“Lift your end.”

“I am lifting my end.”

“Higher. The rail—”

The right side of the couch caught the stair rail and stopped. We were on the landing between three and two, the couch jammed diagonal with my end up near the third-floor hallway and Ray’s end pinched against the wall where the stairs turned. The building was old and the stairwell was narrow — the kind of narrow where you could touch both walls with your elbows if you stood in the middle and tried. Somebody in 1940 had decided this was enough room. Somebody in 1940 had never tried to move a couch.

“Back it up,” Ray said.

“I can’t back it up. The wall’s right there.”

“Tilt it. Get the arm over the rail.”

I tilted. The couch arm cleared the banister by maybe an inch. We shuffled forward, Ray going down backward, both hands under the frame, his neck craning to see where his feet were going. The couch was heavier than it looked, which is a thing I’ve noticed about every piece of furniture I’ve ever helped move. They all look like they should weigh fifty pounds and they all weigh a hundred.

“Step,” I said.

“I know.”

“There’s two.”

“I’ve been walking down these stairs for four years, Ellen. I know how many steps there are.”

We got it around the second landing and down to the ground floor. The front door was propped open with a cinder block Ray had brought up from the basement, and we carried the couch out into the sun and slid it into the back of the U-Haul. It fit with about three inches to spare on each side.

“That’s the worst one,” Ray said.

“The dresser’s going to be worse.”

“The dresser comes apart.”

“Since when?”

“Since I took the drawers out last night. It’s just the frame now. Sixty pounds, maybe.”

We stood in the street, breathing. It was September and the air had that specific quality where summer hasn’t ended but it’s going to — warm but the light comes in at an angle, the shadows longer than they were a month ago. Ray’s block was lined with maples that were just starting to turn at the tips. He lived on Birch Street. No birches.

“When does the truck go back?” I said.

“Six.”

“It’s already quarter to twelve.”

“That’s why I said start at eight.”

“You said nine.”

“I said eight. You showed up at nine-thirty.”

“I brought coffee.”

“You brought one coffee. For yourself.”

“That’s not true. I brought you one too. You’d already had two.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t want a third.”

He pulled his T-shirt up and wiped his face with the hem. Ray was thirty-one, same as me. We’d been friends since college — same dorm floor, freshman year, one of those things where you end up getting lunch together on the second day and then never stop. Twelve years. Half our lives, roughly, if you start counting from the point where your life begins to feel like your life and not just stuff that happened to you.

“Water,” he said. “Then the dresser.”

• • •

The dresser wasn’t as bad as the couch, because Ray was right — with the drawers out it was just a wooden frame, heavy but manageable. We carried it down without saying much. I went up for the drawers and brought two at a time, one stacked inside the other, clothes still in them because Ray hadn’t packed them and I didn’t ask. His system for the move was somewhere between organized and catastrophic. The kitchen was boxed and labeled. The bedroom looked like someone had tossed a grenade and then taped shut whatever survived.

“You want me to start on the boxes?” I called from the hallway.

“Yeah, stage them by the door. The heavy ones are books.”

The heavy ones were, in fact, books. I picked up the first one and my shoulders informed me that it contained every book Ray had ever purchased, which was considerable because Ray read the way some people drink — steadily, daily, without it ever looking like a problem until you tried to move the evidence.

“How many of these are there?” I said.

“Nine.”

“Ray.”

“I know.”

“You own nine boxes of books?”

“Some of them are Margaret’s.”

I set the box down. “You’re still storing Margaret’s books?”

“She said she’d pick them up.”

“When did she say that?”

“March.”

“It’s September.”

“I’m aware of the month, Ellen.”

I looked at the box. On the side, in Margaret’s handwriting — I recognized the heavy downward stroke on the M — it said FICTION A–G.

“She organized them alphabetically?”

“She organized everything alphabetically. You know that.”

“Are you going to bring them to Portland?”

“I’m going to put them in the truck and drive them to Portland and put them in my new apartment and text her the new address and she’s going to say she’ll pick them up and then not pick them up and in six months I’ll move again and bring them with me.”

“That’s a plan.”

“It’s not a plan. It’s a prediction.”

I carried the box downstairs. Nine trips for books. By the fourth one I was carrying them on my shoulder, arm up, hand braced on the side, the way you carry a case of beer if the case of beer weighs forty-five pounds and wants to destroy your lower back. The stairs were getting familiar. I counted them on the fifth trip. Thirty-six from the third floor to the sidewalk. Twelve per flight. The carpet was worn to the backing on the edges of each step, and the wallpaper in the stairwell was peeling near the second-floor landing where the window leaked. Ray’s building was the kind of building that had a landlord who lived in another state and responded to maintenance requests with the phrase “I’ll send someone.”

On trip six, I sat down on the second-floor landing.

“You okay?” Ray said from above.

“I’m resting.”

“There’s only three more.”

“That is three more forty-five-pound boxes of books. That’s a hundred and thirty-five pounds of Margaret’s alphabetized fiction that I’m personally carrying to your new life in Portland.”

He appeared at the top of the stairs, holding two boxes stacked. He was taller than me by six inches and had the kind of build where physical work looked like something he happened to be doing rather than something that was happening to him.

“She’s not coming for them,” he said, starting down.

“I know she’s not coming for them.”

“So why am I bringing them?”

“Because you think if you throw them away, that’s a statement. And if you keep them, it’s not.”

He stopped on the step above me. “That’s pretty good.”

“I’ve been thinking about it since March when you told me she left her books.”

He stepped past me and kept going down. “You could’ve said something in March.”

“You didn’t ask in March.”

• • •

The bed was a queen-size mattress on a metal frame. We carried the frame down first — light, awkward, the kind of thing that catches on everything because it’s all corners and no weight. Then the mattress. A mattress on a narrow staircase is its own particular nightmare. It bends, which means you can’t get a solid grip. It absorbs sweat, which means after the first flight your hands are sliding on the fabric. And it’s wide enough that it seals the stairwell like a plug, so you’re pushing this floppy wall through a tube.

“I used to do this professionally,” Ray said, halfway down.

“Move mattresses?”

“Move everything. Summer after sophomore year. Two of us and a box truck, twelve bucks an hour. We did six apartments a day.”

“Six?”

“Small ones. Studios, one-bedrooms. College kids. The heaviest thing was usually a futon.”

“How’s this compare?”

“This is worse because I’m ten years older and my back has opinions now.”

We got the mattress into the truck. It went on top of the couch, leaning against the side wall. The truck was starting to look like an actual move — shapes wedged into corners, the heavy stuff on the bottom and the fragile stuff theoretically on top, though nobody really follows that rule when they’re behind schedule and sweating.

“Lunch?” I said.

“We’re behind.”

“We’re going to be behind either way. Lunch.”

• • •

We sat on the tailgate eating sandwiches I’d picked up from the deli on Prospect. Turkey and Swiss on rye for me, Italian combo for him, same as always. Ray’s apartment didn’t have any food left in it — he’d cleaned out the fridge two days ago and been eating takeout since, which struck me as a bleak way to spend your last days in a city but Ray didn’t seem to find it remarkable.

“Have you found a place?” I said.

“I told you. The one-bedroom on Congress Street.”

“You said you were looking at it. Looking at and having are different.”

“I signed the lease on Tuesday.”

“You signed a lease sight unseen?”

“I saw pictures.”

“Pictures. Of a one-bedroom in Portland. That you’re going to live in.”

“It’s got a bay window.”

“Wonderful.”

“What do you want me to say? I had a budget. It was in the budget. The neighborhood looked fine on Street View.”

“You chose your apartment off Street View.”

“I also read some reviews.”

“Of the apartment?”

“Of the neighborhood. The building doesn’t have reviews.”

“That’s reassuring.”

He took a bite of his sandwich and watched a woman walking a dog across the street — a big brown mutt, some retriever mix, pulling the leash taut. Ray watched the dog the way Ray watched anything that interested him, which was with his whole face.

“You going to be okay?” I said.

“It’s a dog, Ellen.”

“I don’t mean the dog.”

He kept watching it. “Yeah. I think so. I think it’s going to be different. Which is the point.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s also the point.”

“That’s not a plan.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because you keep not having one.”

The dog stopped to investigate a tree. The woman waited, phone in her other hand.

“The job starts Monday?” I said.

“Monday. Orientation, probably a week of training. It’s a bigger office than here. Forty-some people.”

“Do you know anyone?”

“My boss. We talked three times on Zoom. She seems good. Direct.”

“That’s something.”

“It is something.”

A car came down the block, slow, looking for parking. We pulled our legs up as it passed.

“I’m going to miss this block,” Ray said.

“You’re going to miss the block?”

“The trees. The walk to the co-op. The way the light comes through the kitchen window in the afternoon.”

“You never once mentioned the light in your kitchen.”

“I noticed it. I just didn’t mention it.”

“What else didn’t you mention?”

He looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“Four years. What else were you noticing and not saying?”

He crumpled his sandwich wrapper and sat with the question. This was a thing Ray did — he heard a question, and instead of answering the way most people do, which is immediately, he’d let it sit. When we were younger I thought he was being evasive. Somewhere around twenty-five I realized he was just thinking. Most people don’t actually think before they talk. Ray did. It was one of the things I liked about him and one of the things that made me want to throw a sandwich at his head, because sometimes you just want someone to react.

“I noticed that this was the longest I’d lived anywhere since my parents’ house,” he said. “I noticed that the couple downstairs fought every Sunday morning and then cooked something incredible every Sunday night. I noticed that the tree outside my bedroom was some kind of crabapple and it bloomed for about ten days in May and then dropped everything on the cars underneath it.”

“That’s a nice list.”

“It’s not nice. It’s just what happened.”

“Those are the same thing sometimes.”

• • •

The afternoon went faster. We fell into a rhythm — up the stairs, grab something, down the stairs, into the truck. The apartment shrank. Rooms that had felt like rooms became walls with marks on the floor where things had stood. Ray’s kitchen was the last room we cleared, and by then there was an echo in there that hadn’t been there in the morning.

“Tape,” Ray said.

I threw him the roll. He caught it without looking — we’d been doing this for six hours and had synced up in the way where the coordination stops being something you think about and just happens. He sealed a box labeled KITCHEN MISC. I carried it past him and he was already assembling the next box when I came back up.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” he said, folding the flaps.

“What?”

“When you help someone move, you see their entire life in objects. And none of the objects are the person.”

“That might be too deep for box-carrying.”

“Everything I own is in that truck right now. Every single item. And if you went through all of it, you wouldn’t know me. You’d know someone who reads a lot and owns too many coffee mugs and has a rice cooker. But you wouldn’t know me.”

“I’d know you kept your ex-girlfriend’s books for six months.”

“That doesn’t tell you why.”

“It does, actually.”

He stopped taping. “What does it tell you?”

“That you don’t like endings.”

The kitchen was quiet. That specific quiet of a room that’s been full and now isn’t — not silence, but the absence of the soft sounds things make by existing there. Clothes absorbing space. Books weighing down a shelf. A bed holding the shape of someone sleeping.

“Nobody likes endings,” he said.

“Some people are better at them.”

“And you think you are?”

“I think I’m faster. Better is a different question.”

He finished the box and stood up. The kitchen was empty except for a broom leaning against the counter, a dustpan on the floor, the roll of tape, and his phone charger plugged into the outlet by the stove.

“You should unplug that,” I said. “We need to go.”

“Give it ten more minutes.”

“We don’t have ten minutes. It’s four-thirty and the truck goes back at six and Portland is not ten minutes away.”

“Portland is two hours away. I’ll drop the truck there.”

“You got a one-way rental?”

“I got a one-way.”

“Since when?”

“Since the beginning. Why would I drive a truck back here? I’m not coming back here.”

“You’re not coming back?”

“Not to live.”

“I know not to live. But to visit. To see people.”

“To see you.”

“To see anyone. To see me. Yes.”

He unplugged the charger and wound the cord around his hand, tight, the way you do when you’re giving your fingers something to work at. “I’ll come back. I’m just not going to come back the way I came back from Pittsburgh. Where I came back because I couldn’t make it work. I want to come back because I want to, not because I failed at being somewhere else.”

“Pittsburgh wasn’t failing.”

“Pittsburgh was absolutely failing. I hated that job and I had no friends and I ate frozen burritos four nights a week.”

“You still eat frozen burritos four nights a week.”

“By choice now. There’s a difference.”

I picked up the broom and swept the kitchen. Dust and crumbs and a penny and a twist tie and a tiny screw from something — a cabinet hinge, maybe, or a curtain rod bracket. Four years of living reduced to what falls between the cracks. I swept it into the dustpan and looked around for a trash can that was already in the truck.

“Just leave it by the door,” Ray said. “The landlord’s sending a cleaner.”

“The landlord is not sending a cleaner.”

“He said he was.”

“He said he’d fix the window too.”

“Fair point.”

I set the dustpan by the door and leaned the broom against the wall. The apartment was empty. Ray stood in what had been the living room, which was now just a room — no couch, no bookshelf, no rug, nothing that made it a place someone lived except the name and the late-afternoon light coming through the windows. It hit the floor where his rug had been, and the wood underneath was lighter than the rest of the room — a clean rectangle that hadn’t faded with everything around it. A shadow in reverse. The shape of what had been there.

“I keep expecting it to feel like something,” he said.

“The apartment?”

“Leaving. I keep waiting for the feeling to arrive. Like, this is it, this is the last time I’ll be in this room. But it just feels like walking down stairs carrying stuff.”

“That’s what leaving is.”

“I thought there’d be more.”

“More what?”

“More weight. More — I don’t know. Ceremony.”

“You want ceremony? I can say a few words. We are gathered here today—”

“Shut up.”

“— to commemorate four years on Birch Street, a street with no birches—”

“Ellen.”

“— may the next tenant find joy in the bay window—”

“I don’t have a bay window. The new apartment has a bay window.”

“May the next tenant find joy in these regular windows, which have never been mentioned in a lease as a selling point—”

He was laughing. I kept going.

“— and may Margaret’s books find peace in Portland, where they will live, unclaimed, in alphabetical order, until the heat death of the universe. Amen.”

“Amen,” he said, and picked up the broom even though there was nothing left to sweep.

• • •

We walked down the stairs for the last time. Ray carried the broom and the dustpan and the phone charger. I carried nothing, which felt wrong after a whole day of carrying everything. My arms were sore in that specific way where you know you’ll feel it worse tomorrow. The stairwell smelled like old carpet and the ghost of someone’s cooking — garlic, cumin, something warm — from the second-floor couple who fought on Sundays and cooked on Sunday nights.

On the landing between two and one, Ray stopped.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“When you asked what I noticed and didn’t say. Earlier.”

“Yeah?”

“I should’ve said this. Thank you. For today. For all the times you’ve showed up.”

“Don’t make it a thing.”

“I’m not making it a thing. I’m saying thank you.”

“You’re making it a thing by stopping on the stairs to say thank you while holding a broom.”

“This is what thank you looks like. A man on a staircase with a broom.”

“Noted. You’re welcome. Keep walking.”

We came out into the late afternoon. The U-Haul was packed tight and the sun was low and the maples on Birch Street were turning at the tips the way they do when summer is ending but hasn’t fully committed to it.

“Follow you to the highway?” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s on my way.”

“It is absolutely not on your way. Portland is north and you live south.”

“I’ll follow you to the on-ramp. Make sure you don’t get lost.”

“I have GPS.”

“I don’t trust GPS.”

“You use GPS every single day.”

“I don’t trust it every single day.”

He closed the back of the truck and latched it. Pulled the latch to check it. Pulled it again. Two checks — that was Ray. One check is normal, two is careful, three is anxious. He lived at two.

“Drive safe,” I said.

“You drive safe. You’re going against traffic.”

“Call me when you get there.”

“It’ll be late.”

“I don’t care. Call me.”

“Okay.”

We stood there. The kind of second where you’re both deciding whether to hug and neither one of you wants to be the one who makes it a thing. I stepped in. He hugged back. He smelled like sweat and packing tape and the particular dusty sweetness of an emptied apartment — plaster and sun and the absence of everything that had been there that morning.

“Don’t eat a frozen burrito tonight,” I said into his shoulder.

“No promises.”

I walked to my car. He climbed into the U-Haul. The engine caught on the second try and he pulled away from the curb slow, checking his mirrors the way he checked everything — carefully, twice, and then once more because the thing he was leaving was still visible if he looked.

I sat in my car and watched the truck reach the stop sign at the end of the block. His turn signal went on. Left, toward the highway. He sat at the sign for a beat longer than he needed to. Then he turned and the truck slid behind the maples and was gone, and Birch Street was just a street again — trees, hydrant, the sidewalk where the woman with the brown dog had passed earlier, the spot where the truck had been, which wasn’t empty because a street is always full of something, but which was different now in the way a space gets different when you know what used to be in it and you watched it leave.

I started my car. I did not go home the short way.