On his first Monday in retirement, Branko sorted all the cups by size. On the second he took over the shopping, and on the third he began preparing breakfast before his wife Nada woke. She still worked in accounting and previously spent the first twenty minutes of her day alone, with coffee and an open window. Now a man greeted her with an omelet, a shopping plan, and a question about why she looked as though none of it suited her.
One morning Nada said she missed silence. Branko removed the plate too quickly, sending a fork to the floor. They spoke all day only to ask whether there was bread. That evening she went to the kitchen for water and found him studying old photographs of colleagues. In the last, he stood beside the machine they had shut down when he left. Beside it on the table lay a household work schedule he had drawn himself.
She sat opposite him. He said he did not know where he ought to be between seven and three. For thirty six years there had been a definite place. Nada admitted she feared every need for solitude would now look like rejection of him. She did not want to become his new supervisor. Branko laughed for the first time that day and said he had never tolerated supervisors well, even those he brought breakfast.
They agreed on mornings without a program. Branko began going for a walk while she drank her first coffee, and once a week he played table tennis with a former colleague. He did not enjoy it immediately. He returned too early and checked whether anything needed repairing, but he was learning to sit without a task. On Saturdays Nada proposed outings they did not have to earn by washing windows first. The first Saturday they visited a museum where they had sent guests for years but never gone themselves.
Before a painting of the sea, Branko asked whether she remembered their first vacation. She remembered the wrong bus, a broken fan, and his determination to find her cold cherries. Suddenly she saw someone with whom she still had untold stories, rather than the man who had moved her cups. The following Monday, coffee waited on the table without an omelet or schedule. Branko was already walking. She left a message asking him to return by ten because she had taken the day off and wanted a long breakfast with him.