“You never responded to Michigan,” he said.

“I said no to Michigan,” she said.

“You didn’t,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “No. I don’t want to go to Michigan for vacation.”

“Where do you want to go?” he said.

“You need a want, Miles,” she said. “You brought it up, so you should know where we’re going. I should be hearing why where you want to go is right.”

“You don’t want to be with someone like that,” he said.

“Someone who knows what he wants?” she said. She gripped the glass, watching the foam recede into her last inch of beer.

“Wanting to go isn’t a want?” he said.

She sat with that a moment before saying, “We’ll go to Texas,” as if they’d been discussing Texas as an option all along. “West Texas for two weeks.”

“Are we having a fight?” he said.

It came out like a burp. But if it was going to get asked, he was glad he’d managed to ask it before she did. If they were, that is. Having a fight.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Then why did you ask it?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said again, officially giving up any advantage he’d gained by demonstrating he had no idea what to do with it.

“Well, then think about it,” said his wife, “and get back to me.”

“Okay, well,” she said, stopping the chair again with her foot, “when you say it like that, I start filling in blanks. I know it’s not that you don’t know, or don’t think so; it’s that you don’t want to tell me what you actually think. Or you think you’ve already told me, and you’re trying to make me work it out on my own. So. I start trying to think of things you might know but wouldn’t want to say. I look at something like what you just asked, about quitting your job, the way you’re letting it hang there in the air between us, and I start thinking things like maybe it’s a threat. Like maybe you’re saying that if I can’t figure out some way to appease your chronic insecurity, you’ll come home one afternoon with your tie all loosened and your job all gone. Is that what you’re saying?”

“How could you not know?” she said.

He shrugged.

“Fuck that,” she said. “Tell me.”

In truth, he’d wanted to talk it through with her since the problem first came to his attention. His wife was an expert at coring the layers of Miles’s anxiety for nuggets of relevant truth. She saw him faster than he could see himself, which was how she’d managed to be right from the start—he was scared of her—and also why he hadn’t realized it until now.

When she did speak, Miles’s wife was careful. She was attentive to what she said, how she said it, and why, making her pauses more loaded, her half of the conversation more compelling, and her criticisms more devastating. Miles was messy by comparison, but he preferred to think of it as a strategy. It wasn’t that he was incapable of getting it together; he was messy because carefulness in communication made him uneasy. It was too tactical, too close to dishonesty. It was a technique for people who were unwilling to confront the consequences of their true feelings. When Miles wasn’t ready to reveal something, he’d made a practice of forcing himself anyway, at least when he could remember to, and he almost always felt better after doing so. Whatever the aftermath, he’d done what he could. The weight was lifted. A burden shared is a burden halved. Having it out beat holding it in.

“I am,” he said. “You’re saying how quickly the winds can change. I’d better watch my step.”

“No,” she said. “I’m saying, I’d like to love you.”

“But?” he said.

“But you’re making it hard,” she said.

Miles felt his skin sloughing off. His bones had quit too. He’d be nothing but a mess of hair and organs and blood after this, and she would like to love him.

“I think it’s fair,” he said, “to want to be able to live my life without feeling that I’m about to lose you to a grocery trip.”

“A hike,” she said.

“And you wanted me to know all this for what?” he said. “You wanted to leave, and now you’re not, and you’d like to love me, and you wanted me to carry all this around with me for the rest of my life, for what?”

“This is what you asked for,” she said.

“This is not what I asked for,” he said.

“It’s what you ask for all the time,” she said.

“What do I ask for?” he said.

“How I feel,” she said. “You ask me to tell you. So, this is how I felt.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “It’s a little late.”

“You think a death threat’s irrelevant?”

“I was talking about your trash-can bullshit,” she said. “You think you’re the only one getting death threats?” She stopped spinning and stared at the screen for a second before typing something in, then spinning again.

Miles stewed. He hadn’t meant to make this about the threats, but all he could think now was that Lily had no idea what she was talking about. No idea what he’d been going through, or how hard he’d worked to avoid making it her problem. Maybe she’d read some comments online, received a few emails, but he had a drawerful in his kitchen! He won.

“I understand,” he said, “that someone of your talent and intelligence would want to find a more proactive solution for our nothing problem. And what I’m saying is . . . Please help me. Help me do that. I can’t just pack up and go find something to believe in. I’m sorry, but I can’t. Maybe you can, but you don’t know what it’s like for me. You don’t have kids. I can’t just leave a job like this and start a bakery.”

“I have a son,” she said.

“I’ve done good in my life,” Miles insisted, annoyed with the way she was looking at him, like he’d let her down once again by being so typically Miles. He would have known she had a son if she had told him. Or, if she had told him and he’d forgotten, wasn’t forgetting important personal information about a coworker a human enough flaw to be forgiven this once? “I worked on a show,” he said. “People loved it. They wrote papers.”

Despite the popularity of the adage, Miles did not believe youth was wasted on the young. The pleasures of youth were the by-product of its shallowness, the ability to feel things deeply and then forget them, to hurry from one moment to the next, taking life as for granted as possible. It wasn’t a waste; it was the point.

The pleasures it provided had only served to underline Miles’s creeping suspicion that his life was becoming unmanageable. A single present sentence from his daughter had been enough to make him feel invincible. It felt suddenly so pathetic. His life felt small, and far from him, and the comforts of the machine were being converted directly into back fat.