What the Tide Took

The glass of water sat untouched between them, condensation pooling on the coaster like the silence between their words. Maria traced the **palm** of her left hand with her right thumb, feeling the lines that supposedly held her future—though the palm reader in Key West had been vague about what waited for her back in Chicago.

"I don't know what you want from me," David said finally.

Outside, the stray **dog** they'd nicknamed Neptune scratched at the screen door, insistent as memory. They'd found him three days ago, ribs showing, fur matted with sand and burrs. Now he'd become something else—a third thing in the room that neither of them could quite name.

"I want you to be here," Maria said. "Not even here. Just somewhere. Anywhere that's not that office."

David laughed, short and bitter. "Easy for you to say. You got the promotion. You're not the one who'll be explaining why your division missed quarter."

"That was six months ago." She stood up, knocking the coaster. The **water** spilled across the table, dripping onto the floorboards. Neither of them moved to wipe it up. "We were supposed to be figuring this out. Remember? The vacation that would fix everything?"

"And instead we're just pretending in a nicer climate."

The dog barked, sudden and sharp, cutting through something thick between them.

Maria opened the screen door. The dog scrambled in, pressing his wet nose against her ankle, tail thumping with desperate hope. She sank to the floor, burying her face in his dirty fur, and for the first time in their marriage, she let herself cry without trying to stop.

David watched from the table. Outside, the ocean kept doing what the ocean does—coming in, going out, taking some things, leaving others. He stood up and walked to where she knelt on the floor, placed his palm on her shoulder, and for once, didn't say anything at all. The dog's tail kept thumping against the floorboards, marking time in a world that had somehow, impossibly, kept moving.