A woman follows her husband around, talking. He sits in a “big blue chair” in the living room, “watching home-improvement shows on his device.” She gets distracted and then wonders if his ear buds are in. He looks up at her, as if he doesn’t quite remember who she is. She asks him what he thinks: “Is it a good idea or a so-so idea or a terrible idea or what?” She asks him, “Do you have thoughts?” Her husband thinks about how his inclination for home improvement shows was more gradual than most, how his father had been a hobbyist, had “kept his complicated hardware there in a fishing-tackle box.” He thinks about his grandmother, how her “broken-down Victorian sofa” sat in the basement beside his father’s worktable. He thinks about how his father “preferred his hobbies solo” and so he learned the names for tools later on.

His wife is not interested in home improvement. “She has other fish to fry. Big fish.” She’s interested in discussing life, in figuring it out. The pandemic has caused people to quarantine and she wonders “[i]f these questions can’t be debated now, when time has slowed to a standstill, what does that say about all of it? What does that say about everything?” She talks to her children occasionally, on Zoom.  She reflects on when she met her husband—in law school, Chicago, 1973. Back then, he told her about his parents’ dysfunction, how they only communicated to each other through their family dog. She asked the wrong questions: “What breed?” “A hound mutt?”

Watching the home improvement show, the husband thinks about how attics were once called “ghost floors” because of the high infant mortality rate in the early twentieth century. The ghost floor is where the parents put the reminders of the dead child. Now, the husband reflects on his marriage. How they eloped. How quickly they moved through their relationship. “[I]t felt like Mary Jane was an introduction that had gone by too quickly, the kind that left you pretending you remembered a name for years afterward.”

His wife thinks about how she used to ask a Magic 8-Ball what her life would be like. “Will I be married? It is decidedly so.” She thinks about her therapist, how her therapist told her “We all hold trauma.” She wonders, “What did Ginger mean, trauma?” “‘Trauma?’ she’d told Ginger, ‘It’s just a story.’” That morning, the woman and her husband had woken up to rain. She had gotten ready to go, and the husband had thought about asking her where she was going, but figured she was going to garden. He’d tried to talk to her, but she was in a rush. Now, he looks up and she’s waiting for his opinion on whatever she’d been talking about. He thinks about how nonchalantly they’d gotten married, how “[i]t had all seemed a lark: the judge, marriage, forever,” and yet, here they still are. And somehow, they’re still there too, “the judge conclud[ing] the script from which he’s been reading and wait[ing] for the newlyweds to embrace.”