Prologue

The bathroom smells like a hotel. You love the way hotel beds are made, with the sheets stretched taut across your skin in restraint. The best sheets in the world line beds of a Super8 motel in Moab, Utah. Their bathrooms smell just like this. Like travel and anonymity. You sleep there like under a spell. 

Their Park Slope brownstone is a whirlwind of three years' life. We don't understand it yet, I think, she says, but I think we are ready. You can't dwell on what it means to leave, what it is to tear up the trembling roots of a home, but once the week is over, the space that was theirs will be whitewashed, and the pavement won't remember their soles against its cheek. You carry their vacuum cleaner down 4th avenue. A late June sun runs mild and sweet down the wide street, and the view from the F train at Smith and 9th is the most bittersweet song you know. I cried today over many things. 

But I think it will be alright.