Some days, before she was fully awake, Hallie forgot she was eighty-three. On those mornings, when a warm finger of sun angled across her face from between the blinds, she thought she was in her thirties again. She felt it so strongly that she was on her feet, wondering what to wear for work, before she realized. Before the stiffness in her legs or the sight of her face in the tiny oval mirror above the dresser reminded her she was an old woman.

She was a stranger to herself then. She stopped, awed by the intricately wrinkled hollows around her eyes, the translucent skin stretched across her nose. She stood in front of the glass, arms around herself, mouth slack with surprise. Where’s Hallie? she thought until her mind cleared. What has that old bat done with Hallie?

But then she moved at the same time the hag in the mirror did, and it was like waking from a dream. In a second, faster than you could nod or realize, Oh, yes, of course that was a long time ago, she remembered. Her full bladder hummed inside her, and the kitten rubbed itself against her shins. She was no longer a young woman, a teacher who lived with her brother in a brand new house on Carlisle. And Terry was no longer a handsome, toothy boy who charmed without trying. They both had white hair and arthritis and no one but each other.

Once she had climbed the stairs to knock on Terry’s door, gone to the bathroom to put in her dentures, filled the cat’s bowl and placed it on the mat at the kitchen door, Hallie had renounced the past and was consumed by small chores that demanded all her courage. She put the coffee on, her fingers slow and unmanageable, lagging behind her intentions like stragglers on a tour. The striped can of drip at the back of the cupboard evaded her, so she settled for instant. She fried the eggs, even though Terry hated them that way. It hurt too much to move her wrists in the small flourishes it took to scramble.

She set two places at the dining room table, one on each side of the large water stain in the table’s center. Years ago, in an uncharacteristic gesture of apology or thanks, she’d forgotten which, her brother had left a vase of lavender peonies there. The deep, permanent whorls she found when she lifted the glass days later changed with the light. Sometimes, in the afternoon, they took the shape of a huge, Chinese fu dog, with flared nostrils and bulging eyes. Other times, especially mornings, they curled themselves into a group of girls running, their hair streaming across the tabletop.

When she heard Terry in the kitchen, Hallie knew he’d come down too soon. She found him, bending toward the sun in the window over the sink, his skinny wrists like bird joints, the tale of his navy blue nightshirt spilling from under his sweater. “Dirty Old Man,” she told him. “Don’t go telling me it’s too cold for a shower.”

He grinned then, faint spots of color spreading across his face, roses on old wallpaper. “Cold enough to freeze piss, Hallie,” he told her, the way he always did. Then he helped her get the mugs down and they drank their first cup of coffee. They drank standing up, side by side, staring out the window.

“You know damn well there’s no such word as axer,” he said, eyes fixed on the glittering stalactites clustered along the phone wire that stretched from the house to the pole on the corner. It was still early in the winter, but northern New York had already had three major snowstorms. The last one had left the front yard desolate and hushed as an altar.

Scrabble was a bond and a wedge between them. Every night they played, and every morning Terry rehashed and regretted. “We always add er to things,” Hallie insisted calmly. When they were little and played “rocks, scissors, stones,” her brother would slap her hands if she won. He’d wait until their mother turned away, then strike quickly, cunningly. When Hallie cried out and her mother turned around, Terry was all innocence, hands in his pockets, huge doll-like eyes sparkling with good will.

“I just let you have it,” he told her now, steam waffling the air above his Patriots mug. “Hell, Scrabble’s only a game.”

“A game I won,” she said. She didn’t look at him, pressing her fingers against the sides of her own mug, feeling the warmth, wishing it could reach her feet. They poured themselves refills and carried them into the dining room, but Terry hardly touched his eggs. He only pushed them to one side of his plate…