Single, Carefree, Mellow. Katherine Heiny

      Still, you can tell the guy in the jewelry store anything you like. Go ahead, say it: “This is for my boyfriend, do you think he’ll like it?”

      For Christmas, Boris gives you a framed poster of the four major food groups. You amuse yourself by trying to think of one single more unromantic gift he could have given you. You amuse yourself by wondering if you can make this into an anecdote for the women in Pigeon Lab.

      When people ask you what Boris gave you for Christmas, you smile shyly and insinuate that you were both too broke to afford much.

      The girls in Pigeon Lab have a Valentine’s Day party and invite you and Boris. Probably you shouldn’t show him the invitation, since his name is on it and he might wonder why you and he are invited as a couple. Just say, “Look, I have a party to go to, want to come?”

      “Sure,” Boris says, and the best part of the whole thing is that this way you know without asking that he doesn’t have plans with someone else.

      You don’t have boyfriends anymore, and these days you don’t even have dates. You tell Boris this is because you have too much work to do, and often on Saturday nights you make a big production of hauling your Psychology of Women textbook out to the sofa and propping it on your lap, even though it hurts your thighs and you never read it.

      Instead, you talk to Boris, who is similarly positioned on the other end of the sofa, his feet touching yours. Sometimes he lies with his head in your lap and falls asleep that way. You never get up and leave him; you stay, touching his hair, idly clicking through the channels, watching late-night rodeo.

      One night Boris wakes up during the calf roping. “Oh, my God,” he says, watching a calf do a four-legged split, its heavy head wobbling. “This is breaking my heart.”

      This thing with Dahlia Kosinski reminds you of a book you read as a child, Good News, Bad News.

      The good news is the ethics study group has a party and Boris invites you to go. The bad news is that Dahlia Kosinski is there and she’s beautiful in a careless, sloppy way you know you never will be: shaggy black hair, too much black eyeliner, a leopard-print dress with a stain on the shoulder. You know that her nylons have a big run somewhere and she doesn’t even care. The good news is that Dahlia has heard of you. “Hello,” she says. “Are you Gwen?” The bad news is that she makes some joke about a book she read once called Gwendolyn the Miracle Hen, and Boris laughs. The good news is that Dahlia has what appears to be a very serious boyfriend. The bad news is that they have a fight in the bathroom, so maybe they’re not really in love. The worse news is that in the car on the way home Boris says, “I don’t think Dahlia will ever leave that boyfriend of hers. Everyone I’ve talked to says they’re very serious.” Which means that he’s looked into Dahlia’s love life, he’s made inquiries. Wonder how there can be bad news followed by worse news. Does that ever happen in the book? Bad news: You’re pushed out of an airplane. Worse news: You don’t have a parachute?

      Boris tells you that one night he stopped by the frozen yogurt place without you and the guy behind the counter made some sort of pass at him and wanted to know if you were Boris’s girlfriend.

      Ask, “What did you tell him?”

      “What choice did I have?” Boris says in a tone that crushes you like a grape.

      Linette stops by again. This time she spends the night, disappearing into Boris’s room with a six-pack. You hear them laughing in there. Whatever else you do, call someone and go out that night.

      When you are in the kitchen the next morning, Boris wanders out. You ask him how he feels. “Tired,” he says. “Linette kept me up all night talking about whether she should go to grad school or not.”

      Wonder if he’s telling the truth. Say, “Should she?”

      “God, no,” Boris says. “She’s such a birdbrain.”

      “Oh,” you say loudly, over the banging of your heart.

      You clean the bathroom late one night after Boris has gone to bed. You wear a T-shirt and a pair of Boris’s boxer shorts that you stole out of a bag of stuff he’s been planning to take to the Salvation Army. It gives you immense pleasure to wear these boxer shorts, but you wear them only after he’s gone to bed, and you never sleep in them. You do have some pride.

      Your cleaning is ambitious: you wipe the tops of the doors, the inside of the shower curtain; you even unscrew the drain and pull out a hair ball the size of a rat terrier. It is so amazing that you consider taking a picture with your smiling face next to it for size reference, but in the end you just throw it out.

      You are standing on the edge of the tub, balancing a bowl of hot, soapy water on your hip and swiping at the shower-curtain rod with a sponge when Boris walks in and says, “Well, hello, Mrs. Clean.”

      You smile. He yawns. “Do you need some help?” he says.

      You let him hold the bowl of water while you turn your back to him and reach up and run the sponge along the shower-curtain rod.

      “I never knew you had to clean those,” Boris says. “I can’t believe it’s one in the morning. I feel like we’re married and this is our first apartment or something.”

      Your throat closes. Until this moment you had not thought about the fact that this was your and Boris’s first apartment, that once the lease is up there might not be a second apartment, and you might not see him every day.

      “Hey,” says Boris. “You’re wearing my boxer shorts.” He puts the bowl of water on the sink and turns the waistband inside out so he can read the tag. “They are!” he says, delighted.

      You freeze. Clear your throat. “Yeah, well,” you say.

      Even standing on the edge of the tub, you are only a few inches taller than Boris, and he slides an arm around your waist. He brushes your hair forward over your shoulders and traces a V on your back for a long moment, as though you were a mannequin and he were a fashion designer contemplating some new creation.

      Then you feel him kiss the back of your neck above your T-shirt. You remember Halloween and think about saying, Boris, are those your lips? but you don’t. You don’t do anything. You still haven’t moved; your arms are over your head, hands braced against the rod.

      “You’re so funny, Gwen,” Boris whispers against your skin.

      “Really?” you say. A drop of soapy water lands on your eyelid, soft as cotton, warm as wax. “Me?”

       SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW

      You could sum it up this way: Maya’s dog was dying, and she was planning to leave her boyfriend of five years. On the whole, she felt worse about the dog.

      “God, that’s horrible,” said Rhodes, Maya’s boyfriend. “I don’t know if I can stand it. There’s really nothing we can do?”

      He was talking about the dog dying, because he didn’t know that part about Maya leaving him yet. Though if he had, he might well have said exactly the same thing. And then Maya would have had to say, No, there’s nothing we can do. It’s like that song: You just can’t be here, now that my heart is gone.

      Yesterday morning, Maya’s dog, Bailey, a yellow Labrador, had refused to eat breakfast. This behavior was so extremely out of character (Maya could in fact never remember it having happened before) that both Maya and Rhodes were immediately concerned. Maya made some scrambled eggs for Bailey, and while she was doing that, Rhodes examined Bailey and discovered a marble-size lump in her cheek.

      Maya had felt a hot ember of resentment about the fact that Rhodes had found this lump before she did. Bailey was her dog, had been her dog since she was eighteen, had been her dog for exactly twice as long as Rhodes had been her boyfriend. Maya should have been checking for the lump instead of scrambling