Not tonight

At six thirty Victoria stands in front of the hallway mirror putting in her gold hoops. The dark red dress, the blazer over it, lipstick a shade darker than she wears to the lab. She booked the table two weeks ago, at the little restaurant by the river with candles on every table. It’s the first time since the move that they’re going out, just the two of them, paid for out of her tip jar. Sam’s train gets in at seven. At ten after, she hears the key.

Sam comes in and doesn’t take off his jacket. He leans back against the door, his face gray. “Hey,” he says. Then he sees the dress, and Victoria can see that he forgot. Not the date, that’s in his calendar. Just that tonight is the night.

“Vici,” he says softly. “Can we push it? Not tonight. I can’t do it tonight.”

Victoria freezes, one earring still in her hand. “You can’t? I’ve been looking forward to this for two weeks.” She isn’t loud yet. Sam hangs his jacket over a chair and sits down at the kitchen table. “It was a bad day.” “How bad?” “Bad.” She waits for more, but nothing comes. That’s what hurts: one word. “That’s it? I’m standing here in a dress, and you say ‘bad’?”

Sam rubs his face. “So now I have to prove I’m tired enough?” The sentence just hangs there. Victoria feels the heat rising in her face. “I don’t want proof! I want you to see that I was excited!” The louder she gets, the calmer he gets. “I do see it. That’s exactly why I’m sitting here feeling like I’m on trial.”

Victoria walks out onto the balcony, in the dress, into the cold. Across the way the boathouse lights are on. She doesn’t count, she just breathes. After five minutes she catches herself in the balcony door: in heels between Nonna’s little lemon tree and the folded-up grill, like a guest who wandered off from a party and got lost. She has to laugh, quietly at first, then as loud as always.

Inside, Sam hasn’t moved. She sits down across from him. “Tell me. Not ‘bad.’ Tell me.” And this time he does. About the bracket for the solar panels he’s been calculating for weeks. About the test on the shaker table, where it snapped after twenty seconds. About the small mistake in his math, which he found himself and reported to Dr. Hartmann right away, before anyone else could find it. Dr. Hartmann just said, “Up there, there’s no roadside assistance. Start over tomorrow.” “I’ve been doing math all day,” Sam says. “Tonight I don’t want a table or a waiter asking if everything’s okay. I don’t even want to talk much. I just want to be here.”

Victoria picks up her phone and calls the restaurant. She moves the table to Saturday, after her shift. Sam watches her. “Thanks,” he says. And after a while: “I’m sorry. Not that I’m tired, I can’t help that. But that you were excited, and I walked in the door and canceled like it was a dentist appointment.” Victoria nods slowly. “That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s all.”

She doesn’t change. “I didn’t get dressed up for nothing,” she says, and makes pasta with garlic and olive oil, the way Nonna makes it when nobody has any energy left. Sam sets the table and digs out the candle from the cupboard that was supposed to be for Christmas. They eat without music and don’t talk much. At one point he looks at her over the candle and says, “You look like a party.” “I am a party,” Victoria says. “A small one tonight.”

Later they sit on the couch, phones in the bowl by the door. Sam reads, Victoria has her feet in his lap. At some point he reads her two lines from a book of poems, about a boat tied up in the harbor at night that can still hear the sea. Victoria isn’t totally sure what he means by it, and she understands anyway. She rests her forehead against his, and for a while neither of them says anything.

On Saturday they go to the restaurant by the river. When Victoria comes back from the coat check, Sam stands up until she’s seated, the way he always does. On the walk home, his hand holding hers inside his jacket pocket, she wonders how many times she could push something like this back before it would be too much. Once was fine. Twice, maybe. She tells him right away so she won’t forget. “Then tell me,” Sam says. “In time. Before it needs a poem.”