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high tolerance for irritation—this was a thing Darcy knew. As the Stevie Winwood song said, you had to rol widdit, baby.

She rol ed with it. So did he.

In 2004, Donnie went off to col ege in Pennsylvania. In 2006, Petra went to Colby, just up the road in Watervil e. By then, Darcy Madsen Anderson was forty-six years old. Bob was forty-nine, and stil

doing Cub Scouts with Stan Morin, a construction contractor who lived half a mile down the road. She thought her balding husband looked rather amusing in the khaki shorts and long brown socks he wore

for the monthly Wildlife Hikes, but never said so. His bald spot had become wel entrenched; his glasses had become bifocals; his weight had spun up from one-eighty into the two-twenty range. He had

become a partner in the accounting firm—Benson and Bacon was now Benson, Bacon & Anderson. They had traded the starter home in Pownal for a more expensive one in Yarmouth. Her breasts,

formerly smal and firm and high (her best feature, she’d always thought; she’d never wanted to look like a Hooters waitress) were now larger, not so firm, and of course they dropped down when she took off her bra at night—what else could you expect when you were closing in on the half-century mark?—but every so often Bob would stil come up behind her and cup them. Every so often there was the

pleasant interlude in the upstairs bedroom overlooking their peaceful two-acre patch of land, and if he was a little quick on the draw and often left her unsatisfied, often was not always, and the satisfaction of holding him afterward, feeling his warm man’s body as he drowsed away next to her… that satisfaction never failed. It was, she supposed, the satisfaction of knowing they were stil together when so

many others were not; the satisfaction of knowing that as they approached their Silver Anniversary, the course was stil steady as she goes.

In 2009, twenty-five years down the road from their I-do’s in a smal Baptist church that no longer existed (there was now a parking lot where it had stood), Donnie and Petra threw them a surprise

party at The Birches on Castle View. There were over fifty guests, champagne (the good stuff), steak tips, a four-tier cake. The honorees danced to Kenny Loggins’s “Footloose,” just as they had at their wedding. The guests applauded Bob’s breakaway move, one she had forgotten until she saw it again, and its stil -airy execution gave her a pang. Wel it should have; he had grown a paunch to go with the embarrassing bald spot (embarrassing to him, at least), but he was stil extremely light on his feet for an accountant.

But al of that was just history, the stuff of obituaries, and they were stil too young to be thinking of those. It ignored the minutiae of marriage, and such ordinary mysteries, she believed ( firmly believed), were the stuff that validated the partnership. The time she had eaten bad shrimp and vomited al night long, sitting on the edge of the bed with her sweaty hair clinging to the nape of her neck and tears rol ing down her flushed cheeks and Bob sitting beside her, patiently holding the basin and then taking it to the bathroom, where he emptied and rinsed it after each ejection—so the smel of it

wouldn’t make her even sicker, he said. He had been warming up the car to take her to the Emergency Room at six the next morning when the horrible nausea had final y begun to abate. He had cal ed in

sick at B, B & A; he’d also canceled a trip to White River so he could sit with her in case the sickness came back.

That kind of thing worked both ways; one year’s sauce for the goose was next year’s sauce for the gander. She had sat with him in the waiting room at St. Stephen’s—back in ’94 or ’95, this had been

—waiting for the biopsy results after he had discovered (in the shower) a suspicious lump in his left armpit. The biopsy had been negative, the diagnosis an infected lymph node. The lump had lingered for another month or so, then went away on its own.

The sight of a crossword book on his knees glimpsed through the half-open bathroom door as he sat on the commode. The smel of cologne on his cheeks, which meant that the Suburban would be

gone from the driveway for a day or two and his side of the bed would be empty for a night or two because he had to straighten out someone’s accounting in New Hampshire or Vermont (B, B & A now