This isn't working, she thought again and again.

Now they sit, back in the truck, rumbling through stop-andgo traffic on the inaptly-named Independence Boulevard. Miriam doesn't feel independent. She feels trapped. Shackled.

"My wife is dead," Louis suddenly says as they're sitting at a red light.

Miriam blinks. It's so unexpected, a boat anchor thrown overboard, a jarring splash.

He keeps talking: "I lied to you earlier. I said she left me. That's true only in the… dumbest way. She's dead. That's how she left me."

Miriam looks down on the floor mat, expects to see her jaw sitting down there, unhinged, the tongue flopping about like a dying fish.

"I don't know what to say," is all she can say.

Louis sucks in a deep breath that he doesn't seem to exhale.

"I killed her," he says.

Miriam's not easy to surprise. She's seen many things, and over time, those things act like steel wool; they abrade any presuppositions she has about the world. She's seen an old black lady taking a shit on the side of the highway. She once watched a woman beat a man to death with his own fake leg because she thought he was cheating on her. She's seen blood and vomit and car wrecks and X-rays where dudes have weird stuff shoved up their asses (like light-bulbs and 8-track cassettes and rolled-up comic books) and at least two instances where guys were stomped to death by the horses they were trying to fuck. By now, the human animal is hardly a mystery; his depravity, his madness, his sadness, all these things are all well-catalogued in her mind, and she's not even thirty years old yet.

But Louis. She didn't expect this.

Him? A killer?

"I was drunk," he explains. "We had a good night. It was warm. We ate dinner out on the patio of our favorite restaurant, this… this little café that overlooked a river. We talked about where we were going, what we were doing. We talked about having kids. About how it was time – maybe not time to try for children, but maybe time to stop trying not to. If that makes sense. We were laughing, and we both had margaritas, and–"

He stops then. Dams up the stream; closes the floodgates. His eyes are steel dots – gun barrels pointed at the horizon, or at nothing at all.

Miriam has an image in her head of Louis wrapping his giant hands around his wife's neck and choking her the way you squeeze a pimple – maybe a tequila worm made him do it, maybe the worm crawled up out of his windpipe and bored deep inside the meat of his big brain.

"We got in the car, and I was dizzy and all torn up from those drinks, but I didn't think anything of it, because I felt like we were unstoppable, that the road was wide open. I lost control of the car five minutes into the trip back home. It wasn't raining or anything, and I'd driven that road a hundred times before, but there was this one curve, and – I took it too fast, reacted to it too slow, and the road followed along the river, and…"