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"Listen," I said. "I know you don't believe me. But don't trust this guy Thomas; he's bad news."

"You'd know," she said.

"I would?"

"Bad news knows bad news," she said. I could hear her light up another cigarette, which meant that she was on track to smoke more than her daily three. She didn't like to smoke around the kids, and so I thought maybe I could talk to them while she finished her smoke. I'd lost her; it felt that way already. But I hadn't lost the kids yet, I didn't think. Apparently this is what you do when you lose someone you love: you scramble to make sure you don't lose everyone you love.

"Hey," I said, "are the kids around?"

"Yes."

"Can I talk to them?"

"No," she said.

After that, silence opened up between us, big and yawning and much wider than the actual two miles between the gas station from which I was calling and our home to the west. The gap was so big that it felt as though there were nothing I could do to close it, nothing at all. It was the worst feeling in the world. Think of when California finally breaks off from the rest of country, and the people in Nevada watching it happen from their new coastline. That's what I felt like.

So what did I do? Did I finally, out of desperation, do what the bond analysts told one another to do? Did I tell Anne Marie the truth? I didn't. It would have been like reaching inside of me and yanking out one of my organs ― my liver, my spleen, or one of their vital neighbors ― and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. But I could tell Anne Marie what she thought was the truth. This is what I decided, right there on the phone: that I would tell Anne Marie I'd had an affair with Thomas Coleman's wife. After all, wasn't it better to be a philanderer than an arsonist and a murderer? Wasn't I catching a bit of a break here, that my wife was convinced I was a philanderer and not something much worse? Wasn't it better ― if your wife thought you were a philanderer and wouldn't be convinced otherwise ― just to go ahead and admit to her truth, so that you could then apologize and beg her forgiveness, and then she could get on with the business of forgiving you and things could get back to normal? This was my thinking when I admitted to Anne Marie, "OK, yes, I cheated on you. I am so sorry. Please let me come home and we'll talk this over."

I could hear Anne Marie suck in a breath, one, two, three times, as if she were inhaling the words love, honor, and cherish before exhaling loudly into the receiver, releasing those words into the mysterious fiber optics between us.

"Good-bye," she said. "Don't call back. I'm serious. Don't come home, either." She paused dramatically again, sucked in one more breath, and then said, "You've really fucked things up this time, Sam."

"Wait. . . ," I said, but she didn't and hung up.

I stood there in the gas station. It was a big one, right off the highway, with too many pumps. Suddenly the place seemed full of families, parents and their children, and there were a few extended families, too, grandparents with weak bladders who'd requested the pit stop, all of them so grateful to have a brood of their own. I hated them, the way you hate the morning after a night of not sleeping, when it comes up both blurry and sharp at the same time. It made me want to howl ― howl about the world that wasn't mine anymore and how I hated it, howl about the truth and how I wasn't brave enough to tell it ― and so I did exactly that: I howled right there in the gas station and was given a wide berth by the other gas pumpers.

But the howl had a fortuitous effect: it summoned the gas station attendant. I stopped howling long enough to tell him about locking the keys in my van, and he unlocked the door with his ingenious thin slice of metal. I paid him, climbed in, started the van, and then sat there. I had a full tank of gas and nowhere to go. Nowhere to go! I started howling again, except the windows were rolled up and so it was as though I were howling in my own crypt, with