The silver pickup trudged along the highway, the tinted windows left half open, revealing two tufts of cottonball hair set atop two liver-spotted foreheads. The old man and woman had been married 52 3/8 years. They could remember when they counted only the half years but couldn’t remember when they wore each new piece with the pride of a four-and-a-half-year old and didn’t see them as lead-filled measuring cups that hung from their limbs with each passing fraction of a year.

They were on their way home from the house of their daughter who was a successful lawyer and a very devoted mother and could make a key lime pie with half the calories and twice the taste in a fourth of the time. They knew she threw out the peanut crackle fudge they brought up special when she thought they weren’t looking. The sugar would go right to her thighs and keep her from the gray pants with the sharp creases that looked like success and the black dress with the slits that made her blush but smelled of her husband’s devotion. The old man and woman knew she threw it out but pretended not to hear the thud as the candy hit the empty metal bottom of the wastebasket. The woman could still picture the ribbons that were their daughter’s favorite shade of lavender shake from the jolt.

They fished out the cellophane-wrapped confection and shared it between them. He bit and chewed, bit and chewed, while she swallowed chocolaty chunks whole, washing them down with stale-tasting saliva and the fervent hope her daughter wouldn’t rave about the taste when she called next month.

Their daughter, a child under one arm, a pie tethered to the other, successfully placed the first in the old man’s arms, the second in the oven, and sped calmly out the door, her hastily called devotions and baking instructions hanging in her wake.

The child screamed and howled in the old man’s arms, stopping only when the old woman stuck a still sugar-coated finger in his mouth. She reveled in the soft wet of his tiny lips and tongue until the daughter’s husband came home. As the husband said hello-good-bye the old woman reluctantly slipped out her cold dry thumb and watched the child hungrily lap from his lips the last bit of love his mother had thrown away.

They were silent on the dark drive home, his bleary gaze anchored to the infinite yellow lines. She stared at his shadowy form, illuminated by streetlights every three heartbeats, lit for two, then plunged back into a light black that had no effect on her ability to see him. Still intent on the stream of yellow he ­approached and left behind, the old man reached into the worn pocket of his corduroys and pulled out the last piece of fuzz-spotted fudge, placing it in the cup holder. The old woman took the old man’s hand in hers across the armrest, and took the fudge with the other. Holding it between two dry fingers, she bit and chewed.