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“Something to eat, too?” the waiter asks.

“Just the drink for now,” she says.

I order a cheeseburger, which I find myself looking forward to with disquieting enthusiasm. How diminished I’ve become. Rarely in my life have I worked as hard as I have the last few weeks, and rarely have I deserved to be rewarded more richly. Yet there’s nothing I want in the world right now except a cheeseburger, my own second cocktail and a long night of uninterrupted sleep, preferably without anyone counting money in the same room or trying to steal my blanket.

Neither of us has the energy to celebrate. Nevertheless, we have to wring some joy out of the anniversary, do we not? It’s great to have longevity as a couple, but what does it matter if you can’t enjoy an occasion as significant as this?

“Do you remember our first date?” I ask.

Gab smiles weakly, wincing at the thought. She and I had met as underclassmen at Chicago. We were in our “decadent” phase—that is, both of us were trying desperately to act like depraved college students. But it was a struggle to sustain. We had both been drawn to the University of Chicago (voted that year by Maxim magazine “the least fun school in the entire country”) for the same reason: pain. We wanted misery and suffering, which the U of C, with its unofficial motto, “Hell Does Freeze Over,” was more than happy to provide. What the U of C famously did to its undergrads was work them to death, burying them beneath suffocating, elective-free workloads filled with the Great Books. The school didn’t apologize for its lack of fun. It took pride in its reputation as an old-fashioned, heavy-handed, almost monastic sort of place, and therefore attracted a lot of people who took themselves rather seriously, like me and Gab.

But there were differences between us as well. In U of C–speak, Gab was more of a Lockean liberal, whereas I fell more into the Marxist-Rousseauian collectivist camp. Also, even when she was attempting to goof off in her decadent phase, Gab generally went to class, and thus received much better grades.

The most obvious difference between us was our backgrounds, of course. Whereas Gab had been born on the other side of the world, in Daegu, South Korea, I had exited the womb just a hundred or so miles away, at a nice little summer town my parents used to visit in upper Michigan. And whereas Gab was on significant student aid, I didn’t even have a clue about the way a Pell Grant worked. These contrasts were important in that they seemed to promise a lifetime of shared surprises. For even though stability-oriented people like Gab and me are probably destined to settle down early and bore even ourselves, marriage needs surprises—although, truth be told, they need not go as far as buying a deli.

Tonight we’ve agreed not to discuss the store, which means that after the obligatory reminiscing is over, we run out of things to talk about. The store, I realize, has completely taken over our lives.

Then Gab seems to snap out of her funk and pushes aside her glass.

“I want to ask you something,” she says. “To be celebrating our tenth anniversary tells us something, right? That our relationship is strong, yes? That despite all the challenges we’ve put up with recently, you and me, we’re holding up?”

I nod somewhat reluctantly, because I have a feeling Gab is about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” she continues, “because as you know, I did some accounting today, and I don’t know how to say this, but things at the store don’t look so good.”

Uh-oh. I knew it.

“How bad is it?” I ask, putting down my burger.

“Bad,” she says. “Really bad.” Her explanation goes something like this:

We had thought that the store was off to a decent start, because every day we looked at the receipts and saw figures that more or less jibed with what Salim promised us, namely, revenue of around two thousand dollars a day. Sure, some days were disappointing, but if