The chrome had gone brass at the center, rubbed down to something warmer by fifty-three years of hands. Gerald set the wrench against the mounting bracket and leaned his weight into it the way he always did, left knee braced on the edge of the tub. The bar held. It always held.
Patrice wrote *4* at the top of the page, then drew a small box around it and pressed hard enough to leave a groove in the paper underneath. She stood in the kitchen and watched Gerald climb the painted stool - the one with the crack running up the left leg, the crack she'd been watching since 1987 - and reach the canned tomatoes down like it was nothing - like it had always been nothing. She wrote *stool* on the legal pad and then crossed it out and wrote *stool* again. On the way back through the hall she stopped at the bathroom door, looked at the tub, at the chrome bar gone warm and brass, and wrote a number she circled three times before she turned the page.
Gerald pulled the string on the fluorescent tube and they stood in the dark together for a moment before the light came. He ducked the low beam without looking, the way a man ducks a thing he stopped seeing decades ago - and put his hand flat on the workbench where the pine boards for Rosie's chest were clamped and waiting, the wood pale and new-smelling against the old oil smell of everything else down there. He said her name - *Rosie* - when he showed Patrice the dovetail joints he'd cut by hand, and he said it the way you say the name of someone you're building something for, which is different from other ways of saying a name. Patrice held her legal pad against her chest and looked at the single bare bulb above the stairs, the stairs with no railing - and didn't write anything down.
The step stool skated left on the buckled linoleum square and the cabinet door swung wide on its hinge and for one long second Gerald was just a man in the air, his socked foot finding nothing, his elbow grazing the refrigerator coil before his fist closed around the handle and held. Patrice's legal pad hit the floor spine-first and splayed open. Gerald stood with his forehead against the freezer door, breathing, the bourbon still on the shelf above him. The page that faced up said GRAB BARS / TUB / STAIR RAIL / LIGHTING - every letter in her handwriting, the ink pressed hard enough to groove the paper underneath.
Patrice read the number off the screen while the coffee maker finished its last hiss, four thousand two hundred and Gerald's knife scraped butter across the toast without stopping. The towel bar through the open door was white porcelain with a small chip at the left bracket she had been meaning to mention since the second Bush administration. Gerald folded the toast once along the middle crease, the way he had always folded it, and set it on the plate and looked at it. Outside the window the oak was doing what it always did in November - which was lose everything.
The new bar was chrome the way a hospital is chrome, bright and fingerprint-hungry, and Gerald pressed his palm flat against it once, heel to fingers, the tile cold through the grout lines beneath his feet. He looked at his hand there for a moment - then lifted the shaving kit by its cracked leather strap and hung it the same way he'd always hung it, the same hook of wrist, the bag swinging once and settling. The paper bag on the shelf above the washer still had the dish towel tucked around the old bar, the porcelain cool and wrapped like something you weren't ready to put in the trash but couldn't say why. Patrice walked past the doorway with a basket of folded sheets and didn't look in.
Gerald found the legal pad open on Rosie's bed, beside the flat-pack box with the German instructions and the four small bolts in a plastic bag - and he stood there reading Patrice's handwriting - *threshold strip, 3/4 inch, door 2* - in the room that still smelled like cedar chips from the hamster that had died in 2003. He picked up the bolt bag and set it down. On the windowsill, the ceramic rabbit Rosie had painted at camp, the one with the chipped ear and her name scratched into the glaze on the bottom - was pushed to the corner to make room for the measuring tape.
Gerald carried the measuring tape into the hall and stretched it from the bathroom door to the bedroom door and knelt to read the number off the floor, and when he stood he left a red mark on his knee from the threshold strip still in its packaging, the cardboard corner sharp where he'd opened it partway and stopped. The mark was the same place he always braced against the tub. He rolled the tape back into its case with his thumb and set it on the hall table, the small one with the drawer that stuck, the one they'd carried up four flights in Somerville in 1971 and promised each other they'd refinish - and he stood there a minute looking at the tape where it sat on the scratched wood. Then he went and got his level.
Patrice found the level on the hall table where Gerald had left it and carried it into the kitchen and set it on the counter beside the stove, the bubble floating just left of center the way it always had, the way it had floated left of center since they'd moved the stove out to paint in 1994 and moved it back not quite right. She stood looking at it for a moment, then opened the junk drawer and moved the rubber bands and the dead batteries aside until she found the pencil she was looking for, the one with the teeth marks at the eraser end that weren't hers. She wrote *stove* on the legal pad - and under it *floor*, and then she closed the drawer and looked at the pencil in her hand and didn't put it back.
Gerald found the grab bar catalogue on the kitchen table, the pages fanned open to a spread of brushed nickel and oil-rubbed bronze, and someone - Patrice, her handwriting - her red pen - had circled a model called the Comfort Series and written *Rosie's bathroom too? * in the margin, the question mark soft and small, the way you write something you're not sure you have the right to ask. He turned the page. The next spread showed a man and a woman in a white bathroom, both of them laughing at something outside the frame, their hands nowhere near the bars.
