I didn’t sleep.
I lay there in the dark and thought about our whole life.
I thought about the first time I saw Mark. I was twenty-three, working the counter at my uncle’s hardware store. He came in covered in drywall dust looking for a specific kind of hinge, and he didn’t know the name of it, so he drew it for me on the back of a receipt. It was a terrible drawing. I laughed out loud.
“Hey,” he said, pretending to be offended. “I’m a builder, not an artist.”
“Clearly,” I said.
He came back the next day for more hinges he didn’t need. And the next day. And the next. On the fourth day, he finally asked me out.
Our first date was at a pizza place with sticky tables. Our second date was a drive up north to Loon Lake, because he’d grown up going there with his grandfather and he wanted to show me the water at sunset.
