Amber greets the morning by throwing open every window. It is cooler with lower humidity than it has been for a month. She bought an air quality monitor -- which tells her ours isn't quality -- and wants so to appease it that she assures me we will have open windows in deepest January. If I care to complain, she will point me toward the chest of comforters and suggest I might need an additional sweater. That disc's green ring trumps potential hypothermia. I shall freeze to death with healthy lungs.

Amber would not allow the air conditioner shut off even when we were on our vacation, but this declaration on the last days of August feels like welcoming autumn through our door, a guest I have no urge to greet so soon.

We settle on the sofa, where I poke about the internet while she reads her biology textbook cover to cover and takes notes on index cards. I ask her some questions about a schedule, something we might do that I want to ensure works for her. She snaps that she is timing herself -- not that anyone asked her to -- and I need to leave her alone. We sit eight inches apart on our loveseat. This is another bane of autumn. She resumes taking a class, and our living room becomes her study. She surrounds her seat with cast-off papers and books she does not permit me to move, organize, or clean until mid-December. The Amber of Summer, though she works as a vet tech, must cede ground to the Amber of Autumn.

Next week, I will return to work. When I left, I knew we would be down three teachers -- two retirements and a promotion. Another went because the facility made an unwise decision, and she made one better for her. The teaching staff at this maximum-security juvenile detention facility had never been robust. Owing to its bureaucracy, the state cannot advertise these positions until September, though they knew about two of them for a year. I am unbothered by my work as a concept -- I do my job well when permitted -- but this puts a poisonously dysfunctional system father out of whack. I do all I can within my job description but will act my wage and not as an unappreciated martyr.

Amber and I walk to pick up her car from the charger, taking the excuse to get ice cream cones. I ask her what she would change if she could restart the summer. She says she would change nothing. I find this hard to believe. I enumerate what I would have liked more of, but much of it falls more into the category "Some of." I wanted bonfires, barbecues, and drive-ins. I wanted outdoor concerts -- or, frankly, any concerts. Amber and I lead dull lives, which she assures me suits her fine. Home with the cats is where most she wants to be.

Amber likes fall better. The nights are cooler, there is pumpkin spice and apple cider, it is "spooky season," and she is back in school. She concedes that fall would be superior if it bled directly into spring. She openly fantasizes about living a life where we can annually follow autumn across the world, never meeting winter. It is nothing more than talk. Few feasible ways appear where this could happen for us, and she wouldn't care for it in practice.

My ice cream cone is satisfying, despite at once losing its structural integrity beneath the cherry dip. It isn't warm or sunny enough to justify this melting, so I blame it on the vagaries of soft serve made in-house. Even as I confuse this Wednesday for Saturday, a summer privilege, I am aware that this late summer day is good on its own, by its virtues, and not in comparison.

I do not feel I have accomplished enough, though I should have a sci-fi novel, Sorry about the Apocalypse, on query to agents this autumn and the reprint of We Shadows out October 1. I could always have done more, but I did some -- which is more than I have done in other summers and more than many do in years.

The closing act of our summer is the Dutchess County Fair, which is better than the Ulster County Fair. We went to the latter earlier in the summer, but it was all abrasive sun, rickety rides, and a booth whose wares embraced fascism as fashion. We went there hoping to hang out with Ingrid and her Child, but Amber advocated going early, thus dehydrating us and exhausting the potential for the fair hours before Ingrid set foot within ten miles of the entrance gate.

Dutchess County's fair has shopping, booths to attend, shows to watch, and rides that are more numerous and solid (though they require individual tickets or a wristband). It is an experience we can enjoy to varying degrees from open to close if I am permitted refills of a beverage.

Kristina is the only friend we can induce to join us this year, though she is hours later than she intended for predictable reasons (she works too hard and rests too little). I am not bothered. I know and love Kristina and have tempered my expectations of her punctuality. It is never personal. If she could always be on time, she would be.

We wander about the fair for hours -- not in a coherent way but following our whims. Amber and Kristina are more interested in the animals. I am in the shopping and free samples. Amber nixed getting ride tickets this year, feeling she has endured rides enough in Lake George and Maine.

We pause in the shade of a van while we enjoy a container of fried pickles Kristina purchased. We can see a cowboy show where the man flings knives at his partner. He then lights a whip on fire, which he accidentally wraps around his throat, choking and burning. He throws it to the ground, where it sets some grass alight. His dog comes to look at it, unconcerned.

I pop some overly horseradished fried avocado in my mouth, grinning. "I am having the best day."

I cannot say how many desire to imagine a better life while trying to stop a friendly goat from giving a tongue kiss. Before me, that number was not zero. It is a cliche that every millennial wants shared property with friends on which we all have separate homes but can meet in our courtyard. With Kristina near me -- and the goat still sure my mouth is incomplete without its saliva -- I ache keenly. I could make dinners for more than just Amber when she is around to have them or go to another loved one's for a meal. We would have chicken and goats, cherished dogs wandering about, and a random eight-year-old who seems to belong to everyone.

Amber and I cannot even get property on which we could have a solitary pygmy goat and a few chickens. I don't know how we would change that. Or I do not see it changing in our current personal and societal trajectories. Kristina, who would be a member of this improvised family, does not have the means. Though we buy her trinkets and food, we could not support her. I cannot imagine anyone else whom I would want on our compound. If we do not have a forge at the ready, Kest would have no use for us. Without Kest, there is no Daniel. I doubt anyone else would be up for joining our cult compound.

The friendliness of people at the fair is unusual in the world outside. When I return to a stall where a woman has pasta to sample, she says, "Welcome back."

"Oh," I say, startled that she is breaking the social contract that would allow me to eat as many pasta samples as I wish. "You aren't supposed to realize."

"You have a distinctive energy," she says. "I like to watch people here and figure out what they do."

"And what do you think I do?" I irresistibly ask.

She gives me a second look. "I don't know about you. You're a mystery."

I tell her I am a writer and teacher. She is more interested in juvenile murderers than my publishing travails, which may be no surprise. That I -- a walking marshmallow -- do not flinch away from the culprits of front-page headline felonies does seem improbable. I assure her that the secret is finding teenagers tedious in their ignorance and posturing well before one considers their string of violent robberies.

As I later look at rocks, a man asks if I am remote or in-person. I answer that I am in person, which is evident because I am in front of him. I wonder what joke he is making. Am I standing too close to him? Amber calls me over to look at her newest discovery, but the man finds me again to tell me that he is teaching at a college and struggles with his students. I do not know him, though he appears to be someone I might have passed at the fair today. I keep seeing a few people I remember by the loose curling threat on the back of their shirts or the minor case of rosacea. What makes me distinct? I am not going to ask this man. If he overheard me with the pasta woman -- and this is no guarantee -- it had been over three hours, far too long to have retained me.

While we are shopping, a band on the road outside equipped with trash can lids as instruments begins playing "Hooked on a Feeling." I think, at first, this is a recording. I had been feeling jubilant. This music, cheesy as it is, only exacerbates that. I dance up to Amber, who ignores me to buy a lemon tree. I turn my attention to Kristina, who often blushes and flusters when Amber and I tease her. This only makes us want to do it more.

I cannot goad Kristina into joining me -- too embarrassing -- but she tolerates me better than my wife.

"If I dance next to you," I tell her, "it makes it less weird that I am doing this among the gears of commerce."

A diminutive woman, pushing the upper edge of her seventies, interrupts to say I never need an excuse to dance. "I was part of Studio 54! I know these things."

Amber and I want to take care of Kristina. She does not like people buying things for her, even asking what she owed us for her free ticket when she entered the fair. (Nothing. It was free, though Amber jokes Kristina could work it off petting her kitty, a double entendre that went over our dear friend's precious head for five minutes.)

At evening's end, Amber returns to a tent to buy cans of hard cider. Between pouring out samples, the woman behind the table tries to give Kristina the hard sell. Kristina does want a four-pack, but she does not have the money to splurge, asking instead where it is available outside the fair. The woman names a grocery store but adds as quickly and with unnecessary sarcasm that it will be marked up, and she needs to buy it here. The seasonal flavor Kristina wants won't be available for a month.

"I can just buy it for you," I tell Kristina.

She claims I don't have to. I say I will buy it for myself then and hand it to her to hold in perpetuity. When she tries again to demur, I get in her face, smiling, telling her I am doing this. She tries to argue again that I don't have to. I kiss the tip of her nose, which startles her enough that she lets me buy her booze.

"I'll buy you something," she says when I've handed over the money.

"You buy us plenty." What good is my summer pay if I don't spend it on loved ones on a late summer night, a week before returning to work?

last watched: Little Demon
reading: Nona the Ninth