Her house is dark but warm. The gas fireplace simmers in the living room, wheezing heat into the foyer and kitchen. Claire slowly sheds layers, starting with her scarf. She sits on the stairs and unties her shoes. Neatly, she places them beneath her jacket in the front hall closet. David’s dress shoes, a pair of brown loafers that are cracked with overuse, are thrown haphazardly about the foyer, and she picks them up, also setting them orderly next to her pair.

A soft, muffled rumbling comes up through the floor boards. She moves through the living room, bending to turn off the fire. There is a slight seizure in her lower back; the contortions on the couch will haunt her for the next few days.

In their laundry room, David has a massive piece of plywood set up. On top of it, he has constructed an intricate set of miniature train tracks. He has begun to fill it in with fake trees and houses, has built numerous hills for the trains to ascend, and has even built a tunnel. Technically, it is a joint project with his six year old grandson. But it has clearly become a project of his own volition. There are nights she will come home from work, and find him on his knees in the laundry room, paint all over his clothes, straightening a stretch of track, or building a bridge over a paper mache canyon.

She thinks again of Philadelphia, and coming home to find Erin stretched on the floor, or in a bath reading some mystery novel. She is nostalgic in a kind of forward sense, as if she can feel herself missing toy train sets in the future. There is no logical reason she might miss them. Then, there is little reason to miss most things.

Once more, she thinks of being a young girl. One night, about a year after her mother died, she woke up suddenly in bed, her sister quiet beside her. It was nearly three, and she crept out of bed into the hallway. She intended to get a glass of water, but at the end of the hall, she heard the deep, sorrowful breathing of her father reverberating through the cold, drafty house. She slunk down the hallway, and cracked the door to the guest bedroom, where her father had begun sleeping when her mother fell ill.

After her mother’s death, her father had moved quickly to rid the house of any unnecessary reminders of his wife. They bought new dinnerware and new curtains, and any jewelry she had saved for her daughters was put away, hidden from sight. He had tried his best to cleanse the house and make it new.

When Claire opened the bedroom door, her father shifted and mumbled but did
not wake up. She stood in the doorway, and was about to wake him when her eyes began to adjust to the dark. She noticed that he was not wearing his usual pajamas, and instead he was sleeping in an old nightgown of her mother’s, a faded white one with purple flowers. She quickly ran back to her room, embarrassed for some reason, though for the next few years she would check on her father whenever she woke up in the middle of the night. Every time, despite wearing his pajamas when tucking her and her sister in, he would be sleeping in one of his dead wife’s old nightgowns.

Now, she smiles strangely at the memory. For many years she felt ashamed by it, but lately the thought of it makes her miss her father. Try as she might, she misses far more than she should these days. She knows Philadelphia will not change that, though it may alter the way she longs for some things.

She walks back into the den, where David is still asleep, his feet bare, and hairy, and dangling off the end of the recliner. She sits down on the arm, putting her hand on his thigh. He opens his eyes, groggily, and his breath smells like gin and old cheese. She kisses him despite this.

“Who won?” she asks.

“What?”

“Football. Did the Eagles win?”

“Oh,” he says, beginning to catch his bearings. “No. Of course not.”

She smiles, grateful to not care about football.

“That’s too bad,” she says.

“Well, it’s only football. Life goes on,” he says dreamily, still half asleep. She kisses him again, for longer this time. She grabs hold of his shirt, pulling him towards her before letting go and sending both of them tottering backwards on the chair. She lets out a scream and he flails about aimlessly. He succeeds in grabbing her as they fall backwards with the recliner. They hit the carpeting relatively softly. She lands on top of his stomach, and he is suddenly very awake.

He looks up at her, and for a moment looks infantile in his surprise. She laughs, and this brings him back, and with a loud clearing of his throat, he, too, begins to laugh. She presses her forehead into his bloated stomach, and lifts his shirt to kiss it. He squirms away as she tickles him. She pins him without much of a fight, holding his wrists to the ground. They are both out of breath. Incredibly, wondrously, her body does not yet permanently ache from her day. The spasm upstairs has been pushed off. She is on top of him and feels remarkably young, like she could fuck him all night.

He slowly smiles, and it takes her a moment to realize what is going on. Then, she feels him hard beneath the sweat pants and lets out a celebratory laugh.

“Hey, hey,” he says. “There it is!”

She wails in laughter. Quickly, she rips his sweats off. She stops to kiss him again, running her hand up his shirt and through the brittle hair of his chest. He tries to stand up, but she pushes him back down.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she says.

He grins like a teenager as she shimmies out of her spandex. She can feel the rippled skin of her thighs, but she is still drunk enough to not be self conscious. He is as old as she, and has assured her that in some weird way, he finds her varicosity sexy. His sexual whims have grown odder with his age, but this is not such a bad thing. Once more, she leans forward, her knees already starting to sting. She ignores them, and kisses him, knowing that although he tastes like gin and cheese, she must taste like pizza and wine. Perhaps, even, a little like Erin, though how could he know what she tastes like?

She sits back, and feels for him. He is still hard, and she guides him into her with her hand. He closes his eyes, his neck muscles tensing, and raises his head. She throws herself back, letting her weight fall onto him. She moves quickly at first, but her knees hurt more and more, and then she feels it in her hips, too. She is not as young as she felt five minutes before. Exhausted, she slows, and moves forward, her chest pressing down against him. He kisses her neck, his face raw against her skin.

“You need to shave,” she says quietly. He laughs, and ignores her. He moves his hands up her thighs, which are sinewy and loose with age. They are both tired. She is wearing out, and she worries she is beginning to dry. She is starting to hurt, but he finishes shortly, his whole body tightening and clenching, and then unspooling. He exhales deeply, and she lets her arms buckle so that she fears she might crush him with her collapse. His heart is going like mad, and she is sweating through his shirt.

“Ooahh,” he moans. “Fuck I feel old.”

She smiles away from him. She can‘t help herself. “You fuck like you’re old.”

He laughs and starts to throw her off him, which causes her to wail once more. He stops himself, and instead sets her gently down on her back. For a few minutes, they lie next to one another on the floor, their pants around their feet. He is still panting, but the pulsing of his body is slowing. She closes her eyes. Her breath evens out. She feels the air growing cold over her skin, the sweat beginning to stick in a fine, cool film over her body. Still, she does not move and neither does he. She drifts into a half sleep, her consciousness beginning to slip, but then she wakes up for a moment as David takes her hand.

“Mm,” she whimpers, but he does not respond. She means to squeeze his hand, but is not sure if she actually does so, or if she only imagines it.

~

She wakes up, disoriented, with the lamp still on. For a few seconds, she is not sure where she is. Her left side is imbalanced by the lack of weight next to it. She turns, finally, to her right, and David is still sleeping beside her. He breathes heavily, each inhale quivering loudly as if perturbed by a blockage deep in his lungs. She is profoundly cold, her body shivering and still naked from the waist down. She sits stiffly up and pulls her pants back on. Her arms are tender and weak with exhaustion. Her legs ache, too, and she is not sure if it is from the walk, or from David. Likely, it is from both.

She does not wake David, but instead turns off the lamp and walks upstairs to the kitchen. The back door has blown open with the wind. It undulates and creaks with each gust. Despite the cold, she steps outside. The first snow has already melted. Her yard is dark and barren. She cannot see its boundaries in the night. Her land could extend to the far reaches of the globe, if she did not know better. She would not mind such a vast swath of life. Instead, hers goes about forty paces beyond where she is standing, to a line of juniper trees under which a black lab and a golden retriever are buried. Luke, when he was only four, made a small wooden gravestone for their first dog, Cocoa. The picture of her he painted on it faded long ago, but the almost hidden grave marker is still standing, warped with snow and wind and time. Someday, it, too, will be gone.

The cold is sinister in its precision, and it is not long before she heads inside. She closes the door tightly behind her. Like most nights, she does not lock it. The moaning, wailing wind makes the house sound old, as if it has many voices stirring in its crevices. But when the wind quiets and dies, the house grows still with night. There is nothing left to hear.