A Dip in The Floor

The dip appeared on a Tuesday, between the kitchen and the hallway, a soft depression in the hardwood about the size of a welcome mat. Sandra noticed it when her coffee tilted in her mug on the way to the table.

She mentioned it at breakfast.

"There's a dip," she said.

"Hm," said her husband, Paul, not looking up.

"By the hallway."

"I'll take a look," he said, in the tone he used when he would not take a look.

She stepped around it on her way out the door. It was easy enough to step around.

By Thursday, it was deeper. The edge of it caught the afternoon light, and you could see the shadow it made, a small valley in the floor, perhaps three inches at its lowest point. The cat, Gerald, had taken to sitting beside it and staring into it with the particular attention cats give to things that are not there.

Paul's mother, Evelyn, came for dinner that weekend. She was walking to the bathroom when she stopped and looked down.

"What's this?" she said.

"Oh, the dip," Sandra said from the kitchen. "Watch your step."

"It's quite deep."

"Paul's going to look at it."

Paul, from the living room: "I'm going to look at it."

Evelyn looked at it for a moment longer, then stepped around it carefully, holding the wall, and went to the bathroom. At dinner, she said the chicken was very good, and Sandra thanked her, and no one mentioned the dip again.

It was deeper by November. Sandra had started to think of it not as a dip but as a hollow, though she didn't use this word aloud because it seemed like the kind of word that would require a conversation she didn't have the energy for. It had spread slightly, the way a bruise spreads, and now extended almost to the baseboard on one side.

She had taken to keeping a folded bath towel at the kitchen door so guests would know, without being told, that there was something to watch for. Most guests appreciated this. They stepped over the towel and into the kitchen without asking about it, which Sandra found, on balance, easier for everyone.

Her friend Diane came for lunch in November and said, stepping over the towel, "Oh, I love what you've done in here, is that a new light fixture?"

Sandra looked up at the light fixture, which was not new. "Yes," she said.

"It's wonderful," said Diane, and sat down, and they had soup.

In December, Paul's foot went through.

He was in his socks, heading to the kitchen for water, when his right foot broke through the floor mid-stride, and he plunged in up to the shin. He stood there for a moment, one leg down, the floor around his leg perfectly intact, looking at the wall above the stove with an expression Sandra could not read.

She came out of the bedroom.

"You okay?"

"Fine," he said. He pulled his leg up. The hole closed around it on the way out, or seemed to, because afterwards there was no hole, only the hollow, slightly wider now, and Paul's sock was damp in a way neither of them commented on.

He got his water. He went back to bed.

"Maybe we should call someone," Sandra said from the doorway.

"In the new year," Paul said.

The children came home for Christmas. They were adults now, Nora and Ben, and they arrived within an hour of each other on the twenty-third, dragging bags, and they both noticed the hollow immediately and said nothing about it, which made Sandra feel something she couldn't name — a kind of warmth, almost, at how quickly they read the room and fell into line.

Nora stepped over it on her way to the refrigerator. Ben, who was taller, simply adjusted his gait in a way that reminded Sandra of how he had learned to duck under the doorframe of his old bedroom, automatically, without thinking.

On Christmas Eve, Sandra's brother-in-law, Terry, stepped into it by accident and lurched forward, catching himself on the counter. He turned around and looked at the hollow with what Sandra recognized as the beginning of a serious question.

"What is—"

"We're going to have someone look at it," Paul said, from the table, pleasantly.

Terry turned this over for a moment. He nodded. He came and sat down.

They played cards until midnight. The hollow was in Sandra's peripheral vision the whole time, and she found that if she didn't look directly at it, it was simply part of the room, the way the crack in the ceiling was part of the room, the way the window that didn't open fully anymore was part of the room. Things accumulated in a house. You learned to see past them.

In January, Gerald stopped sitting beside it and started sleeping in it.

He fit exactly. He lay curled at the lowest point and his sides rose and fell with his breathing, and Sandra stood at the kitchen door in the mornings and watched him sleep in the floor and drank her coffee and thought about calling a contractor, which she had been thinking about since November, and which continued to feel like something she would do when she had more time, when Paul was less busy, when the new year had fully settled into being the new year and not still feel like December in disguise.

Paul walked past Gerald on his way out each morning. "Good boy," he said, without stopping.

In March, Nora called.

"How's the floor?" she asked.

"We're going to get someone out to look at it," Sandra said. "In the spring."

"Okay," Nora said.

"How are you?"

"Good," Nora said. "Busy."

They talked for twenty minutes about other things. Before she hung up, Nora said: "It's just, if it's structural—"

"We're going to have someone look," Sandra said. "In the spring."

A pause. "Okay," Nora said. "I love you."

"I love you too."

In April, the hollow was large enough that they had stopped walking through that part of the house. They went around, through the dining room, which took a few extra steps but wasn't unreasonable. Sandra had moved the bath towel to the dining room entrance to redirect guests naturally, the way zoos redirect foot traffic away from exhibits that are under maintenance, and it worked quite well.

The kitchen was still fully functional.

The cat still slept in the hollow.

The floor around it was fine.

At Easter, Evelyn noticed the new traffic pattern and said, "Are you going around now?"

"It's just easier," Sandra said.

Evelyn nodded. She had raised children. She knew when something had been decided.

She went around.

They had a very good Easter. The ham was perhaps the best Sandra had made, and Paul said so, and Evelyn agreed, and outside the window, the crabapple tree had just begun to bloom, which it did every year, reliably, despite everything, which Sandra had always found to be one of the more quietly moving facts of her life.

"Same time next year?" Evelyn said, at the door, putting on her coat.

"Same time next year," said Sandra.

She closed the door. She stood in the hallway. In the kitchen, through the doorway she no longer used, she could see one edge of the hollow, and the tip of Gerald's tail moving slowly in the way it did when he was dreaming.

She went to bed.

In the morning, she thought, she would call someone.

She did not call anyone in the morning.

The crabapple bloomed.