“Thanks. It sucked,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “So what are these gifts you come bearing?”
“Oh!” He brightened, then pulled a small, wrapped object from his pocket. I tore off the brown paper and held up a wooden piece shaped like a tall pizza wedge. He reached over to press the area that would be the natural first bite. The object unspooled, transforming into a circle right in my hand.
“A cheese plate,” he said. “Happy housewarming.”
“My first gift.” I stowed it on one of the open shelves, then stepped back to admire it. “There.” I gave him a quick hug, my hand brushing the nape of his neck, which was damp from a recent shower. “Sorry. I probably smell. I did a workout before you got here.”
“I’ve seen you much sweatier than this,” he said, leaning both hands against the top of the kitchen archway doorjamb. He pressed into the stretch, his shirt riding up in response.
I averted my eyes from the stripe of his stomach skin. Why was I noticing it? “What’s on deck for you today?”
“Spent the morning packing a traveling exhibit for the Smithsonian. I’m wide-open now. You?”
“Painting the dining nook.”
“I thought you said you hired painters?”
“I did. They already came. But I don’t like the color in that room, which isn’t their fault.”
His mouth twitched. “You didn’t tell them you didn’t like it when they started?”
“You should see me at a nail salon,” I said solemnly. “I will wear literally any color the tech tells me to and proclaim it’s my new favorite. Every time.”
Now he openly laughed. “Want help?”
“You wanna paint with me?”
“What are friends for?” he asked, cracking me up by giving me theHunger Gamessalute.
We put on music, started taping, laid out tarps. I took a video of the before. I could use it for content at some point. My exercise sweat had long cooled in the air-conditioning, but when we broke open the paint, the chemical stench forced us to open the windows, inviting summer inside.
For a while, we lost ourselves in the heat, in the monotony of painting. Originally, I’d chosen a white that read more aged yellow; now, I’d flipped the script and gone for a trendy lilac color I knew I’d also regret before long, though that was the beauty of paint.
I sat on the floor, running a paintbrush along the baseboard; Caleb used the roller to reach more gracefully than I could. The smell of the paint was inescapable, but I wasn’t sure if it was that or him that made me woozy. “Tell me more about becoming a museum curator,” I ventured.
“I love it.” He shook droplets of paint into the silver tray. “Really lucked into the job.”
“Yeah. So weird of you to just stumble upon your doctorate one day.”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“Why’d you go for it?”
“Preservation,” he said immediately. “There’s somethingabout upholding the past that I can’t shake. I’ve begun to think about the fact that people will be studying this wacky time in a way that they haven’t studied anything since maybe the pandemic. I find the concept of living history to be...”
“Terrifying?”
“The opposite,” he said. “Extraordinary.”
I wondered if he was teasing me, but when I checked his face, it was nothing short of rapt. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. There are so many events in life that become a ‘where-were-you-when’ moment. We live them all the time, and we usually don’t know until they’re over.”
“That doesn’t scare you?”
He put down the paint roller, shook out his hands, stretched his fingers. “It does. But that’s life. My grandpa always talked about where he was when JFK died. Sometimes it keeps me up at night, wondering what the next event will be. And then that next thing happens.”
