From Collected Stories, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

“What did we say? Forty-nine by twenty-two?” He held the measuring rod open in his hands.

She had brought the stepladder from his kitchen and was clearing the top shelf of a closet. She looked down at him. “And thirty-five inches high,” she said.

At a corner of the room where a bookcase now stood, he measured a space where her chest of drawers might be placed.

“It’s like the first act of Figaro,” she said. “All this measuring.”

“Only—that’s for a bed.”

“A chest…