I WOKE UP to an empty room. Nelly had left for work early and dropped off Shira at school on her way. She was supposed to start work every day at nine, but insisted on being at the office at eight. To set an example. “To help these people realize their potential, because potential is not something they’re short of here in the south,” she’d repeat her worn mantra, as if the people of the south were another moisturizer she had taken upon herself to market to the masses. I have to admit I was skeptical at first. When out of nowhere Nelly suggested we move to a remote farm in the south, I didn’t buy her sudden Zionist urge to settle and develop the Negev. But after two months here, I’m not so sure anymore. You never know with Nelly. Most of the time she can’t stand the world, but every so often she gets these bursts of compassion, which she herself can’t explain. She once called me from the car, and sounding rather distraught said she had picked up a homeless Russian she found on the street. She ordered me to switch on the water heater and clear my wet clothes from the bathroom. Only after I said that if Shira caught AIDS it was on her did she come to her senses, dropping the guy off on the Namir highway with two hundred shekels in his pocket.

And yet, Nelly wasn’t one to move to the south out of purely altruistic motives. It’s tempting to believe we moved because she wanted the promotion, but that wasn’t the only reason either. Even though we never discuss it, I know we moved because of me. Because I didn’t deliver. Didn’t make good on the promise I made on our first date in that dive bar in downtown Haifa.

During our twelve years of marriage, how many times have we discussed that promise? Three? Four? Hard to say exactly. But I do remember what she told me a few months after that first date, when we went on our first vacation together—a bed-and-breakfast in the Galilee. She lay on the bed in a white bathrobe, half naked, ran her fingers through my hair and said that was what had won her over. The promise that by forty, I’d make my first million. She explained it wasn’t my desire to get rich that attracted her. It wasn’t the money, it was the drive. It was how I said it—not as an aspiration, but a cold fact. “That’s what makes you so special,” she said, and quickly added, “makes us special. The drive to push forward. To succeed unapologetically.”