Forty years of marriage: he forgot every anniversary, and remembered every one

Auntie Gui has a husband the whole neighborhood knows about. Old Gui, forty years married, cannot hold on to a single anniversary.

Their wedding anniversary: forgotten. Her birthday: forgotten. Even her fiftieth birthday, which was also the year of their — no, not the golden, the silver — anyway. Forgotten. Every year she braced herself and waited, and every year he ate his dinner and read his newspaper in perfect ignorance. She picked fights with him over it. He scratched his head and apologized. "My memory's bad. Don't hold it against my memory."

The children all took their mother's side. Only her oldest friend saw what was actually happening. "Don't just look at what he forgets. He forgets the date. He doesn't forget anything else."

What else, exactly. The small things. Auntie Gui's phone alarm list is alarming in itself; the children scrolled through it once and found that three days before every important date there is an alarm labeled buy flowers. Each one, without exception, has been deleted, because he "can't remember what it was for." The notes stuck to the fridge have changed over the decades; the current one reads: Gui's blood pressure pills, one in the morning, half at night. Her stomach is bad, and he has made her congee for forty years, controlling the heat like an instrument. Her rheumatism means every chair she sits in has a cotton cushion on it. When a cushion wears out it gets replaced, and nobody has ever seen who does it.

Her friend said, "He didn't forget the anniversary. He broke it into three hundred and sixty-five days."

The turn came last year. His annual checkup flagged the early signs of mild cognitive impairment, and the doctor told him to start doing memory exercises. Auntie Gui was restless for days. She began keeping his dates for him, reminding him of things. Then, sorting through old belongings, she found a tin box.

Inside were forty years of torn-off calendar pages. On every page, the same day was circled in a clumsy hand: their anniversary.

On the earliest page, from 1985, there was a line of small writing beside the circle, in the hand he had as a young man. She said yes today. From now on, every year on this day, be a little better to her.

Forty years. Forty circles. Not one missed.

What frightened him was not forgetting the anniversary. It was that life might run too smoothly, and he would slacken. So he didn't trust his head. He trusted one circle a year, renewing the promise to be a little better to her, forty times over.

She carried the stack of pages to him and asked, "Tell me the truth. Do you remember, or don't you?"

He looked at the circles for a long moment, and then he understood his own defect. He scratched his head. "The calendar's circled, so I remembered. Not thinking of it on the day means I'm the kind of man who... doesn't use his head." He paused and added the honest part. "Things I've promised you feel solid once they're on paper. In my head they just hang there."

She laughed in spite of being angry. From that day the household memory system was upgraded. The calendars are no longer thrown away. A large one hangs on the wall, and he circles the important dates himself in red pen. This year, their fortieth, there is a line in his handwriting beside the circle: Forty years exactly. I'm cooking tonight. Don't argue.

He made four dishes that night, and the salt was exactly right. She finished eating before she said anything. "I can tell. This time you really remembered. You even circled that I like things light."