“What’s this?” she said. It was The Green Road.

“Oh, that old thing,” I said. “The Free Press said it had promise, but never got around to saying what that promise was.”

“You never told me you were a writer,” she said, sitting down on the bed.

“Nobody ever told me I was a writer, either,” I said. I must have sounded a little prickly, because she kissed me then and said, “I think it’s pretty good. Not bad, anyway.”

Then she looked at me in a strange way. Like she’d found something to distrust.

“I want you to know,” she said, “I won’t be used.”

“Baby,” I said, and I meant it, “I would never use you.”

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m not on earth to be anyone’s inspiration.”

I didn’t really know what she meant, so I just kissed her. “Relax,” I said. “I got my own voice.”

As it happened, though, my own voice wasn’t doing much for me. Everything I wrote turned clean sheets of white paper into great balls of crap. I just couldn’t get an idea worth anything or a sentence worth typing. But it didn’t seem to matter. I had Helen. What we had was what the philosophers talked about. Live for today. Live in the moment. Be here now. That was us. We just lived a life together. If the words weren’t coming for me, that was okay. I had my job, I had Helen. We were happy.

Then I started to hear stories at the factory. They were laying men off, men who’d been there for years. Men with families. And one day the supervisor called me into his office, and gave me a check, and said he was sorry.

Helen said she’d work, but with the factory laying off, every wife and girlfriend and mother and daughter in the area was looking for work. Pretty soon, we had nothing.

My wife called. She wanted a divorce and she wanted her share of the house. The house was sold, and with my share of the money—minus her alimony—Helen and I moved into a new apartment. It had hot water, but apart from that it was no palace.

Still, during that time we became even closer. We started to tell each other everything we knew about ourselves. Filling in the gaps, Helen called it. I told her about my pa and his fists, and my ma and her drinking. She told me about her childhood on a farm, way out in the middle of nowhere. I told her about riding across America, and she told me about going to farm college and one day, halfway through a lecture about the importance of manure, realizing that anything would be better than farming.