A refrigerator door had been slammed over every tag, leaving a word jumble of magnets beneath the laminated obscenities. This is not a table but a Bjursta, Leksvik, Melltorp, the unobtrusive slips correct him. A faucet dangles out of its spring, a cross between hose and watering can. Andrew toys with it, loosing an invisible spray at his wife. She scowls and reabsorbs herself in the countertop.

They’re remodeling the kitchen – at least, she is. That’s why they’re here. Erin to scavenge, Andrew to mask his apathy. He finds himself daily restraining the urge to tell her she’s the only one who’d spend much time in the room anyway – their couch is too hard for such honesty.

He wanders off towards a titillating earthy color in the distance. The object turns out to be a plush crocodile, as Andrew plunges into the children’s section. Leopard-print chairs with pink boa arms smile innocently up at him, unaware that should they succeed in enticing him to sit they would be naught but metal twigs against his adult bottom. He smirks at them, aware of their weakness. He’s not big on pink anyway.

He stumbles into a child’s bedroom. An intruder in jeans, the night sky on the walls glares down at him. They know the man with the weak jaw doesn’t belong in their dreamworld. His dreams are broken; worse yet, they are forgotten. His inner child choked on cynicism long ago. Still, it mumbles from the grave at the sight of a canopy vaulting over the five-foot bed. Andrew crushes him again as the word “cute” flashes past, dismaying anew at Erin’s desire for offspring.

Well, a boy he could handle. Playing catch in the yard, showing him how the heater works … he could love the kid, ruffle his hair, be proud. But a girl would be all Erin’s, until the necessary screening of boyfriends once she was old enough – and she would never be old enough. Sure, he could have kids. Not now, never now, but he could, in some unforeseeable nearly-thirty future, when the closest he and the guys got to partying was Superbowl Sunday. Someday they would be here for cribs and plastic nipples.

Now he’s in an adult bedroom. The area seems to be a mock-up of an entire house. It gives him the feeling of being in a crime scene, and Andrew nearly raises an eyebrow when the tags say not “Exhibit A” but “Lagom.” He tries to put the blackened cherry bed in his home, to see himself sleeping, yawning, making love in it. He can’t. It’s too sterile, impersonal. He prefers the old oak frame with the washed-out covers, still rife with homey smells of fresh dirt and stale sweat. The cat probably pissed on it again in their absence.

Damn cat. He preferred Winston, the golden retriever he’d cared for since birth at his grandmother’s farm. The dog was quite almost dead, but managed to drag on and remind all who cared to know of Andrew as a child, grinning and muddied. Neither of them had the time or energy for their old antics anymore. Andrew trudged on to the next room.

He was back to the kitchen, staring at the back of his wife as she examined the cabinets. Her posture was calm, that of a young doe taking her draught from the stream. The harsh light calmed for her, lapping over waves of brown, searching out caramel highlights and caressing them into shrapnel. She turned to a profile, sharp nose somehow gentle on her face. Erin was as her wedding day for him, beautiful and serene as she beheld what she knew she would have to love each day for the rest of her life.

“Do you think we could bear it?” She was talking about the room, but it wasn’t the question he answered.

“If you could, I’d love to.” Andrew wrapped around her waist for a moment, trying to show her where he was. Under the cliché little garden arch he tried to kiss her again. But she was still in Ikea.

“Andy!” she hissed. “We’re in public.” With that she turned back to the wood, stamping out the moment with a click of her sensible flats.

Leaving the store with a figuratively empty wallet, Andrew remembered with a twinge of guilt that he was actually Swedish.