When my boyfriend came home from work each evening, I was desperate for company, but he wasn’t much for chatting. Me, I could talk all night. We would get in bed, and I would begin. When I began talking, the raccoon crept by, and when I finished, the woodpecker hammered its spring-loaded head into the ash tree outside our window. I jiggled my boyfriend’s arm to keep him awake.

We almost made it to September.

The night my boyfriend quit working for Rudy, he was finally in the mood to talk. He’d come home with a cut on his face, but he didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to tell me the story about Rudy’s balls. “It’s not that I’m sensitive,” he said. “The guy’s a mess and that story proves it. I mean, what the hell kind of man trespasses on coal company land to hide out and cure himself with whiskey and duct tape? Just ask yourself that.”

“But what are we going to do for money?” I asked.

“We’ll think of something,” he said. “What about your aunt?”

“They’re about to foreclose on her house,” I said.

“What about your college degree?”

“What about it?”

“There’s a college in town, maybe you could I don’t know be a professor or something,” he said.

“You can’t do anything like that with a college degree, the only thing you can do with a college degree is get another degree,” I said.

“I could go back up north to work,” he said. “Plenty of money up there.”

“And leave me alone here again? I’ll die.”

He told me that I wasn’t going to die, and so I said, Okay but I want to die, and he said, No you don’t, and I said, Okay but I want to kill you. He opened his eyes then, but he didn’t say anything, so I told him that I was going back to Seattle. He told me not to leave, and I told him to give me one good reason.

“It’s not right that you should go,” he said. “I’ll go. I’ll find someplace else. I’ll go in the morning.”

That was how he outsmarted me.