Molly Gaudry

Three years ago, after Bach got a tenure-track job offer in the DC-area and successfully defended their dissertation, they left the west without ceremony, which meant they also left behind Ab, it seemed, without so much as a decent hug goodbye. Two years ago, when it was Ab’s turn to go on the market, she also got a tenure-track job offer, defended her dissertation, and headed east. In July, she arrived at her new apartment and did the walk-through with someone who gave her keys and a clipboard with pages of things to check regarding condition and cleanliness. It wasn’t until she said, “Bye!” after he got in his truck and drove away that she started to feel something, but what that was she wasn’t sure. Satisfaction? Accomplishment? Sadness? Something related to a new beginning? Ab wasn’t great with feelings. She knew this and accepted it about herself. It was what it was—or, she was who she was—and who she was was someone who had difficulty processing big ups and big downs when she felt them. So she did what she always did. She made herself busy.

She unloaded her car and started dumping things one by one in her front hallway. Once everything was out of the car, she took her suitcase into her bedroom closet and folded the clothes that could be folded, stacked her underwear, and draped her few blouses over the rod, which would have to do until she acquired hangers. She put her suitcase in the back corner of the closet and moved on to the bathroom. There, she organized the contents of her travel Ziploc and lined them up on the counter. She put her 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner on the edge of the bathtub next to a razor and a bar of Dove, and then she pressed the air out of the Ziploc and laid it flat in the cupboard below the sink. She used her hair dryer to blow up her twin-sized air mattress in the bedroom, unpacked her full- sized bed sheets and draped and tucked the leftover material as best she could. In this box marked LINENS, under her bed sheets and pillows, were a hand towel and a bath towel, so she went back to the bathroom and got those situated. At the bottom of LINENS were the exact number of tension rods and curtains that she needed for her apartment’s six large windows—its selling point, in fact, when she saw photos online and when Google Maps’ satellite view revealed that this particular end unit was surrounded by trees. For the seven years it took to finish her PhD, she’d lived in a basement, where the only view from her only window was of feet walking by.

In her kitchen, she unpacked KITCHEN: one pot, one pan, one wooden spoon, one dish towel, one dish, one bowl, one coffee mug, one empty and de- labeled jelly jar, one knife, one fork, one spoon, one small bottle of Dawn, and one green-and-yellow sponge. The last thing to set up was her coffee machine. She plugged it in and ran water through it twice, standing over and watching both times, not lost in thought so much as mindlessly absorbed by the ease with which water moved and the general pleasure people took in watching it. Granted, usually outdoors somewhere scenic and not trickling through a Mr. Coffee, but that was Ab for you.

The movers weren’t scheduled to arrive for another month, which was inconvenient but more affordable, so she went to Home Depot to buy two patio chairs. She already had two patio chairs, but those were on the moving truck, and now because she had both a front porch and a back porch and nothing to sit on for a month other than her air mattress, she figured she might as well buy two more chairs. If necessary, she could hunch over and use one as a makeshift desk for her laptop, although she dreaded what that would do to her already generally unhappy low back. As she roamed the aisles, she picked up a four-pack of hangers, a small trash can, liners, a broom-and-dustpan set, a bag of medium roast coffee, 100 coffee filters, and, nearing checkout, she impulsively added a peace lily to her cart/dolly thing.

At home, she positioned the chairs on the front patio and tied down their cushions after tearing away the tags. Inside, she hung up her blouses. She lined the trash can and put it and the box of liners under the kitchen sink. She put the broom and dustpan in a coat closet that, to her surprise, had a recessed area for mops and brooms, etc. She grabbed a notebook and pen from her purse, went back outside, and she sat—butt on one chair, feet on the other. So this was it. She was unpacked and settled in. She stood and went back inside and took a long shower and then got dressed and came back out to her chairs and sat again and felt refreshed and renewed. New job, new coast, new life.

Now it was July again. Her peace lily’s lilies had fallen away over the winter but now they were back, five white flowers had shot up recently from their thick green leaves and unfurled, and the plant (Lily, yes, she called it Lily) seemed proud about it, standing tall and full. When thirsty, though, Lily drooped as if she were on the verge of death but then after a quick gulp she’d recover and rise straight up again. Lily was so dramatic! But the truth was, Ab had learned to take some of her own mental health check-in cues from Lily when this happened: How was she feeling when Lily flattened out? Worried? Concerned? And were those two different things? How so? Or, alternatively, how did she feel when Lily perked up? Relieved? Happy? Aesthetically pleased? Why was it, Ab had only recently begun to care enough to wonder, that Lily had more clearly defined and easily remedied ups and downs than Ab? This last question seemed to haunt her more and more in recent months, whenever Lily went into her drama queen routine. Despite this though, over their past year together, Ab had grown to care for Lily, deeply. Theirs was her most intimate relationship at home.

So it was July again, and Ab was a year into her job. She was supposed to be reflecting on how her classes had gone so she could get started on her Faculty Accomplishments Report, but her thoughts drifted instead to the fact that today was the one-year anniversary of her move-in date. She was sitting on her front porch thinking about all this and about how her older, shabbier folding chairs had ended up out back, and she wondered what that said about her as a person, that she chose to have her “good” chairs out front and on display. This was when her phone rang, which startled her. Ab’s settings were such that only her favorites could get through and/or other contacts but only if they called more than once in three minutes. Nobody called her, so she was truly startled—coffee spilled onto her thigh and ran down her shin and landed between several toes, gross—as her phone lit up and also vibrated and also played the notes of the only ringtone she’d ever downloaded in her life (the Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1, and the only ringtone she’d ever specifically assigned to someone in particular so she would recognize when they called). “Bach?”

“Are you free? I’m at Penn Station, but I can take a train toward wherever you are. Just not sure which station to get off at.”

“Ronkonkoma,” Ab said automatically, before wondering if East Hampton would be better. “Actually, how long are you here? I’m housesitting this weekend and need to pick up keys from—

“My flight home is Monday.” “Okay, yeah. East Hampton.”

“Thanks. I’ll text ETA from the train.”

Ab wanted more details, but Bach hung up. She’d find out soon enough, she reasoned, and went inside to wash her leg and foot and to start packing. If she left within the next twenty minutes, she could pick up the keys from Gary’s chef a little earlier than expected, but then she’d be free and clear to camp out and be waiting at the station when Bach’s train got in.

*

Bach threw their bag in the back seat and climbed in up front and took a deep breath and sighed. They put on their seat belt and stared straight ahead.

“Do you feel like talking or should I just take us where we’re going?” Ab pulled onto the road and pretended to be a little worse at navigating traffic than she really was, just to make it seem like she was slightly preoccupied with the play-by-play of the GPS (whom she continued to think of as Carmen, even though she hadn’t used a Garmin in what, a decade?). Anything that Carmen said, Ab repeated back. For instance, when Carmen said, “Turn right onto Gingerbread Lane,” Ab mumbled under her breath, “Why Gingerbread Lane?” and then, lest she appear to be too preoccupied, she looked over at Bach and put on her best sympathetic face. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Ab turned on her blinker and its clicking filled up the car. Ab turned onto Gingerbread Lane, which turned into Toilsome Lane, and then Carmen said, “At the traffic circle, take the first exit onto New York 114/Lost at Sea Memorial Pike,” and Ab said, “These names though,” and then they were on the turnpike that would get them where they were going. The silence after the clicking stopped was mildly uncomfortable.

“So you’re housesitting?”

“Yeah, my department chair has this cat that needs to take Prozac every morning and every night, so I’m helping out. He has a hot tub and a chef who comes by to load up the fridge every couple days, so I thought I’d turn the weekend into a writing retreat.” This was true, but as soon as she said it Ab wondered if it was not the most productive thing she could have offered, like maybe it would make Bach feel bad about possibly interrupting Ab’s writing retreat, but then Ab got a little mad and thought fuck it, Bach should feel a little bad popping up out of nowhere after two years of nearly zero contact whatsoever. Ab had considered Bach her best friend out west, but apparently Bach hadn’t felt the same.

“A writing retreat sounds nice. What are you working on?”

Ordinarily, Ab loved talking about writing and her writing process, and she would have jumped at a question like this to start talking shop, especially with Bach, whose own writing and various processes were truly surprising and frequently led to stimulating conversations that could go on for hours. Since moving to Long Island, Ab had felt a little unstimulated, just teaching classes and marking up student writing. But she supposed that was the nature of the beast. She remembered at the beginning of her reading year, her advisor said, “I’m jealous you get to spend this next year reading. You’ll never be smarter than the day you take exams,” which, weirdly enough, did seem to ring true now after the fact. Back during coursework and then all through their reading years, Ab and Bach had spent entire days working together, usually at Ab’s apartment. They made coffee and sometimes ordered food. Bach cooked more than Ab did, so sometimes they went to the store and came back with groceries and Bach made them dinner. They had one of those relationships that felt like a relationship except it wasn’t that kind of relationship. (Ab said this once to one of their mutuals, but that person had just replied, “A friendship?”) “Something new,” Ab said. “It’s too soon to talk about, I think?”

“Okay,” Bach said. They stared out at the water and said, “It’s nice here.”

“Where I live, in the middle of the island, it’s not like this at all. It’s all Wal-Marts and pizza-deli-bagel strip malls or pizza-deli-exotic birds or pizza- deli-vape shops or pizza-deli-nails and then a guns-and-ammo store and about a million dentists.”

“How far away?”

“A little over an hour.” Was this really what they were talking about? Traffic? Driving? The scenery? “Oh my god, I’m in the left lane already,” she snapped at Carmen. To Bach, she said, “Are we really talking about scenery?”

Carmen shouted, “Red light camera ahead,” and just like always it about gave Ab a heart attack. “Shut up,” she said, as she always did, then turned and said, “Not you.”

They rode in silence to Gary’s house. Ab felt a jolt of gratitude toward Carmen and the blinkers and also the wipers and fluid, which she used to wash her windshield—twice—even though she’d just been through a car wash the night before. “Bugs,” she said to Bach by way of explanation, although none was called for.

The night before, when she’d pulled into Middle Country Autospa, there had in fact been a few splattered bugs on her front bumper. She could have wiped them off with a paper towel, but Ab used any excuse to sit under those rainbow- colored suds and to listen to the muted loudness of that giant apparatus’s many moving arms, and to watch its torrents of water pouring and spraying from all directions like the tightest, hardest water hug she could imagine. Harder than any shower. Maybe even harder than heavy rain in a summer thunderstorm.

*

Three beers later, Bach started talking. The gist of the story was that they’d gone on a dating app and matched and hit it off with a filmmaker named Sam, who lived and went to grad school in the city, and after spending most of the past month texting the two of them had finally decided to meet. Bach had summers off, whereas Sam took summer classes while working at the Starbucks in Penn Station—which was, coincidentally, where Ab bought her flat white every Monday this spring when she’d taught on her program’s Manhattan campus, and it was at this point in Bach’s story that Ab became slightly more curious about if the barista named Sam that she knew was the same Sam as Bach’s (had to be, right?). Sam had asked Bach to come to New York, so Bach booked a hotel for the weekend. They’d planned to meet in person for the first time over dinner on Friday night.

“It was a disaster,” Bach said. “I can’t even tell you.”

Ab wanted Bach to describe Sam, so she said, “I mean, what even attracted you in the first place? When you swiped right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Interesting face?”

“I guess.”

“Funny bio?”

“Not really.”

“Good pics?”

“Um,” Bach thought. “Not especially.”

“Just generally into their style?” The Sam that Ab thought she knew was definitely stylish and wore different colored glasses every day and had a bright orange mohawk that kind of flopped over in a way that just worked for the whole look overall. Definitely a New Yorker, whatever that even meant since Ab was also a New Yorker and didn’t look anything like Sam, or Bach for that matter.

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

This line of questioning wasn’t going anywhere. Ab waited for Bach to crack open a fourth beer, and then started pressing again for the juicier details. “Really, though, what was so disastrous? What happened at dinner?”

Bach sighed and said, “So your chair seems like he’s really into wine?”

They were in a sort of lounge by the wine cellar. Gary had told Ab to help herself to anything in the house, including the contents of the wine cellar, which was like a whole room for wine lined entirely from floor to ceiling. The floor in the room where they were was a kind of terra cotta-colored tile and it felt cool under Ab’s bare foot. They each had their own leather couch to themselves, and they were kind of half-lying and half-sitting upright, facing each other but not really looking at each other. Bach had the wine cellar view. Ab had the hot tub view. She had one foot propped up on the arm of her couch, and her other leg was dangling off and bent at the knee and she was halfheartedly trying to self- regulate by focusing on the coolness of the tile under each of her toes individually. Every so often she would move her foot slightly to touch a cooler spot, and then she worked her way from big toe to pinky, and then back again from pinky to big toe. She wasn’t having much success isolating the sensation of tile temperature beneath each individual toe, but maybe she was getting better at it, better than an hour ago anyway. Either way, it was still helping. She felt something—impatient, annoyed, tired, curious, happy? to see her old friend again? but still angry about how Bach never called and texted bare-minimum responses if they even bothered to respond at all. The toes-on-the-tile thing gave Ab something to focus on and kept her from word-vomiting whatever it was that was stirring up in her chest.

“Gary doesn’t drink, actually. He’s married to some executive of global something-and-something, which is how they live like this, but they like hardly ever see each other. Gary took off this weekend so they can be together for their anniversary. Anyway, I think the wine is just here because it’s supposed to be. Like, because there’s a cellar, the cellar is stocked?”

“Damn.”

“I know.”

“We should write a story about this.”

“Gary?”

“No, this whole situation. You agreeing to housesit because of whatever’s going on with you. And my thing with Sam. There’s so much conflict, you know?”

Ab did know, and she agreed. “Okay.” And just like that it started to feel like one of their old working days. “I think my character’s housesitting because she’s not happy at home. It’s depressing. At least when she’s housesitting she doesn’t have to be all alone in her own space. It kind of is a retreat. From, you know, loneliness.”

“Do you feel that way really?”

Ab did, but she didn’t want to tell Bach that. “Sometimes. Not usually. But it’s good for the story and good for our character. What’s the deal with yours?”

Bach took two huge gulps and polished off their beer and made kind of an angry or defeated sound and said, “Sam never showed. I sat there by myself like a fucking idiot where I made our reservations, on a Friday night, and like what the fuck? Am I that repulsive in person? So I just walked around the city all night. And then I went back to my hotel and like, couldn’t sleep? I don’t know. I woke up just in time to check out today. I canceled my stay and went to Penn Station with all my shit and then called you. I honestly didn’t know what else to do.”

“I’m glad you called.” This was true.

Also true: “I’m really sorry that happened to you.”

She wasn’t sure what else to say. “You’re not repulsive.”

“I’m gonna go write,” Bach said, standing suddenly. “You write some of your version and I’ll write some of mine. All you have to do is get these two characters together by the end of the opening scene. Let’s see what they do with each other.”

“Okay.” Ab watched Bach go upstairs. “Hey, wait.”

Bach turned back. “What?”

“Are they friends? Are they close?”

“Definitely,” Bach said. “They go way back. They’ve been through it.”

Bach disappeared and Ab wondered what that meant. They’ve been through what? In her back pocket, her phone buzzed. It was a notification about her grandfather, Abner, after whom she had been named. It was the anniversary of his exact time of birth. She opened her Instagram and scrolled forever to find the last picture they took together. It was just the two of them at a table in Joe’s Crab Shack, bibbed and grinning. Ab felt happy looking at her younger self. That younger self had assumed she’d graduate from high school and work at her grandfather’s hardware store and one day inherit it. But when the time came, he pushed her into college instead and said, “Try a bunch of things. See what sticks. Maybe you’ll meet someone and fall in love and get married while you’re at it.” A totally antiquated and gendered thing to say, but Ab didn’t hold it against him.

While she had Instagram open, and just out of curiosity, she searched for the Penn Station Starbucks, and after trying several different hashtag combinations she found one with actual results and scrolled until she found a picture of Sam, which wasn’t tagged, so she kept scrolling until she finally found one that was. Tapping over to Sam’s account, Ab opened the most recent post—a selfie with another person. She looked at the caption: When yr best friend rescues you bc you got stood up and yr sitting in a restaurant all alone. #ghosted #wtf

Ab put her phone down and sat back. Between Bach and Sam, Ab trusted Sam’s version of the story, which made her feel a little guilty—believing a stranger over her own best friend—but the guilt didn’t make her belief any less true. Did she have it in her to confront Bach or not? They had the entire weekend ahead. She could go along with Bach’s story and see how it played out, where Bach took it over the next couple days, but that seemed manipulative. Not to mention an inefficient use of their time together. So the alternative was what? to just come clean about knowing Sam? about knowing the truth? It could backfire badly if Bach denied it and turned it around to ask why Ab was snooping around and questioning them anyway?

Sometimes writing helped Ab to sort through her thoughts. She opened the Notes app on her phone and started typing: The two of them went way back, having bonded immediately after their advisor sent Atlanta an email during her second semester of coursework after her in-class presentation—“Not good enough. You will not pass exams. You will not get a job.” They were in a bar just off campus, and when Atlanta handed over her phone Boise said, “Screw it,” and ordered two shots of Tito’s, and then two more. By the end of their PhD program, Boise had helped Atlanta get through countless “its” of varying intensities. Now, Boise was the one calling Atlanta in a panic and asking her to drive into the city and pick them up in Manhattan, but after all that had happened in the years since graduation Atlanta wasn’t sure she wanted to.

A terrible opening, but it was a start. The start of what, Ab wasn’t sure.

*

Outside, it was beginning to rain. Inside, at the stove, Bach was preparing the lamb chops per the instructions Gary’s chef had left on the counter. Ab combined the contents of several glass containers into a single serving dish—cubed watermelon, pie-shaped wedges of sliced cucumber, chopped mint, red onion, feta. She was mixing, but delicately so as not to crush anything. She put the salad on the table, next to the bowl of tabouli they’d chosen from several other side dishes on the ready-to-serve shelf in the fridge. Then she sat on a counter stool and swiveled a few times. “How’d writing go?”

Bach gently lifted the edge of a chop to check the sear and said, “Not bad.

You?”

“I worked in our road trip to my grandpa’s funeral. The history of our friendship type of stuff.” Ab paused. She said, “Those smell really good,” and then she said, “I switched it up though so that your character is the one who stands up the Sam character.”

“Oh?” Bach nodded. “Cool.”

Ab waited for further reaction but nothing. “What’d you do with mine?”

“You don’t give Prozac to the cat. You’re taking its temperature rectally every couple hours and collecting its stool samples all weekend. It’s degrading that your chair would ask you to do that and you know it’s because you’re the only junior faculty and you don’t have a choice. You’re so humiliated you’re thinking about accidentally letting the cat outside. But at the same time, it’s like the most intimate relationship you have in your life, so you’re also kind of in love with the cat.”

Ab had no idea how to respond to this. She thought immediately of Lily, then pushed that thought away. She said, “What’s the cat’s name?”

“Cat.” Bach laughed. “Still using city names?”

“Yeah.”

“Albuquerque?”

“Atlanta. And Boise.”

“I like it,” Bach said. “Hungry?”

They moved to the dining area and stood side by side preparing their plates at the center of the table where all the food was. Ab put tabouli on her own plate then scooped some more and raised it in offering. Bach nodded and Ab put it on their plate. Bach, holding the watermelon salad spoon, put one scoop and then another on Ab’s plate. They each grabbed a fork and speared a chop, and then they sat across from each other at the head and foot of the table, which was longer than normal dining tables. Ab felt like they were miles apart. It would be easier to text each other than have a conversation as if they were the Lord and Lady of the manor.

“Thanks for cooking,” Ab said. “I’ve missed this.” “Me too,” Bach said.

“Really?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t I?”

Was that an opening? Should she take it? Just say something, Ab thought. She chewed, feeling her masseter muscles tense and release. “I feel like we’re too far away from each other. I’m going to move closer. Is that weird?”

Bach shrugged like do what you want.

Ab stood, gathered her plate and utensils and napkin and beer and moved down to Bach’s end of the table. She sat not in the corner chair next to Bach, but in the one next to it. She did this so as not to invade personal space, but she couldn’t help but think there was a person-sized space between them, a Sam-sized space. “Listen,” she said.

“Hey, so,” Bach said at the same time.

“Sorry,” Ab said.

“No, go ahead.”

They stared at each other. Outside, lightning flashed. One-one thousand. Two-one thousand. Three-one thou—thunder. From what she could see through the sliding glass doors, the trees were really swaying.

“Why are you here?” Ab said.

Bach took a while to respond, but Ab had her please-talk-to-me face on and it must have worked because suddenly Bach let it all out: “Things are really fucked up right now. Not just Sam but, you know, life. When I was walking around yesterday, I thought about all those hikes we used to take. I had this idea that maybe if I saw you again and we spent some time together I could feel like I used to feel before I moved away and got depressed. I mean, like, really depressed. Not getting out of bed depressed.”

“Really?”

“Sleeping through my classes depressed.”

“Shit.” This was an unexpected development and Ab didn’t know how to respond. Whatever this was, it had lowered the temperature of her anger, and now she felt something else rising in its place. “Thanks for sharing that with me,” she said. “I don’t know, I guess that makes me think that maybe this isn’t the best time for you to be trying to start a new relationship anyway. Like, maybe you have some healing to do.”

“Well, I thought I’d done it—making the choice to stay at my job for a second year, taking some ownership of my situation—but I guess not.” Bach put down their fork and looked at Ab. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Why are you here? I mean, here,” they said, gesturing toward all of Gary’s house. “Or Long Island even, for that matter. Is this the life you wanted?”

Ab had never really considered this question. She had just been so happy to get a job offer, any job offer, she had moved without thinking much of anything other than thank god. When her movers arrived the weekend before classes started, she raced against the clock to unpack everything in time. And since that Monday morning of her first class, she’d been racing, endlessly, trying to catch up on grading and learning how to prep each day for courses she’d never taught before and organizing the speaker series and reading application submissions. The list went on, and even though it was July now, she’d still had to teach an intensive class in May and another in June after the regular semester ended, because her salary didn’t cover her living expenses so she had kept her old summer hustles just like when she was a grad student living on $17,000 a year. She earned substantially more than that now, more than four times that, but after taxes and rent and student loans, the money she had left for utilities, phone, and food was the same as it had always been, which was to say: not enough. Really, though, she hadn’t even had a chance yet to catch her breath, it seemed, until this morning, sitting outside on her patio chairs and thinking about the one year-ness of it all, the occasion inspiring some kind of obligatory introspection. Now that she’d lived it for a year, she supposed Bach was right, this was the question she should be asking herself: Was this the life she wanted?

“Mine isn’t. I lost a decade to grad school for no damn good reason, and I’m mad about it. I can’t stop being mad about it. I’m either depressed or furious, and I can’t tell the difference anymore.”

Neither of them touched their food. Ab was slouched down in her chair and holding her beer between her legs and staring at the tabouli on her plate.

“They train us to be that,” she said, pointing at it with a downward tilt of her chin, “ready to serve.”

“Instant rage,” Bach said. “Instant.”

Ab didn’t feel rage, instant or otherwise. She felt sad. Sad for herself or sad for Bach or maybe sad for both of them in different measures. Sad enough that her throat got tight and her chest seized up, but she wasn’t about to start crying now. Ab didn’t do tears. It wasn’t a healthy reaction to the body’s need for release, but she was who she was, and who she was needed to make sense to herself and the only way to do that was to be consistent. “I think better in water,” she said. “How do you feel about the hot tub?”

*

“It feels wrong to not be, like, grateful. Like you can’t even have actual feelings about it because the whole rest of our cohort didn’t get jobs. So we’re the lucky ones. Except, is this even luck? A 4/5 teaching load plus a January session and also covering two classes for a colleague halfway through the semester because she’s on maternity leave?

“They made you do that?”

“Other shit, too. Like, they took away our annual raises across the entire college. 3% in my contract, but now suddenly that part of all our contracts is

void.”

“How is that legal?”

“Seriously, Ab. I know you like your job more than I do mine, but the question is: Do you really? Are you really housesitting because you want to? Is this really a writing retreat for you? Or are you obligated without even knowing you’re obligated because it’s an unspoken part of the job to drop your life so they can live theirs?”

“I don’t know,” Ab said. She really didn’t. All she’d ever thought was that Gary’s house was amazing and she’d love to housesit just to be in it for a couple days and to be able to walk up to the beach a couple times over the weekend. “Honestly, it felt kind of like a gift, like a favor to me or something.”

“Yeah,” Bach said. “That’s the tabouli talking.” They dipped down under the water and came back up and pushed back their hair from their face and took a breath and sighed. “I’m not trying to make you hate your job the way I hate mine. If you’re happy here, I’m happy for you. Just . . . just think about these things sometimes, will you?”

The jets were on and the water was bubbling and Ab had one of the bigger streams pointed straight at her lumbar area and she was feeling all right. Calm. Peaceful. Less emotional. A little clearer. Curious. “What are you going to do about Sam?”

Bach shook their head. “Don’t know.”

“Why did you book a flight and get a hotel room? What were you hoping for when you did that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Love?”

“No. Maybe. A chance at it, at least.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t go the way it was supposed to.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Why are you pressing this?”

Ab wasn’t entirely sure, but as her words came out and surprised her she realized they were true: “If I can tell you that I honestly have no idea anymore why I’m here in Gary’s house, you can tell me why you reached out to someone, to Sam, from within all of this.” She gestured vaguely, like wax-on, toward Bach’s general person.

“I thought I was ready to make some changes. Put my personal life first for a change. Maybe it would cancel out some of the work stuff. But it doesn’t seem fair to do that to someone, to put all that on them to fix your shit. Wouldn’t have been fair to you, not when you were on the market and needed to be hopeful. Not to anyone else either.”

“I get it,” Ab said. “I forgive you, if that needs saying. But what also needs saying is you have to fucking lean on me from now on. Don’t disappear.”

“Okay.”

Outside, the trees were really swaying. Rain poured down the windows in heavy sheets. It was hard to hear the rain because of the hot tub jets and all the bubbles at their ears, but when lightning flashed it lit up the room and lit up their faces.

“I’m serious,” Ab said.

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Because I miss this. Talking. I need you, too, you know.”

It was true. Now that she was here, wherever here was and whatever it might mean, she needed her friend. Bach was the only one who really understood the sacrifices she had made over the years. Bach had made those sacrifices, too. For both of them, it had meant no personal lives. It meant not dragging partners all over the country with them every time they moved to a new school. It meant not letting partners drag them across the country, away from their own opportunities, because if you were the kind of person who wanted a partner you had to also be the kind of person willing to make compromises for them.

For both Bach and Ab, their entire lives since undergrad had revolved around their fantasies of one day becoming college professors and being able to live the lives they assumed their professors lived. It had taken them years, a decade-and-a-half for Bach after undergrad, two full decades for Ab, and, between them, a grand total of six graduate degrees, four book publications, 37 pages of CV, and over $300,000 in student loan debt—just to have a chance at being competitive enough to get interviews. The years they dedicated to their shared pursuit had been grueling. Humiliating, at times. But the two of them, she’d thought, she and Bach, they had made it, had met their goals of landing on the tenure track, which was all they’d ever wanted. But Bach was right. What came next, for either of them?

A year ago, Ab would’ve stated, clearly and intentionally, the only answer that made sense if someone had asked her: “Tenure.” Now, she wasn’t so sure.

She didn’t know what she thought. But maybe that was okay, maybe it was okay to be confused sometimes and to not have all the answers all the time.

“You’re right,” Ab said. “There has to be more to life than this.”

“Right?”

Just then, the power went out. “There has to be,” Ab said, as the house went dark and the hot tub whined down. Lightning flashed somewhere nearby. The cat jumped up from his window seat and ran out of the room. Ab didn’t even know he’d been in there with them.

In the distance, a tree cracked and swooshed as it fell.

Bach started laughing and said, “We need to get the fuck out of this thing,” and hopped up and out and said, “Now, Ab.”

She groped her way to the edge of the tub and climbed out and by then Bach had found their phone and turned on the flashlight. Ab wrapped herself in her towel and gestured to Bach to help her snap the hot tub’s lid back in place, and then they made their way upstairs to the table, still messy with their dinner dishes, and where Ab picked up her own phone and turned on her flashlight too.

“Change clothes and meet back here for beers?”

“Sure,” Ab said, and walked off to her room, where she stood without thinking for a moment and then she went and opened the French doors and stepped out into the stinging rain and felt the wind on her cold skin, and as she held her face up to the sky, just for a moment, she let herself cry. Then she was really crying. She went back inside and shut the doors and sat on the floor and put her face in her hands and let it out. Eventually, Bach showed up with two beers and sat next to her. She cried as Bach bumped shoulders with her and drank both beers.