A moment ago, we were making love. Now the room has cooled and you’ve pulled yourself together to hustle off. There is a draft that blows down from the window beside the cherry wood dresser and I gather the blankets to myself. They smell like they need to be washed. It is early March and you don’t close the window or speak a word before you pull the door closed behind you.

My mother can read people like tea leaves. She sees faces, reads futures and tells me when I come down stairs that I am pregnant. You’ve only just left; the cool air from the door swinging closed is still hanging in the room. I hear the car door slam and the engine rumble and tell my mother she is talking crazy.

These hours are long. You leave for work at ten and I spend the night alone. My mother falls asleep in her recliner with crochet work on her lap. The television still on, tangles of yarn down to her pale blue slippers. She won’t lay in her bedroom since my father died in his sleep. The room is a shrine. Flickers of candlelight cast shadows on the wall and it smells like incense when I pass the open door on my way to set the kettle for tea.

My life is a fishbowl. Everything is disoriented, claustrophobic, and I am a spectator. I see daylight with you when you’re off, though you tell me not to—to sleep with the world and not with you. Still, I will not. We have been married two years and I am not ready to let night and day divide us. To be married to a sleeping man.

All men are sleeping, my mother tells me. She does not remember things clearly anymore; she spittle’s from the corners of her lips and spouts gibberish. That’s your word for it—gibberish—not mine. I know my mother as I know myself. Her are pockets stuffed with Kleenex and hard candies and she is afraid to turn off the lights. But she is not insane, only lost. You tell me there isn’t much difference between the two. They are two dots on the same map.

I run the washer all night and transfer our blankets to the dryer with an extra sheet of fabric softener. I want our bed to smell fresh, like Mountain Springs. I fold our clothes and stack them in piles on top of the vibrating machine. T-shirts worn so thin my pink fingertips show through the cotton. Your navy blue uniform is ironed and hung on a wire hanger. I shove our socks and underwear together into the same drawer, even though you’ll complain. Yes, it makes it difficult to find a matching pair. But we don’t have the space to be separate.

In the morning, I make dinner. Potatoes mashed with butter and cream. Green beans cooked in the microwave and chicken fried steak. The grease spits at me from the cast iron skillet, but it is your favorite. I watch the sunrise through the kitchen window and set the table for three.

My mother will eat oats and coffee and toast with grape jelly. I pull a chair out for her when she walks toward the table, eyes still half asleep. The skin on her face sags and I tell her she needs to smile more, needs to exercise the muscles in her cheeks. She tells me that she’ll smile when she holds her grandbaby. I shake my head and she clicks her tongue.

Then the house sighs with the opening of the front door and I quickly run a hand over my hair and pinch some color into my cheeks. I haven’t showered since you left. My mother says nothing and you brush by me with a quick kiss, smelling of cigarettes, Speed Stick and mint.

You spit the gum out before taking your seat across from my mother and tucking a paper napkin into the collar of your uniform. I serve oats and fried steak with potatoes. I sit between you and sip cold milk from a glass with orange slices dancing along the rim. When we’re done, I clear the table; put my unused plate back in the cabinet.

We live in my childhood bedroom. It is a small square and the walls are powder blue. We block the sun with blackout curtains that are velvety to the touch. I draw them closed as we get ready for sleep. The window beside the dresser is too small for a curtain and so you drape a bath towel over it. It’s the window you open when the air is too stuffy or too warm. Like when we made love last night.

My mother thinks we’re pregnant, I tell you as we settle together beneath the freshly laundered sheets. You don’t say anything and I take this to mean that your position on babies has not changed, will not. Not until she dies and we have the house to ourselves.

I’ve told you that she’s not sick and not near death, that I’ll be too old, and that the good eggs are all dried up by the time a woman turns thirty-five. You don’t seem to care that I’m already thirty-three and counting. Or maybe you don’t even remember anymore. All these long nights at work, your world is nothing but repetition and artificial light. Maybe you’ve forgotten that time passes, regardless.

Do you remember when we got married? I ask, but you’re already asleep. I think of our wedding sometimes when I’m feeling distant, when I need a memory to connect me back to you. It was in the spring and my father walked me between rows of folding chairs in their backyard. We exchanged vows in front of the grape trellis, decorated with twinkling white lights. We wrote our own vows and after two years I cannot remember the words.

Beneath us, I hear my mother shuffling in the kitchen. Drawers sliding, cabinets opening. Sounds of coffee cans and garbage bags moving. Sometimes she gets into things while we sleep—starts rearranging the kitchen and complaining about things like, who hid her potholders? And where the hell is her Spam?

At her doctor’s request, we have not bought her Spam (or real bacon or salted fish or anything else that she enjoyed before we moved in) in over a year. The pot holders, I just don’t like.

With you asleep, I pull on sweatpants and go to comfort my mother. To direct her to the living room, her recliner, her crochet. I’ll ask her if she needs to use the bathroom or if she would like some more coffee or a Fig Newton. She is only sixty-nine, I’ll tell her, much too young for such shenanigans. All this forgetting that we’re here, or that her diet is different, her kitchen rearranged, her husband gone.

When I reach the bottom step, the movement in the kitchen has stopped. Through the wall, I hear humming. And though I’ve heard her hum a thousand songs, songs for thunderstorms and goodnight hugs, lips pressed to fevered foreheads, this one I do not recognize.

Turning the corner from the living room, I see her back, her black hair streaked with silver, the small frame of her body, standing in her bedroom door. Shhhh, she says as I approach. Sleeping, she whispers. The candles in the room have gone out and the sunlight falling from the window makes a filmy haze, like we’re looking at an old photograph. My parents' bedroom, unchanged in forty years. Rose patterned wallpaper, mahogany four-post bed, matching dresser. The closet is open—neat rows of shoes and JC Penny boxes, suits and dresses zipped in garment bags. My mother turns around abruptly and pokes my arm. Matches, she says and then pushes past me to the kitchen.

I help her light and replace the candles, the incense. I stop to look at the photographs. Not the framed, posed pictures of their wedding or of the three of us with neat button-down shirts and seventies hairdos, but the out-of-focus ones wedged in the mirror frame. Black and white beach boardwalk photos of my father and mother. A passport photo of my father tucked in the upper corner—almost too young to recognize, save for the long dimples on either side of his grin. A Polaroid of my parents at a party, smiling behind raised glasses, a Christmas tree towering in the background.

When we’re finished resetting the shrine, I leave, sit at the kitchen table and twist the wedding band on my finger. My mother stays behind. Her hand was on my father’s pillow when I left.

We were married in the spring. My father walked me down the uneven grass between the folding chairs toward the grape trellis, hung with lights where once he grew fruit. I remember the grapes, how my father used to gather them, small and dark purple. He carried them like gems into our kitchen.

When we reached the trellis, he gave me to you with a stern nod. A simple hand shake between men and then he sat in the front row beside my mother. He held her hand, firm yet gentle. He held her like she was gold.

When my mother comes into the kitchen, I sit up straight, stop twiddling my ring. He is sleeping? She points to the ceiling. I nod. He broods; she says and lowers herself into the seat across from me, all the time.

He works hard, I tell her. And you do, third shift machinery. Your work is difficult, unappreciated, done in the dark—while everyone else sleeps or has sex or orders things they don’t need from d-list celebrities on infomercials. You sacrifice your nights and your days. This is what I tell my mother, how I defend you to her.

He makes me tired, she says and flips her hand in the air between us. She turns her attention to the kitchen window, the backyard. I want the trellis back.

It hadn’t had grapes on it in years, I remind her and then add, and it was starting to fall apart.

Shortly after we moved in, you tore it down and I miss it too. But I speak none of it to her, only the facts—too many New England winters, rotting wood, carpenter ants. It was already dead when you kicked it down, soft wood splinters scattered in the grass.

Still, my mother sighs and points her toes out from the table. Ballet slippers, shiny baby blue with bows in the center, marking the beginning of her toes. I wait for her to finish her thought, but she does not. Still, is all she meant to say. We sit together in silence, she marveling her feet while I marvel her. My parents were married forty-two years and I worry about us making it through the night.

Is it worth it? My mother asks without looking up at me. The brooding? She says to clarify. But what she really means is you. Are you worth it?

While you sleep, I go to our closet and rummage. There is a black New Balance box half filled with pictures and souvenirs, a square brown album from our wedding. I pull each down and place them carefully beside you on the bed, watching to be sure I don’t disturb your slumber.

In the first picture, I see us in front of the trellis, your hand wrapped around my waist, the sky stretching above us, endless and blue and light. A single brilliant moment. Beside me in the bed, you stir and I hold myself still as death, not even a breath.

I quietly push the box and album down to the foot of our bed and curl myself beside your sleeping body. You aren’t wearing a shirt and I rest my cheek on the smooth skin of your shoulder. Hey, I whisper and when you don’t respond, I’m relieved. I’ve stopped taking the pill, haven’t swallowed one in months. But this won’t be the moment that I tell you we aren’t safe anymore.

I press myself against your back to feel your heartbeat. I nuzzle into your neck to smell your skin. My legs bend into the contours of yours, my arms carefully drape over your chest. I anchor myself to you, to us, in this moment. Something pleasant and reassuring. Even if you’re too far away in your dreams to know that we are here. We are peaceful when you sleep.

We were married in the spring. On our honeymoon, you sped through the Poconos in search of a hospital as I sat beside you and bled through folded hotel towels. Along the Pennsylvania highway, the reason for our rushed engagement, for our backyard ceremony, the stringing of lights, the exchanging of vows—all seeped out onto terry cloth. Towels we had to pay for in addition to the rate of our room.

My mother is in her recliner again, the remote on the tray table beside her, crochet work on her lap. She is working on something new, she told me and smiled—the first one on her lips I have seen in weeks. It is good to be reminded that newness can bring happiness.

You pull away from me in your sleep, and I let you go easily. The weight of your body shifting from mine is relief and I can answer my mother’s question a thousand times over.