Luck by Joan Barfoot

and I’m not doing anything different, so what’s going on?” His elegant shape, which once narrowed from broad chest to tight, slender hips, was turning blockish and solid.
    “Gravity,” Nora had said from her perspective of bed. “Normal change.” What she found most interesting was that his penis seemed to be receding in the process; becoming something tender and fragile nestled in flesh, no longer a bold declaration. “One of these days I probably won’t have a waist any more. Same sort of thing.” She was only pointing out that they both had accommodations to make. She was suggesting that in making those accommodations, they were most safe, as well as most free, with each other. It was slightly disheartening, havingto take the trouble to say this out loud. “We’ll be a pair,” she added, reinforcing the message and indeed, as best she could, spelling it out. In case he was in any danger of forgetting.
    “I can pick something, if you’d like,” Sophie offers. “We need underwear, too, I gather, and socks. But no shoes.” No shoes. That’s entirely too vivid. That gives them all pause, even Beth.
    “No!” That was loud. Nora is up on her feet. “I’ll do it.” Sophie invading Philip’s underwear drawer? Nora thinks not. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” and she is off, out of the room, up the stairs—to be halted by something like a hand raised against her at her own bedroom door.
    She knows the room beyond this door like the back of her hand. Better. It’s their house, so she and Philip have naturally had the largest of the three bedrooms. Since the arrivals of first Sophie, then Beth, it’s also been the only room that contains no outside tastes, no bits and pieces contributed, or left lying about, by the others. Neither does it contain any of Nora’s work, which was both her choice and Philip’s, although for different reasons. She wanted sanctuary, one place where work needn’t exist, except theoretically and in her mind’s eye. He said, “I’d like a peaceful room, nothing jarring,” which ruled out her work and other bright things.
    So they wound up with a bedroom of cool blues and pale greys and ivory whites and various old shiny grained woods. Philip made the wide, deep bed himself, from maple rubbed and stained dark and, after so many years, marked and scratched here and there from one jostling and another. They bought a broad oak bureau, four drawers for each of them, and the blanket box from an ancient neighbour auctioning household possessions. Philip refinished them both. “Texture,” he said. “Grain. Very sexy, textures and grains.”
    The mirrors before which they examined themselves and each other were also the sliding doors to their wall-to-wall closet, reflecting the two original, rectangular farmhouse windows, more or less doubling the size of the room and the view, too, with the grey draperies opened. The draperies have been closed for a day now. It’ll be dark in there. To Nora, halted out in the hallway, the room feels forbidding. Or forbidden. Which is crazy. She slams her hand into the door and once through, takes a deep breath. The air is stale: from being closed in, or from some deathly residue?
    There was yesterday morning, the view, the touch, from the next pillow on that Philip-built bed over there. There are also infinite, uncountable moments of flinging arms, tangled limbs, random or purposeful encounters of shoulders, calves, hips and hands—years of this, night after night after night. Words and silences both, in their two particular voices.
    Never again? No. This cannot have happened.
    In the equal knowledge that it is not only possible but true, a separate cool part of Nora opens Philip’s side of the closet and selects a pair of tan cotton pants, a slim brown leather belt. What he might have worn yesterday, if they’d driven off on the day they had planned. A crisp blue cotton shirt he might have worked in, did work in. No tie. A