She looked at me over her phone. Her squinting eyes were green hard candy, crushing me from beneath her furrowed eyebrows. The sounds of a car chase streaming into the living room had vanished, leaving us alone together, a yellow exclamation mark frowning at the living room.

We had lost network connection.

I stood and she watched me leave. In the computer room, I rebooted the router and the modem, that sacred and mystical dance to appease the technological gods. I returned to the silence of the living room. The yellow exclamation mark still glowered over the carpet. She didn’t look up.

I spent the next hour and a half on the line with customer service. The rep was all the way in the Philippines but I learned we were both Catholic. I told her about my day at work. She told me about her three children and how she loved dark chocolate. She could not fix my internet. We said goodbye, and I plodded back into the living room to find the TV black. She was in the kitchen, eyeing me between the cabinets. No amount of plugging and unplugging or red-button-mashing could resurrect the television set.

I heard the microwave slam. Open. Slam again. In the kitchen, she stepped aside for me to examine it. There was no light on the inside, no numbers on the screen. Add 30 seconds bought me no time. Behind me, I could feel the warmth of her phone, burning through its data plan from where she stood on the opposite end of the kitchen.

That night, we awoke in sweat. The air conditioner was non-responsive. I cleaned the drain pipe and flipped fuses and coaxed it and begged it. In the kitchen again, she stood in the open door of the freezer. For an instant, I saw her beauty, lit by a frosty incandescence, a sideways heaven-sent-beam of light, her glistening skin bathing in writhing icy smoke, her lips parted as though to speak to me, but in that moment of near connection, her eyes opened and saw me. And knew. Knew that the air conditioner and the microwave and the TV and the internet were beyond my repair, a trail of broken promises. And in that moment, the same instant my shoulders slumped, the light that cast on her died. The fridge gargled and sputtered, but I could not speak its language, though I tried into the night, a doomed counseling session. In the bedroom, alone, she slept.

By morning, the electricity was out. No point in trying to fix the fridge. The AC guy, Trevor, the gregarious father of two who liked cheap import beers and smiled wide before he cut a joke, shook my hand and wished me best. He said he’d be back (actually he said, “I’ll visit you again”) when the power was back on. I waved goodbye and there, in the door of the open garage, she stood, waving her phone.

Dead.

Inside, the laptop was giving her problems as well. She handed it to me like a misbehaving infant, passing the responsibility with arms straight, elbows locked, lips sealed.

The power company customer service representative was as nice a lady as you could hope to get and she knew her job well, all business nearly; she laughed at my jokes and appreciated my patience, though maybe they have to say that. There were no explanations. The bill was paid. Someone would come to fix it, but not today. Shortly after I thanked her and wished her well and her to me, my phone ran out of battery.

I trudged through the house, dragged my feet on the carpets. The clocks had stopped working, my watch, an anniversary gift, now a shackle. I could hear my heart beating out a plea in the absence of the appliance-hum, the picture-covered walls echoing nothing from the house’s occupants.

That evening found us in the backyard around a campfire. The birds chattered in the trees above us. Crickets sang. The hotdogs hissed and whispered on their spits. The fire laughed and cackled. The stars said peek-a-boo. And we two sat, with all the heat of the talking world between us, and she said nothing.