Gary looks at me. “They’re not vegan.”

“Of course they are. They’re puppets!”

“They’re not. In fact, Nick asked me where they could get ribs.”

I fling myself back against the headrest. “This is why we’re broke.”

“You should have told me you were doing a shop!”

“You should have told me you had the food-preferences talk!”

I recline the seat and try to close my eyes, knowing I should check my hotel app for last-minute lodging for the following night, but it isn’t long before I feel the car slow to a crawl. Sitting up, I see the traffic stalled, snaking along the posted signs for scheduled construction. Gary grabs his phone and opens his favorite GPS app—Waze—which is the opposite of my favorite GPS app—Google Maps. In minutes, he’s being bossed around to get off the Mass. Pike and rerouted onto secondary roads.

“Why bother?” I say. “It’s always wrong.”

“It’s not always wrong.”

“Why do you always defend her?”

“Because she’s always right.”

But within minutes, just as I’d predicted, we’re lost, miles past the last strip malls and gas stations and fast-food outposts. I turn my app on instead, which leads us back onto the same highway his app had instructed us to leave. Gary turns to me, expecting a snarky remark, but I say nothing, and we drive in silence: him looking at the road, me looking out the window at the blur of colorful foliage whipping past us. When Gary’s phone buzzes with a text notification, I’m tempted to grab it and see if it’s from the CEO, but he grabs it first, turning it off before either of us can see it.

“So let’s talk,” I say.

“Later.”

“Suddenly you’re the reluctant one.”

“I’m not reluctant. I just don’t see what the rush is. We’ve been in the car for five minutes. Neither of us is going anywhere.”

I pretend to be annoyed but secretly I’m grateful for the reprieve. Anything to delay the inevitable parsing of our marriage. I hand him a piece of the nut bar I’ve just torn open from our snack bag—dark chocolate maple bacon coconut almond quinoa Paleo Dream. “It’s really good,” I whisper, though it tastes like wood dust and broken dreams and death.

* * *

In an hour we’ve crossed the state line from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, and an hour after that we’re in front of Gary’s mother’s once-grand Colonial, peeling white with green shutters, circular gravel driveway, dormers and gables and mullioned windows and old rugs in tatters that always fascinated me, someone who was exposed to the color-coordinated wall-to-wall carpeting and drapery and scalloped window shades of the Early American Jew decor of the late seventies. Despite the vestiges of the glorious fall now fading—pumpkins shrinking on the steps to the house; the last of the unraked leaves, red and orange and dry and noisy, blowing against the side of the house and into the scrubby bare bushes—there are no signs of life: no lights on inside; no car in the driveway. When Gary calls her from his cell phone, we both hear the house phone ringing and ringing inside the house.