A man and a woman stand side by side. The man paints houses and the woman is a professor of literature. They have nothing in common between them besides waiting alone at the same bus station on a rainy night, and that is enough to make them friends.

The subject of astrological signs comes up. The man’s birthday is June 24 and the woman’s is July 3.

 “That makes us both Cancers,” says the man.

And that is two things in common. So they might as well exchange phone numbers.

“What are the traits of a Cancer?” asks the woman. “Do we metastasize?”

She smiles at her own joke. She’s wearing a blazer and a white blouse with a coffee stain on the collar, and her curly dark hair is bundled on top of her head.

“We’re attached to home,” the man says. “We can be sources of comfort to other people, but we can also be sources of stress. We can become manipulative or vengeful.”

“Do you find yourself manipulative or vengeful?”

“Generally, I don’t. But it’s possible other people do.”

The woman looks out through the windows of the bus station at the slick black field and the new moon hovering above it—which means there is no moon tonight, just a breach in the sky. The other people waiting in the lobby are standing in groups of three or four. A little boy is watching a cartoon on a tablet with a thick rubber case, and his mother keeps turning the volume down.

“I can be vengeful,” she says. “In college, if a teacher didn’t think I was very special, or if he complimented another student more than me, I would give him a bad evaluation. I would call the class useless and say how much I wished I had been taught by another professor in the department. I would name a specific professor, so they believed me.”

“That’s not so bad,” says the man. “I left my first wife while she was pregnant. But that’s not so much getting revenge as opening yourself up to it.”

“And did she ever get revenge?”

“The opposite. She raised our daughter on her own. I only recently got back in touch with her—my daughter, I mean.”

He rubs his bare forearm with the blunted nails of his right hand.

“Cancerous.”

“Maybe we are cancerous,” the woman agrees. She smiles again, acknowledging the pun. “Where did you learn so much about astrology?”

“I read Cosmopolitan,” he says earnestly. “I’m making more of an effort to understand women.”

This time she gives a genuine, astonished laugh. A flush comes into her cheeks and forehead. Then she apologizes for laughing.

“That’s good of you,” she says. “It really is.”

“After the second wife I thought I must be doing something wrong.”

“You do lots of stupid things when you’re younger,” the woman says. “In love, and so on.”

“Did you?”

“I wrote a book. But that was just a flash in the pan. I didn’t do anything after that, besides get tenured.”

“Stupid things in love, I mean.”

“Oh. Yes.”

The woman removes her phone from her pocket, unlocks it, and pretends to remind herself of the time when her bus is scheduled to arrive. Watching her, the man does the same. People continue passing in and out of the lobby, or seating themselves on the wire benches.

“It’s a little unusual to travel by bus,” the man says after a time. “Where are you going?”

“I’m visiting my parents. They’re up in Maine, and I never learned to drive. My father’s in hospice care.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. What he has, it’s funny actually—it’s cancer. Esophageal cancer. So I plan to spend some time with him, but I can’t miss too much work.

“Where are you going?” she asks, to change the subject.

“Heading home. I’ve been traveling, I saved up for a while. I have one stop left, in New York City. I’ve never been to New York City before.” The way he says “New York City” is slightly self-conscious.

“New York,” she says.

“I think everyone should take a long road trip at least once in their lives. See the country they live in.”

“Good advice. I’ll keep that in mind.”

The digital timetable on the wall alerts them both that they should be preparing now to leave the station.

“Where are you staying tonight?” she asks.

He tells her the name of the hotel, not expecting her to recognize it.

“I love hotels. Maybe love is too strong a word. I like them.”

“Me too,” he says. “Not that I stay in many.”

“No. But it’s a nice thing once in a while. I like how quiet they are inside, no matter what’s happening on the street.”

“I guess that’s the same reason I like them.”

“You don’t get lonely?”

“Don’t you?”

“Well, I guess I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

Pointlessly, the man moves his eyes over the waiting area. The woman crosses her arms and uncrosses them. Her sleeve conceals a tattoo of a miniature key in blue ink.

“Before I leave a hotel room,” she says, “I always make the bed. I fold the towels and hang them up. I straighten the lampshades and TV remotes and everything. I know they hire people to do that, and they probably come in after me and do it again, so it makes no sense what I do. It’s all just so perfect when you get there.”

“It seems wrong to leave things worse than you found them,” the man agrees.

When they part ways, he tells her that he hopes her father recovers, or at the very least has a tranquil death, and she commends him for reconnecting with his daughter. They say they will text or call each other soon. Then they board their buses, each sitting in a reclining seat beside a teenager wearing headphones or an old man swaddled in a coat, fast asleep. As her bus moves towards Portland, dark scenery streaming by, the woman reaches into her satchel and withdraws her laptop from its case. She responds to several testy emails from colleagues, shuts the laptop again, and closes her eyes, imagining all the ways she could sabotage their professional careers.

The man arrives in New York City while the woman is still on the bus. He takes a photograph of the silvery Manhattan skyline, but does not send it to anyone. After he checks in to his hotel, he rides the elevator up to his third-floor room and calls his daughter on the phone. They chat for twenty or thirty minutes, describing specific events in their lives. He wishes her luck with a presentation for a marketing class she’s taking and she promises to talk to him again soon. Then he removes a small plastic container from his suitcase and carries it into the bathroom. Rinsing his toothbrush in the sink, he notices a thumbprint streak of toothpaste on the shiny cold water handle. He holds a tissue under the faucet, wipes away the toothpaste, puts the tissue in the wastebasket, and reenters the bedroom. There he undresses, piling his clothes on the floor until he is wearing only boxers and an undershirt. He lifts up the thin hotel quilt, gets into bed, and turns onto his side, resting on top of the flat white sheets. He thinks of the woman at the bus station, standing in an empty room, admiring the cleanness and silence.