We were young then, and also quite poor. That town was so small, and we kept moving from apartment to apartment because of misunderstandings so complicated I can't remember any of them now. I'd load our books into a cardboard box, use my shirts to wrap up the breakable things.

Once, we had to leave an apartment where we'd spent only one night. It was a bad situation. We had just mopped the bathroom, scrubbed the kitchen counters. We felt defeated, knowing we'd have to repeat that labor in some new place. But there was no point in lamenting it.

We lived next on the second floor of a creaky house: white paint, warped glass, a turret. A rickety back staircase led inside, and we never locked the door. It was that kind of town. There was furniture: whoever had just left hadn't wanted to carry it down those steps.

We had a car your mother's husband had given us but walked almost everywhere because we could. We stole food from the restaurant where we worked but felt this was not amoral. We took modest things—bread, cheese, a tomato, four slices of bacon. We had small and imperfect lives.

I would go in early, make coffee and turn on the radio, bake blueberry muffins and chocolate chip scones. You prepared sandwiches and made cappuccinos and counted the money in the register at the day's end. Technically, you were my boss, and at work and home I deferred to you.

*

There were often late afternoon thunderstorms. There was never anything to watch on the television. We would sit at the top of the staircase and look at the backyard. You'd smoke Benson and Hedges and tell me long stories, and sometimes there were deer, timid and walleyed, on the lawn.

The funny thing is we barely knew one another. We didn't know anyone else in town either. People assumed we were very close because we were always together. Maybe we were. It's hard to answer now. The time that we lived like this was like a dream we both had.

One Sunday you asked if we had bananas and we did not and your shoulders slumped. "Like two times a year I feel like eating a banana and we don't even have any," you said. "Maybe I should just go back home. I don't know what we're accomplishing here. "

*

It was a college town and so it was very quiet in the summer. Many evenings, you could lock up early. We'd go for a walk, though the most scenic place to walk was a golf course just past our house where no one ever seemed to be playing golf.

There was a pond and we couldn't decide if it was part of the golf course or a natural feature. You took off your shoes, rolled up your pants and stepped into it, then sunk into mud to your waist, laughing and shrieking. You walked home barefoot, carrying your sneakers.

*

We moved to a little house, because our apartment was promised to some students. We took a trunk that had come with the place; we liked using it for a coffee table. There was an anteroom to the bathroom, for some reason, and you taped up pictures torn from magazines.

You wanted to have Thanksgiving but the few people we knew were leaving town for that holiday. We threw a dinner party instead. Amanda, who worked at the library, came, and so did our boss and his wife. They brought plum wine, from Japan, and I pretended to like it.

There was a snowstorm. You said snow made more sense on the weekends. "The kids want to get out of school. But when the snow doesn't interfere, it seems more beautiful." It was windy and impossible to light your cigarette. We walked to work together though our shifts were different.

The old car your mother's husband had given us was unreliable in the ice. We couldn't drive to the supermarket so went to the small grocery in town. We snuck into the college gym to use the pool. There was a sauna. We sat in silence, sweating, dizzy, red faced.

In April, the landlord said we'd have to move out in June. You tore down the pictures you'd taped to the wall and there were tears in your eyes but you didn't say anything. I made us both a gin and tonic. "Maybe I should have a baby," you said.

*

On a whim, you bought tickets to the circus. We drove into the city. The show was distressing. The animals seemed oppressed and several of the performers had strange, menacing expressions under all that makeup. The arena smelled bad, of animals and popcorn. We ate cotton candy and held hands.

Your mother died. I cradled your bare feet in my lap and you cried then stared into space. You had a complicated relationship. We'd gone to visit, and I liked her, which annoyed you. "She doesn't like you," you told me. I didn't know if you were making that up.

You drove to see them. You made excuses about your sister, and never came back. I packed the things you left behind into the trunk we'd taken from our old apartment. I moved it to my new apartment. A year later, I left the packed trunk at the Salvation Army.

*

More than a decade later, we ran into one another at a bookshop in Minneapolis. We were both tourists, both far from our homes. You introduced me to your red-haired husband. "We have to go outside and catch up," you told him. You held my wrist like I might escape.

We stood under the awning. "Looking at your face makes me remember how it feels to smoke a cigarette," you said, but you had quit. I asked if you remembered the deer, the muddy pond, the plum wine. The curious look on your face told me that you did not.


.

Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels THAT KIND OF MOTHER and RICH AND PRETTY. His next book will be out in 2021.

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