina take four days and you take three?” Ashland asked. “She doesn’t have a family to take care of.”

            “She’s working some nights now.”

            “Why?”

            “She wants more money so she can travel.”

            “Is it going to be a regular schedule at least?”

            “It’s food service, so I doubt it.”

            “So you might have to be over at your stepmom’s five or six days a week, then. You don’t know, do you?”

            “No, I guess I don’t.”

            Ashland didn’t reply.

            “People get old, Ash. Lots of people our age are taking care of both children and parents.”

            “She’s not even your biological mother. Dani and Valentina should be taking care of her and leaving you out of it.”

            Vernon didn’t say anything and stood up at the next commercial break to end the conversation there. Ashland didn’t follow him upstairs and later fell asleep where she was. At sunrise, she woke up to noise from the kitchen. Vernon said he hadn’t meant to wake her. She didn’t know whether she believed him.

            In the following weeks, she braced herself for Vernon being gone from Sunday to Saturday in one week, but he kept his absences to four days, as promised. They once again shifted the timing of their responsibilities and fell into a new rhythm.

The curbside marker of Ashland’s surrender was still months away, but the for-sale sign that nudged the Tates in that direction was the one placed in front of their next-door neighbor’s house.

It was up for only two days and would have been easy to miss. No for-sale signs lasted long in this area so close to the nearly complete, years-long commercial corridor extension. The associated noises—from constant construction to heavier traffic to people leaving new bars and restaurants in the low-single-digit morning hours—were part of why Vernon wanted out.

“An investor must have given them a cash offer,” Ashland said when the sign disappeared.

“Probably above the asking price, too,” Vernon said.

            Ashland saw that comment as a possible path to a discussion about their own house that she didn’t want to have, so she said nothing.

            As had been the case for other recently departed neighbors, an investor buyer meant renovations. A postcard arrived with the work schedule: ten hours a day, seven days a week.

            Vernon’s complaints began not even two hours into his first work-from-home day after the first crew of contractors started the interior disassembly. Ashland came out of her first meeting of the day downtown and checked her text messages. The noise is annoying, Vernon had typed. I can’t concentrate.

            Ashland found the noise through the shared wall to be not merely annoying but intolerable when she worked from home the following two days. But she kept her complaints to a minimum, lest Vernon find an opening.

            She hated to find herself in a position where noise was unpleasant for her. The primary reason she wanted to stay in the city was to avoid the relative quiet of the suburb she’d grown up in, where only bug buzzes and dog barks penetrated the silence after a certain hour. She wanted the car horns and bus brakes and laughter and shouts. She wanted to know people were around. It made her feel safe and tethered to something outside her immediate orbit.

            That first weekend, Ashland and Vernon had their first date night since Vernon signed the lease on the apartment. “The construction’s only for three months,” Ashland said over dinner. She knew renovations sometimes ran long, and she hoped Vernon would leave that unsaid.

            “Then I’m going to the office every day for the three months.”

            That meant rearranging their tasks again.

            And this time, they couldn’t make it work.

            They wrote out the household and child care responsibilities they were assigned and tried everything, but they couldn’t line it up. Ashland didn’t dare ask Vernon to work at the house and to try his hardest to deal with the noise. So she took two more school pickup shifts and kept her work-from-home schedule for one more week before following Vernon’s lead and commuting each day. She made sure to say it was because her colleagues were complaining about background noise on video calls with her.

            But the weekends were difficult. Without saying aloud why they were doing it, though of course they both knew exactly why, they found that all their activities were away from home: play dates, picnics, movies, theme parks, hikes, and day trips. They spent so much time away that first month that their utility bills declined.

            And then one Saturday morning, a week before the end of the three promised months of construction, the power went out.

            “It’ll be on when we get back,” Vernon said as they finished packing for their day at the zoo. It wasn’t just their house. They were more than a mile away before they encountered traffic lights that weren’t blinking.

            But the area still had no power when they returned midafternoon, and it worsened Ashland’s mood. She was worn out from the heat, and she had spilled almost an entire purple slushie on herself at lunchtime and had spent the hours since then feeling uncomfortable, with discolored clothing and sticky legs, to say nothing of the continual sweat. All she wanted was a shower, but their bathroom had no window, and she wouldn’t shower in the dark and risk a fall.

            “Why don’t we go to my apartment, then,” Vernon said.

            Ashland felt newly vulnerable by agreeing to go. She hated that her appearance reflected a weakened position. She wanted to look hydrated, energetic, and clean. And she wanted to look less angry about being none of those things. But the day was lost, and Vernon’s apartment had a shower she felt safe using.

            So they grabbed food from their warm refrigerator, retrieved some clothes and bedsheets, and headed out of the city.

            “Where did you get the money for all this furniture?” Ashland said as soon as they walked in. She didn’t care whether the question would start a fight Christopher would see.

            “The apartment came furnished,” Vernon said. “I thought we talked about this.”

            “We didn’t.”

            Vernon shrugged.

            To get away from him, Ashland went to the kitchen to put food away. “You don’t have enough plates and utensils,” she called after glancing through the overhead cabinets. Her tone said, “Why didn’t you grab more stuff from the house?” Vernon brushed past her and opened a drawer with paper plates and plastic utensils. He walked out without a word or a glance in Ashland’s direction, which meant he wanted the fight to be over.

            Ashland found the bathroom and stripped out of her clothes. Her anger, as it sometimes did, made her feel reckless and invincible, and she made the shower water hotter and hotter, as though by continuing to endure the increasing stinging pain, she would prove something to someone. But when she absolutely couldn’t stand it anymore and turned the temperature down, she realized she was just trying to give herself a reason to cry unrelated to the exhaustion and humiliation of the day.

            Vernon made dinner, even though it wasn’t his day to do it. Ashland didn’t thank him.

            Later, Christopher, without clarifying whether he thought it was a good thing or a bad thing, said, “It’s really quiet here.” Ashland was preparing the couch for him to sleep. It was the first time Christopher had ever said anything about noise. Vernon was in the kitchen washing dishes, and Ashland didn’t ask whether he heard what Christopher had said when they were getting ready for bed themselves.

            In the morning, Vernon drove back to the city to see about the power and returned with everyone’s swimwear. “It’s back on,” he said, “but let’s do a pool day here before we head home.”

            Ashland tried not to read too much into Vernon calling their city rowhouse “home,” especially while he was prolonging their time at the apartment complex. Of course he would still call it home. Why wouldn’t he? Nothing had actually changed, despite how she felt. She was just feeling less secure after spending this time at the apartment. An address on a lease was an abstraction. Walking and sitting and eating and sleeping in actual rooms felt like a tangible threat against their life in the city.

            “Can we do that again?” Christopher asked as they drove back. “I liked that we had the pool to ourselves.”

            Vernon laughed. “We won’t always have it to ourselves, but sure. We can come back again sometime.”

            Ashland spent the rest of the ride thinking of ways to stop that from happening.

“Valentina’s leaving town for a wedding,” Vernon said as he and Ashland prepared for bed that night.

            Ashland spit out her toothpaste, annoyed that Vernon would try to start this conversation while she couldn’t say anything. “It’s just a weekend, right?”

            “It’s a destination wedding overseas. She’s going to be gone for a week.”

            Ashland turned around and crossed her arms. “You are not going to be gone for an entire week,” she said.

            “If we stay at the apartment, we—”

            “I’m not staying at your apartment.”

            “I thought through the logistics, and we can—”

            “If the plan involves your apartment, I don’t want to hear it.”

            Vernon kept his face neutral, but Ashland could see the bitterness in his eyes before he walked away.

            They later came to a tense agreement that kept Ashland in the city and gave Vernon what he needed: Ashland took care of everything for seven straight days. The extra stress kept her up late, and waking up early every day to take care of breakfast cut into her sleep at the other end. She simultaneously appreciated Vernon’s help with everything up until now and felt extraordinary anger about the situation that had taken him away for the week. To stop herself from yelling at him, she ignored all his calls and communicated with him only through terse text message.

            But when the week was over, Vernon couldn’t force Valentina to spend seven days taking care of her mother to give himself seven days to take care of his and Ashland’s combined responsibilities. Ashland felt resentful toward Vernon, and for the first time, she didn’t try to suppress it. And she let him know through her actions. She wouldn’t do anything that would affect Christopher, like avoiding pickup and stranding him at school. But she started by separating her laundry and Christopher’s laundry from Vernon’s and making Vernon do his own. When the school year ended and Ashland picked Christopher up from day camp, she sometimes took him to dinner on the way home and let Vernon take care of his own meals. Ashland started leaving dishes out on the days they were hers to do, and Vernon washed them, dried them, and put them away. Vernon expressed no feelings about any of this and carried on as though these deviations were part of their longtime arrangements.

            In a more extreme move, Ashland refused to put gas in the car when it was her week to do it. Vernon’s façade slipped when this turned into a game of chicken. In general, they didn’t drive much, and the gas gauge needle rarely dipped below the halfway line. Anything below a quarter tank was new territory, and neither of them knew how many miles were available after the warning light came on. Ashland assumed she would easily win their game, with all the trips Vernon took to the suburbs and back, but she was the one driving alone when the engine sputtered. At the gas station, she squeezed the nozzle so tightly that she gave herself a cramp. When she paid the credit card bill online that afternoon, she noticed that Vernon, to precisely offset his trips, had been putting five dollars’ worth of gas in the car every time he drove it. Only Ashland’s trips had led to the net losses that drained the tank.

            Ashland had never seen that cunning side of Vernon and felt offended to have been on the receiving end. She wanted to feel justified in her naivete, for believing that he would never be so cruel to her. It unsettled her to believe she had pushed him in that direction.           

            At first, her pride refused to let her show her anger, and that night, she climbed into bed next to Vernon. But she couldn’t find enough mental peace to relax and close her eyes. And as she watched Vernon sleep, calmly in victory, she wondered who this man was she had married. The longer she watched, the more she felt disgust and contempt, and then she couldn’t be beside him anymore. She cried herself to sleep on the couch.

            Vernon stroked her arm to wake her when the sun came up. He knelt beside her and whispered, kindly, “You missed your alarm since you weren’t upstairs. But I’m taking today off, so I’ll take Christopher to camp, and you can just get ready for your day.”

            Ashland was confused by the gentleness until she registered that Christopher was standing across the room, backpack on, ready to start the day. When they left, she stayed where she was. She hadn’t slept well. Her first meeting of the day downtown was at noon, and she calculated how much longer she could stay put. At the absolute last possible minute, she dragged herself upstairs, put on clothes that didn’t really match, drove in a daze, tried her best to stay awake in the meeting, slept under her desk for two hours, finally ate, and powered through the rest of the afternoon as best she could.

            As she drove home, she was worn out and was dreading the work she needed to catch up on from the lost morning and whatever mood she might find Vernon in.

            She imagined she looked as vulnerable as she had the day they came back from the zoo and the power was out, but Vernon didn’t say anything to her as she went straight upstairs. Not out loud, anyway. He had left a note on her pillow. He was finally asking to move out of the city. I didn’t think I wanted to be a father, the note said in part, but I took a chance and grew to like it. You might like it out in the suburbs.

            Ashland had always imagined that if they were going to have another conversation about moving to the suburbs, it would be a fight and it would be in person. And she had it all mapped out. If Vernon said this, she would say that. If Vernon said this other thing, she would say that other thing. But a note rendered her preparations moot. She regretted never asking Vernon about his expectations for moving out of the city and how they might have been tied to changing his mind about having a child. By not discussing it up front, it had become an unacknowledged hum of tension underlying their marriage.

            But the request was in the open now. She could no longer pretend, however implausibly, not to know what he wanted. “You don’t get to bring this up in the middle of a fight,” she shouted so she didn’t have to get out of the bed. But Vernon wasn’t downstairs; he was standing in the doorway. “I didn’t start this fight,” he said. “I had a reason to abandon my responsibilities for a week. You escalated this.”

            “It doesn’t matter who started this. We’re not children,” Ashland said. When Vernon didn’t reply, she said, as forcefully as she could, “We’re not moving.”

            “I don’t want to be here anymore,” Vernon said. “I feel cramped. I want more space. I want a yard.”

            Ashland kept quiet while she tried to decide whether it would be better to simply say no or to express that she didn’t care what he wanted or to point out that a yard was going to be more work for him and that she didn’t want to have to rearrange their responsibilities again. She decided to say nothing.

            “Can you at least think about it?” Vernon asked.

Ashland heard him walk back downstairs, and then she fell asleep.

            When she woke up, it was dark. She changed her clothes and took a walk to the commercial corridor. It wasn’t super late, but it was a weeknight, so things were winding down. She walked seven blocks down and back, glancing into the restaurants, bars, and stores. She had never been inside most of them and admittedly had no plans to do so. It was as though she liked the option of having all this nearby more than she liked using any of it. But did she want this because she loved it and it was now familiar and she couldn’t imagine living without it? Or did she want it because she thought she had wanted it when she was growing up in the suburbs, and to renounce it would be to abandon her childhood dreams? And was any of it worth the marital tension? If she and Vernon kept fighting and never returned to their system of splitting household labor, she might be tired like this all the time. And angry and bitter.

            Maybe she could like living somewhere else.

            She climbed upstairs and into bed beside Vernon. “Fine,” was all she said.

By the fall, in time for Christopher to start middle school, they had moved out of the city and into the suburbs.

            For the front porch, Ashland bought a chair, a small table, and two candles that repelled bugs. She sat out there as much as she could. She would often have breakfast there, work there on work-from-home days, and sit there in the evenings until dark. All the while, cars drove past, and people walked by with dogs, partners, and children. Some waved. Some stopped to chat. Some days, Ashland spoke more outside the house than she did inside it. Christopher, who had made fast friends at school, two of whom lived nearby, was gone a lot. And even though Vernon was now just twenty minutes away from his stepmother and therefore home every night, the house was big enough and arranged in such a way that they could avoid each other without any effort. Though Ashland couldn’t speak for Vernon, she didn’t believe they were trying to avoid each other on purpose. The moving process had produced moments of intimacy that they had been lacking, and these moments narrowed the rift that had formed between them. Like when they found photos of their wedding that they thought they had lost in a previous move. They bonded over trying to remember the names of once-close friends and marveled at how young everyone looked. Or like when they repainted most of the rooms in the new house and for the first time in a long time had a shared project. These moments didn’t fully relieve tension, eliminate suspicion, or heal the bitter wounds they’d inflicted upon each other, but they provided for a return of the civility necessary to do things like evenly distribute the household labor again.      

            If asked about her happiness, Ashland would have said she was simply making the new situation work. Central to making the new situation work, though, was the time she spent on the porch, which, as the first few months in the new house passed, decreased with the number of daylight hours and days of comfortable temperatures. She added a blanket to her porch inventory but could do nothing about the declining number of passersby.

            One evening, when both Christopher and Vernon were away, she fell asleep on the porch and woke up to a loud noise. She thought she had imagined it, but after a moment, she heard what sounded like something heavy being dropped from a great height. Whatever it was, it wasn’t visible from where she was sitting. She set aside the blanket, stepped down into the front yard, and stood at the curb. Few houses had exterior lights on, the city-provided light sources were dim and widely spaced, and the moon was new. Ashland had no interest in venturing into the dark to find something that, though loud enough to wake her, had seemed far enough away not to be her concern if it wasn’t easily apparent from here beside the mailbox.

            So she turned back toward the house and realized she’d made a mistake.

            Even though the most bothersome bugs had disappeared, Ashland was still using the candles, hoping that the familiar smell would keep the warmer weeks with longer days more vivid in her mind as she sat in the chilly darkness. She hadn’t paid close attention when she stood up and had draped the discarded blanket over them. The candles, the blanket, the chair, the table, her phone, and a rapidly increasing part of the porch were all on fire.

            She had her keys, though, and rushed to unlock the side door to the garage. Unopened boxes stood stacked in the corner, and one of them, she knew, had a fire extinguisher inside.

            Back in the rowhouse, as one of their many trades, in exchange for Ashland choosing lightbulbs with sunlight-mimicking brightness levels, Vernon had decided they would keep their fire extinguisher in their bedroom. He thought they could run upstairs if there was a kitchen fire while they were cooking, but if a fire broke out in the middle of the night, he wanted it close and easy to find in darkness and disorientation. It would be in the bedroom here, too, but Ashland hadn’t seen it, which meant they hadn’t unpacked it, and it was here in the garage.

            As she tore through the boxes in a way that risked injury, she wondered how she would ever be able to convince Vernon that the fire had been an accident.

David Hinson lives in Washington, DC. He has previously published short stories in the Greyrock Review and Night Picnic.