Anyway — yes — Trevor had been weeping. That was even the word he used, and uttering it made his freckled face and neck flush pink. Irene had been waiting to greet him in the foyer, because she saw the truck pull in, but when he didn’t come inside, she came to find him. He’d spent the previous week in what he called “talks” with his wife. The talks had started Saturday night after Trevor had gone out of his way to set up a “date night” because he felt like things had not been so romantic with them lately. But when the hour approached and he started prodding her to get ready to go, Leanne said she didn’t want to. She was tired, she’d been working extra shifts, and she said that going out with Trevor to try and be romantic just felt like more shift work piled on top of everything else she had to do. He apologized sarcastically that she found him “a chore.” She said she didn’t find him a chore, but lately she found being married a chore. Trevor said he was trying to make marriage fun, goddamnit, that’s what this entire fucking date night was about, and if she would come out on the goddamn fucking date she would see just how much fun they could have. Leanne said why didn’t Trevor go out and have fun by himself, and she would stay home and rest because that was all she wanted, really, was some rest. Trevor barked, Good then! And went out, as Leanne suggested, but he did not have fun.

He sat in a bar and stared, unblinking, at a curling game (which he interrupted himself agitatedly to insist was not even a real sport because real sports did not use brooms) on the bar’s big-screen TV. He knew that something new had happened. Leanne had often been tired, she had often not wanted to do things with him, including having sex, but she had never come out and said a thing like their marriage was a chore. It sounded like a small thing, a nasty little throwaway line of the sort that so-called romantic partners have flicked, booger-like, at one another since the dawn of time. But this was not the sort of thing Trevor and Leanne ever said to one another. It represented a new frontier in their relationship — a definitive shift. Trevor sat there on his stool, one hand braced against the bar, face rigid, everything rigid, afraid to move a muscle. Because he knew the floor was dropping out from underneath him. He knew the future — the life he had and was supposed to have with Mike and Leanne — was in the process of going away. Becoming something else. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing — a minor argument. The husband hits the bar to blow off steam, the wife broods in front of the TV, and later they come together in bed, whisper apologies, however grudging, and life goes on. But life wasn’t going to go on. Something had been set into motion, like when a few stray pebbles come sprinkling down from a mountaintop before the entire south face slides into the valley below. And maybe if Trevor just sat very still, alone at the bar, he could keep the trembling precipice from giving way.