Someone with more money might have gutted her kitchen. But for Jess the old stuff still bore up under pressure, even with the bills and keys splashing on the counter; the spray of coffee grounds Daniel left around the coffeemaker each morning; the sink under whose unyielding flow of scalding water Jess dissolved the remains of hardened oatmeal, burned-on rice, dried God-knew-what crusting the soft inside of Sam’s lunchbox. 

In November Daniel had been sitting at the kitchen table, working on his revise and resubmit for the Journal of Early Modern Studies—he was up for tenure in the spring—when he said, “It’s kind of nice we can still do this, isn’t it?”

Jess turned off the water. “Can still do what?”

“Keep each other company. Chip away at our work.”

He was smiling at her, expecting gratitude, thinking he had made a profound statement about how they’d persevered over a dozen years of marriage, three cross-country moves, a baby who was now a walking, talking third grader. She dumped a quarter-cup of baking soda into the center of the cast-iron skillet and scrubbed. “I’m definitely chipping away at this thing,” she said. The upstairs floor creaked; Sam was awake past lights out; and Daniel was back to his laptop. Jess went to check on Sam, leaving the skillet on the counter, baking soda paste sitting thickly over scabs of burnt sauce and pan drippings.

#

When Jess met Daniel, she was a graphic designer for a small creative agency in Minneapolis. With each move they made for Daniel’s academic career—Minnesota to Texas, Texas to Illinois, Illinois to Washington—she’d strayed from her own. Now she was a project manager in the design department of a company that made Internet-enabled home products, like thermostats and cameras. Vested with the power to create Gantt charts and convene daily standups, Jess shepherded the designers’ prototypes out the door and into production. 

Jess ate lunch with the only other woman in the office, a researcher named Aisha. When she mentioned Daniel’s comment, Aisha said, “My cousin’s husband was like that. So she just stopped doing dishes.”

“That’s an idea,” Jess said.

But hadn’t she learned this lesson before? When Sam was in kindergarten and she’d planned that Saturday at the pool: the wading area for him, a lazy afternoon melting into plastic striped pool chairs for her. Only that morning he threw a tantrum over brushing his teeth. Jess had no idea why he’d chosen that day to wage war on dentistry, but she lost her patience, and took away the pool trip. “You can think about your behavior while you’re sitting at home,” she said. But Sam seemed happy enough to sit at home and color. Jess, meanwhile, watched ten minutes of The Office before she noticed the dust on the TV stand and then felt compelled to dust the entire house.

“My one lazy day,” she’d complained to her mom later, phone shoved between neck and shoulder as she doused the counters in 409 and wiped, “and he throws a fit over tooth brushing. I thought the weird hygiene phase was middle school?” 

Jess heard the trill of her mother’s washing machine, the wrench and slam of the front-loader opening and closing. Helen had starched and pressed her husband’s lab coats for thirty-five years running. She’d only given up ironing the bedsheets the previous year.

“Well, Jess,” she said, “you have to make sure you’re not actually punishing yourself instead of them.”

In the office with Aisha, Jess crunched on her baby carrots. If she simply gave up washing bowls and spoons and stockpots, they would not get cleaned until Daniel got tenure, probably not until he’d advanced to full professor and published his third academic monograph, and Jess would die a little every time she saw the gluey remains of oatmeal left in his breakfast bowl.

“Did the dish strike work?” she asked.

“Hm? Oh, my cousin. Yeah, they got divorced.” 

The privilege of the unmarried, Jess thought, to mention divorce with such nonchalance. The guidance counselor at Sam’s school held a special after-school support group for kids with divorced parents. Jess did not want to imagine Sam sitting criss-cross applesauce on the kelly-green carpet in Miss Deering’s windowless office, rating his feelings on a 5-point scale composed of emojis.

Into Jess’s silence, Aisha recounted her last meeting, when she shared the results of a focus group to their boss. “He blew up at me,” she said. “He’d prefer not to compromise the integrity of their designs to bend to the, quote, focus grouped inanity of ten customers who evidently have never used an app before. Unquote.”

“They’re mad your report wasn’t just a gold star congratulating them on a product well designed,” Jess said. She’d been at the company long enough to know how it worked. The men here had all been working together for a decade, they had their vision, they only accepted evidence that supported it, it was useless to get mad. 

#

The week before Thanksgiving, the chair of Daniel’s department, Dr. Hathaway, threw a book launch party for two recently tenured faculty. “A Wednesday?” Daniel grumbled. “Before a holiday? Am I the only one with midterms to grade?” But Jess knew he wanted the luck of the newly tenured to rub off on him, so to the party they went. 

Dr. Hathaway and his wife, also a professor, owned a Craftsman house with built-in bookshelves and updated fixtures. In the kitchen Jess pyramided sweaty cheese cubes onto her plate while half-listening to Daniel’s conversation about the department’s declining enrollments. “We’re losing everything to the business school,” one woman lamented. “And the dean is just like, cozying up to them, I guess because the point of our august institution is to create”—here she shifted her grasp on her wine glass so she could make air quotes—“ ‘brand strategists’ and ‘health care administrators’ and ‘digital project managers.’ Like, where is the intellectual value?” 

Jess froze, cheese cube midway to her mouth. She set the cheese cube back on the plate, and the plate on the nearest end table, and waited for Daniel to say, well, Jess studied design and is now a project manager, and actually it’s a hard job, kind of under-appreciated. She waited for him to say this, so she could step forward, gracious and forgiving: oh no, Corinne, I understood what you meant. But it’s true, it’s hard! We could use some creative English majors! But Daniel was nodding, saying something about how they needed to better showcase the value of literary criticism. Turned away from her, he didn’t notice when Jess unlatched the sliding patio door behind them, when she stepped outside to wait out the party in the November chill. 

On the way home—Jess drove—she said to Daniel, “The world doesn’t need more brand strategists and digital project managers? Really?”

“Corinne never means half of what she says.”

“Does she know I happen to be a project manager?”

“I don’t think she was thinking of you at all.”

Jess flushed. She imagined herself as a bug Corinne absently flicked from her arm. “You could have, I don’t know, said something.” 

“And so could have you,” Daniel said evenly. “Besides, I didn’t want to get into a thing with Corinne, I was trying to talk to Hathaway.”

Hathaway was Daniel’s trump card. For Hathaway, as the department chair, was the linchpin of Daniel’s professional future. In the spring, he would send Daniel’s tenure file—that record of all Daniel’s achievements, going back to graduate school—around to other scholars to review. Then he would submit a report recommending, or not recommending, that Daniel receive tenure. And then, Daniel promised, life would truly begin: vacations, more trips to Jess’s family, redoing the kitchen, replacing the rotting deck. “Okay,” Jess said, capitulating, “and did you?”

Daniel was cagey. “Just about next semester’s teaching assignments. And the article, a bit. Do you have cash to pay the sitter or should we stop at that ATM?”

#

The problem was, Daniel explained the next night, Hathaway had insinuated that Daniel’s tenure case might be bolstered by an acceptance from the Journal of Early Modern Studies. “If,” Daniel qualified, “I resubmit my article by December. Any later, and the journal won’t have a decision by May when my file goes out.” But he couldn’t resubmit until he first worked out a few niggling “conceptual nuances.” And so Daniel had reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that he should not go with her and Sam to Thanksgiving at his sister’s, so he could knock out those changes and submit the damn thing and they could all be done.

Jess was packing Sam’s lunch for the next day. When she finished wrapping his sandwich in wax paper, smoothing each fold with a fingernail, she said, very slowly, “You want me and Sam to drive six hours to bumfuck Oregon while you stay here and work?”

Daniel’s shoulders were rounded over his laptop. He had a blue-light filter installed, so the electronic glow that spilled onto his face was warm and orange. 

“Oh, I’ll get takeout,” he assured her. “There’re places open.”

Jess made a conscious choice to ignore this comment. “And—and these conceptual nuances? What are they?”

He closed the laptop, one hand still molded to the curve of his external mouse. There was an important theorist whose work he needed to engage on a deeper level. Right now he was citing the theorist, referencing their work, but not utilizing it in the way the reviewers suggested. 

“What I mean is,” Jess clarified, “can you tackle that from Molly’s house?”

“Her kids aren’t exactly quiet.” 

“We drive Wednesday, we come home Saturday. That’s it. What is that, four days?”

He countered, “What if we just didn’t go? Have Thanksgiving here?”

“And Sam doesn’t get to see his cousins?” 

“We’ll go for Christmas.”

“Missing the one holiday we spend with my family.”

She glanced out the kitchen window, the pine trees barely visible against the darkness. When they’d moved to Washington, Daniel gushed about being just one state away from his family, how important it was for Sam to have a relationship with his Oregon cousins. They left unspoken the fact that Jess’s family was all in Minnesota. But Jess still wanted Sam to know her home, and to love it, beyond two visits a year and the Target greeting cards Jess’s parents sent him each month.

“I have it all in my head,” Daniel pleaded. “What I need to do to fix it. I just need time to get it on the page.”

Sam would be disappointed not to see his cousins, to miss the big turkey roast Molly’s husband always made. Jess didn’t know how she could do anything like that roast here. It was too late to order a fresh turkey. Maybe frozen. There were rules about how early you had to defrost them. 

“I get that,” Jess said, “but … do you really think it’ll make a difference?”

If she’d stopped there, maybe she could have salvaged things.

Instead she added, “This one article?”

Daniel kept moving the mouse wheel, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling into nothing. “I guess, stupidly enough, I do,” he said, and then he flipped the laptop back open and did not speak to her the rest of the night. In bed, he slept facing the wall. Jess listened to the metronome of his breath for hours until she flung the covers aside and decided to do something productive.

At four-thirty the house retained the silent, withdrawn quality of midnight. Jess herself felt not quite real, the boundary between subjective imagination and her embodied reality suddenly porous. From the refrigerator she threw out wilted salad greens and moldy cheese; in a corner of the pantry she found old marshmallows, stiff and stuck together, and chucked them into her garbage bag. 

She kept as few lights on as possible, which was why, on the way to the garage, she tripped over an errant cord. Something heavy thudded against the floor. Her foot had unceremoniously yanked Daniel’s laptop charger from the outlet, sent the attached, still-open computer skidding to a precarious position at the end of the kitchen table. 

After she righted the laptop, Jess swiped a thumb across its trackpad, curious. The screen jolted to life. His desktop background was a pixelated image of a medieval manuscript; his computer password, Jess knew, an obscure reference to one of his favorite books, plus Sam’s birthday. She typed the letters with one finger and the medieval manuscript gave way to a Word document stuffed with highlighted paragraphs and fat blocks of footnotes. 

At first the density of words intimidated Jess, who was always a slow reader—but why did that matter? She wanted to know what made Daniel’s work so important. What took him all these words to say. She scrolled to the beginning of his article. Increased the zoom to 150%. Began to read. The sentences bent themselves to the convoluted syntax of literary criticism, twisted around the names of theorists Jess knew from the spines of Daniel’s books. 

So he preferred to get himself takeout and spend a weekend alone with his conceptual nuances and his theorists. Well, Jess would let him. She would get two plane tickets to Minnesota. Expensive, but she had a small emergency fund of her own to use. Her father had talked about teaching Sam to birdwatch. Sam would like that. 

And then she would give Daniel something to work on while they were gone. The idea came to her quickly, too quickly, and in the still-black morning there was nothing to stop the transition from impulse to action. She dragged the cursor over a block of paragraphs in the middle of the document, painting them bright blue. With a soft tap of a flat key, they all blinked away. The tendons in her fingers vibrated with something that might have been satisfaction. 

#

When the sun rose, Jess and Daniel stepped around and past each other, focusing mostly on Sam: did he have his backpack, his lunch? 

“I need my permission slip signed,” Sam said, extracting a crumpled paper from his Jansport.

“Sure,” Daniel said, “I’ll give you my John Hancock. Where’s the field—”

“Your what?” Sam said, as Jess dully interjected, “The science museum.”

To Sam, ignoring Jess, Daniel explained, “John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence with a great big flourish. Like … this. See? Now you’re set.”

Jess’s fingernails pressed crescents into her palm. If he found the missing paragraphs today—if he knew it was her? If in the cold light she were forced to admit to his hunched shoulders and pallid skin, that she, yes, she, destroyed his work? But he didn’t use Track Changes. The thought of Jess having anything to do with his computer was absurd. And Jess would be in Minnesota in a matter of days. Cooking with her mother, slicing stale bread into stuffing cubes, rolling out pie crust with flour-coated fingers. Over the rhythms of the rolling pin, Jess could tell Helen everything she couldn’t over the phone.

When she got to the office, she called Helen from the car, blurting out, “I want to come home for Thanksgiving,” instead of hello. “Me and Sam. It’s last minute but Daniel wants to stay home and work on this article and for me to drive to Oregon—”

Helen drew in a breath. Her sign for bad news. “Next week is our cruise in Portugal.”

Jess attempted to parse each word individually, as if that would help her gain purchase on their meaning. Next week. Cruise. Portugal. “But you were going after the holiday.”

“No, we changed. On Thanksgiving the prices are so much cheaper.”

“The whole week?”

“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Why, what’s happened?”

“Nothing.” Jess stared out at the concrete sea of the parking lot. “I want you and Dad to do things like that. Go on cruises. Travel. Besides”—she knew Helen was about to speak, so she plowed on anyways—“Daniel and I had talked about Portugal, for after tenure, so you have to go. So you can give us tips.” 

After they hung up, Jess waited in the car. Her team’s stand-up was starting in four minutes. She bobbed her knee up and down, hitting the steering wheel with her kneecap. Hot air blasted from the vents and made her eyes sting. She was a fool. You couldn’t get to forty-three years of marriage, like her parents had, if you were dumb enough to think that deleting paragraphs meant anything—was anything, other than childish, unbecoming. And good God, it was part of his tenure file.

When she called Daniel, he picked up immediately. “Sam okay?”

“I was thinking about Thanksgiving. We don’t have to go. We’ll do it here and you can work on your article. I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Clearly he hadn’t expected a Thanksgiving conversation. “That’d be great if we can do that.”

“It’s a little late to do anything special, we’re behind on groceries,” Jess went on. “I don’t know, I could see what Rosauers has? It’ll be a zoo, though.”

For a minute Jess hoped Daniel might rescue her from the work she was creating for herself. But he cleared his throat and said, “Sorry, I’m distracted. It’s been a morning. Whatever you come up with.” 

“Something with your article?” Jess said.

“Three students cheating on their midterms.” He went on to describe a scheme so elaborate that you wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to just study. Jess let him talk. He didn’t mention the missing paragraphs; in fact, he didn’t mention the article at all. A few days later, in passing, he complained about having to fix some strange Word glitch. 

And because Daniel didn’t say anything more about it, not that day or week, not after he submitted the article, never acting any differently towards Jess, she began to wonder if she’d touched his work at all. In December, when work was slow and Jess and Aisha took frigid walks in the parking lot, Jess told her, “So last month I had this dream. I went onto Daniel’s computer and deleted a quarter of the manuscript he’d been writing. Isn’t that wild?” And she could almost leave it at that. 

But in a couple years she will pick Sam up from his after-school club, the one for kids with divorced parents, and when he opens the car door, he will slide his backpack across the cloth of the backseat, and Jess will twist around to ask him how it went. He will say, it was fine, in a new voice Jess hasn’t heard, and there will be nothing she can say or do—or take away or delete—to change what it is.