As if to say, “I’ve tried to help you get to where you are going. If you don’t want to go there, fine. I can’t help you. I won’t help you.”

I’ll drive for blocks, wondering if she will ever say anything. She doesn’t.

She just lets me roam. Aimlessly, for all she knows. Lost. Needing her guidance.

“Guidance,” her silence seems to say. “You want guidance? You should have listened to me back there. If you don’t want to listen, there is nothing I can do.”

After a while, I end up feeling crummy, for I am just testing her, and she probably resents it. Who wouldn’t?

You could say that I have a way of pushing her buttons. It’s true; I do. Usually, though,and I don’t say this immodestly, I push them in a way that satisfies her and satisfies me.

Like I said, we started out very happy together.

I don’t think my misgivings are deep, and I don’t think her pique is insurmountable. I think we are just getting accustomed to each other’s limitations.

We are, after all, modern. We know that to adapt is to succeed.

I just sometimes wish that, in the global sense, we would not position each other to assume that we are the total answer to each other’s needs, or, to put it in a more contemporary sense, systems.

Adaptation is what it means to be a road warrior.

She knows. She has a word for it.

“Recalculating.”