Chapter 10: Unknown Number

On my first day as a dental receptionist in Chicago, a man in the waiting room asked if my wedding ring was a family heirloom.

I looked down.

I wasn't wearing a ring.

"It's at home," I said. "My husband's fixing the setting."

By five o'clock three patients had asked about the husband, and I'd invented him an entire trade, a union, and a bad knee.

I rode the bus up Milwaukee Avenue with my feet aching and a grin I couldn't get off my face.

I hadn't slept in a day and a half.

I had never felt more awake.

Randy was already in the kitchen when I got home, with his sleeves pushed to the elbow and a cast-iron pan on the hot plate.

"How was the husband?" he asked.

"Bad knee. Union man. Drives a truck."

"I like him."

"You should. He's you."

He turned from the stove and looked at me.

I dropped my bag on the floor and went right to him, and he set down the spatula and met me halfway.

I kissed him in the middle of the kitchen with my coat still on.

It was long and wet and tasted like onions and the end of a day.

When I pulled back, both of the graduate students were pointedly examining the ceiling.

"We've been spotted," I said.

"Let them look."

"Hungry?"

"For you or for dinner?"

"Choose carefully."

He grinned, slow and a little dangerous, and went back to his pan.

We ate on the living room floor, five of us, off mismatched plates.

The nurse ate her breakfast at six o'clock at night in her scrubs.

Afterward I washed, and Randy dried, and his hip leaned against mine at the sink.