Walter Bennett had been awake since five thirty. At seventy-six, he rarely slept past sunrise, and he still measured the beginning of a good day by what he could accomplish before breakfast. He had retired from electrical contracting nearly fifteen years earlier, but his hands retained the habits of a man who had spent four decades fixing things other people could not understand. He checked the porch light, tightened a loose kitchen cabinet handle, and carried the newspaper inside before his wife, Eleanor, came down the stairs.
Eleanor was seventy-three, with warm brown eyes that missed very little and an instinct for keeping ordinary life orderly even when the rest of the world became unpredictable. She had worked as a school secretary, taught evening literacy classes, and raised two children in a house where the kitchen table was sometimes an office, sometimes a classroom, and sometimes the only place anyone had time to talk. Her hair had turned silver years ago, and she wore it pinned neatly at the back of her head. That morning she had chosen a simple blue dress before changing her mind and taking out the cream one Walter liked.
"We're not going to a wedding," Walter told her when he saw the second dress laid carefully across the bed. "It's a car dealership. I expect they allow people through the door without a church invitation."
"I know where we're going," she replied. "I'm deciding what I feel comfortable wearing."
Walter raised both hands in surrender. He had learned long ago that Eleanor did not require assistance making up her mind, although he sometimes forgot that her silence was not an invitation to make the decision for her. When she came downstairs, he was standing over the stove watching the edges of the toast. She kissed his cheek, took the pan from his hand, and turned down the flame.
"You've been burning the same toast for fifty years," she said.
"And you've been rescuing it for fifty years. Seems like a reliable system."
Their marriage was approaching its fiftieth anniversary, although they had been together nearly fifty-three years if Walter counted the time before the wedding, which Eleanor insisted he was not permitted to count. They had survived layoffs, medical scares, the deaths of parents, a mortgage that seemed endless when they were young, and the particular exhaustion of raising children while pretending the adults knew what they were doing. They had also survived years in which opportunities were offered to less qualified people who happened to look more acceptable to the people offering them. Their lives had never been without joy, but joy had often required an effort that other families around them did not notice.
They still lived in their old house on Maple Terrace most weekdays, even though their son Michael had bought a much larger property with room for them whenever they wanted it. The house on Maple Terrace had pale yellow siding, a broad front porch, and a magnolia tree Eleanor had planted the year Michael was born. Walter kept the lawn trimmed himself when his knees allowed it. Their neighbors knew them as the Bennetts who returned every borrowed tool and who sometimes left a bag of tomatoes on the porch without asking whether anyone wanted them.