"Let's go gambling," Reuben says, as we drive under the I-80 Reno sign. I haven't been to Reno since I was maybe 11. My parents used to make me and Jen hang out in these weird holding pens for children, full of TVs playing cartoons, and ski-ball games for which you'd have to have tokens, while they were at the casinos. It was cold, really cold there. Everybody smokes. More and more, you just don't see that anymore.

"Reno?" I say, weakly. Mike was sitting at home right at this moment, waiting for me to bring home the parmesan. He'd complain about people at work, Charl and Shrinivas and Jeff, especially, and their latest plans for forcing him to fly overseas, to some broken city of millions, where people drove motorbikes on unpaved roads, you have to boil the drinking water, and you can't get Ranch dressing in the grocery stores.

That was marriage; he had every right to expect that I would listen to it all again, tonight and every night. That's what he signed up for. He was not to blame, not even a little bit, for reading serialized sci-fi fantasy paperbacks with boorish plots, or for thinking that my sole purpose in his life was to listen to a six-hour litany of workplace complaining every night of my life. I knew what I was signing up for. The blame is all mine.

Reuben unhooks his seatbelt and draws his knees up to his chest. He's wearing those outdoor khaki type of pants, the kind where you can zip off the pantlegs at the knee, and turn them into shorts. Like he's ready, on a moment's notice, for a whole different kind of life."Mike expects me to bring something home. For dinner," I say.

"Looks like you're getting right on that."

"I didn't tell him."

"I know. But looks like you're going to tell him tonight, in one way or another." I really wanted the wine in the bag at Reuben's feet. I wanted to drink it right there while we were driving, but then I thought of what Eddie said, and of that truck, the effortless way it sped into the ditch, and then lit upward, like it was made of hollow bones. The way I watched it, driving by, feeling the life drain out of my chest, knowing that I was supposed to pull over, but I didn't.

"I'll call him," I say lamely.

"What's it like?" There is a car on my ass, and I slow down intentionally, just to piss him off. I hate these kinds of drivers. I want them to die in fiery wrecks. Somewhere in my heart, this is actually true. He flicks his headlights at me, and I say aloud, fuck you, psychopath.

"Did you hear me, Ruth?"

"What?" I'm glaring at the driver in my rear view mirror, tuning Reuben out. It's always easy for the passengers to hold these wandering conversations and let you make all of the risky decisions, and then demand that you be equally engaged in some mental abstraction, when their only job is to swap discs out of the CD player and take naps.

"I said," he repeats patiently. "what is it like? Lying to him?"

"What do you think it's like? What the hell do you mean?" the tailgater zooms around me on the left, his middle finger in the air. Die, asshole. "It's easier than telling him the truth. You have no idea, Reuben, cause you've never been married."

'Right, I forgot about that."

"You have no idea, how much there is to lose. Life stops being about these abstract things like how good the sex is, or love, whatever people have boiled relationships down to on TV or whatever you're thinking it's like. It's about all these relatives who know you as somebody's wife, and you've got some mortgage or your name is on some lease, and your name on joint accounts, that kind of stuff. Entanglement. Getting out of that is not as simple as saying "hey, I'm going to stop lying." Then what? I'm homeless? People who were my family yesterday are now treating me like some succubus the very next day, rallying around Mike like he's some little kid who fell down a well? Then what? I move in with your mom and dad?"

Reuben doesn't reply. He's never in a hurry with a comeback. He's the king of the measured response. I've tried before to get a rise out of him, but somehow, he always manages to turn it back to you.

"I think you're headed toward all of that stuff anyway," he says after a minute. "You're just not willing to admit it, right now. So, it'll come down on you, after Mike finds out, 'cause you're already done it. You're just not going to step up and meet it halfway. You know?"

He's right.

"Call him," Reuben says.

I pull of the freeway after a couple of miles, we're in Rocklin. Reuben is patiently flipping the radio between the half-dozen classic rock stations that litter the Sacramento radio landscape as I pull into the parking lot of Denny's.

"Give me the wine," I say to him. He shakes his head. The flood lamps in the parking lot light up his expression; it's impassive, but slightly accusatory. He thinks I drink too much. "If you want me to call him," I say, "that's what it's going to take."

Reuben reaches into the bag at his feet, and pulls out the bottle. "No corkscrew," he says.

"Maybe they have one in Denny's."

"Right, they have quite a wine list."

I start digging in the Daiwoo's drink holder, and then into the morass of receipts in the glove compartment, with this idea in the back of my mind that if I look hard enough, a completely improbable kitchen appliance will appear in the most unlikely of locations, just because I need it to.

"Use a pen or something," he says. I lean down, feeling along my feet and then along his, and then reach between the seats, feeling along the cracker-crumb sediment of the floor of the car. Nothing.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I say. "No pen?" I feel a sense of irrational agitation, like when that car was on my bumper, urging me to speed for his convenience, when I was already way over the limit. Reuben is giving me that look that says it all: even he thinks this is pathetic, although his original plan was to drink it alone.

"Give me your belt," I say after a minute.

"You want me."

"Don't be a creep, Reuben." He smiles. His front teeth are slightly crooked, in this way that is utterly distinct to him. He never had braces, which were quite the craze when we were kids; I had them, and so did Jen. I remember that; he never seemed to have that awkward phase. No braces. No acne. No insane hair, changing form or texture for no reason around 12 or 13. He was always skinny and tanned, with his lovely crooked teeth, and his stupid loud laugh, and the scar on his chin, which had always been there. I don't think I'd ever even asked him about it. He was the same. Radiant, but careless. I stared at him for a minute as he unfastened his belt, seeing him at another, younger age, and marveling at the fact that he was still that person, the same person, here in some Rocklin parking lot with me, taking off his belt.

With the edge of the belt buckle, I start tearing off the top part of the cork. "Oh, bad idea," he says. "Too short. You need a pen. Hang on." He hops out of the car and walks quickly toward the Denny's. I sit there holding the bottle, cold against my hands. I take out my phone. I see that there are four messages there, under missed calls. Three of them are from Mike, one is from Jen. I scroll to the entry for Home.

"Yeah?" Mike answers. He never says hello.

"Mike," I say. I stop. What now?

"You're late! You're way late! Where are you? I called Eddie's and he said you left maybe an hour ago. Are you at the store?"

"I'm at Denny's."

"What do you mean?"

"Denny's. In Rocklin." I'm watching the double glass doors of Denny's, waiting for Reuben to emerge with something, a pen, something. Anything that will work.

"I'm not sure I understand what you are saying."

"I didn't go to the store. I got in the car, and I drove to Rocklin."

"What?"

He's going to make this hard. So hard. I hold the phone away from my ear and listen to his voice getting smaller, repeating the facts that he knows: that I should have bought the parmesan, I should have been to the store already, I should be home by now. I try to imagine what it might mean to end it here on the phone. To tell him about Reuben, I mean. How would I get my things out of the house? Where would I live? How does it work? People do this all the time, and I have no idea how it works. The upside is, being cuckolded might work for Mike. He could work it to his advantage. Because he was always looking for a reason to blame me for things, for everything. A big reason. All the small reasons he was always mining for and coveting never seemed to add all the way up. It might be a gift for him, the truth. He could go back to playing video games and role playing games, and sci-fi fantasy card deck games seven nights of the week, but he would have this marriage, this ex-marriage in his past, which would be something exotic and otherworldly. It would be like an extra side to his thousand-sided dice, a side none of his asexual, single-celled friends could ever play, because you actually have to talk to women, in order to get to the point of having divorced one.

"You know that thing you said, after I picked you up the other day at the airport? Where you said you weren't stupid, and this was my big chance to tell you? Well this is it. I'm telling you."

"Telling me what?" He's in a different mood today than he was that day, after his twenty odd hours of sitting around the stale-aired, tin interiors of jumbo jetliners, nursing his grievances. Right now he wanted dinner, and he was being slow to come around, since it wasn't convienent, this time that I picked to finally explain myself.

Reuben walks out of the Denny's, and stands for a minute under the parking lot lights. He has no idea what it will be like if Mike starts to hate him, how that's going to feel. Right now, he thinks of Mike in the abstract, but knowing Mike, he'd drag my parents into it, and then Reuben's parents would catch wind of the situation, since my mom likes to hang out with Janice, they go to some sort of women-only weight loss gym thing a few times a month, when they are feeling ambitious. Anyway my point is, Mike would bring a lot of people down with the whole thing, it wouldn't be a secret, not anymore to anyone.

"Mike, this is making me really sick telling you this. I don't know how to tell you this." Reuben is walking back slowly, he has something in his hand, it looks like it might really be a corkscrew. "Reuben is coming back to the car with a corkscrew. We're going to drink this bottle of Merlot that he bought at the 7-11. Think about that for a minute."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Ruthie? Reuben? Why the hell is Reuben there? I thought he lived near Eddie?" The smoke is clearing a little bit for Mike, at this point, I can tell, I can hear the anger rising, finally, in his voice. He's forgetting about the parmesan. My head is throbbing and I haven't even so much as dented the cork in the bottle of merlot, I am sure from here forward, it's only going downhill. I have to keep speaking, even though it feels like slapping a puppy across the room for something it doesn't understand.

"Don't make me say it, Mike. Give me credit for one thing, which I know is the only thing I've got left, if you'll give it to me. And that is, that I am telling you the truth. It's too late, but that is what's happening right now." I stop short of saying, I'm sorry. Because I'm not.

Mike is quiet on the other line as Reuben gets in the car. He stops short for a minute, looking confused, and says: "who is it? Is that Jen?"

Mike is just breathing into the receiver, he probably heard Reuben say it, which is suddenly just fine, I realize. Because now, he knows what I've just done. That I've just, for example, invalidated his mother's special Christmas present thing she does for me every year, where she writes the thing in the card about how I am more like a daughter than a daughter in law, because there never were any women in the family aside from her, before I came along and made her son happier than she's ever seen him, ever in his life. Or that I'd just rendered void our 23 thousand dollar wedding ceremony, the one where his cousins who he hadn't seen in fifteen years flew up from Appleton, Wisconsin, all five of them, Randy and Stan and Carl, and those younger ones whose names I always forget, even though they'd never been to California. They said that they would not have missed it for anything in the world, because if anyone deserved happiness, it was Mike.

"It's my husband," I say. "He was just about to hang up." And he does. Just like that.

Reuben gives me a strange, long stare, and holds out his hand. It is a corkscrew, a real one. I take it from him, and jam it into the top of the cork.

"Cheers," he says. His voice is flat.

"Feels good, don't it?" I say, yanking out the broken cork. "Have the first drink?" I hold out the bottle, to him. I understand without his needing to say a word that this is the beginning of the end, the other end. The end of this thing, too.

Comments? mail@tiny-dog.com.