What Sheri leaves open, her husband closes.

She walks away from an open fork-and-knife drawer. Michael shuts it before he stabs a hip on its corner. A room she left hours ago stays lit; he clicks the switch. She takes a glass from a cabinet; he bonks his head on the thrown-wide door, and it eases closed.

With spring’s first dogwood blossom, she unlocks windows, welcomes breezes into the house. He sneezes (hay fever).

The throw blanket on the easy chair? Her napkin on the table? He folds them. More than once (just yesterday) he has reached to put away a mayonnaise jar she’s left out, but the lid—resting there, not screwed into the threads—comes loose in his hand. The jar bounces across the counter.

The Sunpaper, when she’s done, lies helter-skelter across couch cushions. New Yorkers lie folded back over the spine where she stopped reading. Her clothes, when she dresses, hang loose. Her T-shirt collars are all vees. She’ll never wear a turtleneck.

Sheri opens, unfastens, switches on, loosens. Michael tightens, shuts, locks. He moves warily through the house. Danger, he knows, accompanies disorder.

She recalls their life in Montana where blue sky climbed up and always. Driving east out of the Rocky Mountains, she gasped at the unfolded plains, so vast and curving. Through a window over her kitchen sink, she saw an uncontained mountain, an everyday invitation from geography and distance. Ascend, it said. Go.

Now: Baltimore with its constricted roads and looming buildings, its leaden sky crowded out by smokestacks and too many trees. On Sefton Avenue, houses sit not much more than a broomstick-length apart. Through a window over her kitchen sink, she sees a garage built of brick. And next door, another garage built of brick.

But nearby, the grocery store parking lot sits atop a small rise. Sometimes, there to get eggs or bananas, she watches an exuberant full moon climb the open sky above the tire shop.