You Are a Mountain, David

Chapter 1: The Breadstick That Broke the Camel's Back

The thing about Olive Garden is that the breadsticks are unlimited, which means the disappointment has to be enormous to make you stop eating them.

Janine Fitch had eaten seven.

She was reaching for an eighth when Dave said the word "sabbatical," and her hand froze mid-air like a woman in a painting about betrayal, if the painting were set in a strip mall off Route 9 and the woman were wearing her second-best cardigan because her husband had said "let's do something nice" and she'd assumed he meant the food.

Not a restructuring of their entire marriage.

"A sabbatical," she repeated.

"A marriage sabbatical," Dave clarified, as though the modifier made it reasonable. He was using his presentation voice — the one he deployed at quarterly budget reviews, the one that made everything sound like a measured strategic initiative rather than an act of emotional arson.

"Six months," he continued. "I've done the research."

"The research," Janine said.

"There are books."

"There are books about everything, Dave. There are books about talking to houseplants. That doesn't mean I'm going to have a conversation with the ficus."

Dave folded his napkin into a precise rectangle. He had always been a precise napkin folder. It was one of the things Janine had found endearing in year one, tolerable in year ten, and now, in year twenty-six, suddenly sinister — a clue she'd missed, like a detective who'd been staring at the murder weapon the whole time but thought it was a paperweight.

"I want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail," he said.

Janine waited for the punchline.

Dave did not deliver a punchline.

"The Pacific Crest Trail," she said. "You. David Fitch. The man who returned a camping lantern because it was 'too outdoorsy.'"

"That lantern had a chemical smell."

"It was a lantern."

"I've been watching videos," Dave said, and there it was — the sentence that explained everything and nothing. He'd been watching videos. Of course he had. He'd watched videos before the pickleball phase. He'd watched videos before the sourdough phase, which had mercifully migrated to their daughter like a virus finding a more willing host. Dave consumed enthusiasm in ninety-second increments and then rearranged his life around it with the confidence of a man who had never once been told no by a YouTube algorithm.

"I need to locate the version of myself that doesn't alphabetise the spice rack," he said.

Janine stared at him.

"Dave. You alphabetised the spice rack last Tuesday. You moved the cumin. You moved the cumin and you told me about it at dinner like it was news."

"Exactly," Dave said, as though she'd proven his point.

The server appeared. His name tag said BRAYDON. He was perhaps nineteen, with the wispy beginnings of a beard and the exhausted eyes of someone who had seen too many couples reach emotional crisis over the Tour of Italy.

"How are we doing over here?" Braydon asked.

"My husband wants a divorce," Janine said.

"Not a divorce," Dave said quickly. "A sabbatical."

Braydon blinked. "Oh. My parents did the same thing."

Janine looked up. "They did?"

"Yeah. Mom lives in a yurt now."

The silence that followed was the kind of silence that has texture — thick, woolly, the silence of a woman realising that her marriage has entered the same narrative category as a teenage server's cautionary family tale.

Janine began to laugh.

Not the polite laugh of a woman navigating an awkward social moment. The deep, structural laugh of someone whose load-bearing wall of denial had just been removed. She laughed until she was bent over the table. She laughed until the couple at the next booth stopped pretending not to listen. She laughed until Braydon, alarmed, helped her stand and guided her toward the exit with the gentle professionalism of someone who had been trained for spills but was adapting.

"Ma'am, can I get you some water?"

"A yurt," Janine gasped. "A yurt."

Dave followed them to the parking lot, carrying the leftover breadsticks in a to-go bag because he was, at his core, a man who would never waste a breadstick, even during the demolition of his own marriage.

They drove home in Dave's Subaru, which smelled like the pine air freshener he'd bought after watching a video about "scent environments" and their effect on mental clarity. Janine stared out the window at the strip malls and gas stations of suburban New Jersey and tried to identify the exact moment her life had become a sitcom she hadn't auditioned for.

The problem — the real problem, the problem beneath the problem — was that she wasn't surprised.

Not really.

She'd known something was off. Not in the dramatic, lipstick-on-the-collar way. In the oatmeal way. Their marriage had become oatmeal. Reliable, beige, vaguely healthy, and completely devoid of anything you'd describe to another person with enthusiasm.

"We had oatmeal last night," said no one, ever, at a dinner party.

But Janine had believed — had staked her entire adult life on the belief — that oatmeal was the point. That the absence of crisis was the presence of love. That a marriage without fireworks was a marriage without fire damage.

Now Dave was telling her he wanted fireworks.

Or at least a trail.

They pulled into the driveway of their split-level colonial in Woodbury Heights, the house they'd bought when Piper was three and the real estate market was a thing that made sense. The porch light was on. The recycling bins were out. Meatball, their fourteen-year-old beagle, was visible through the front window, standing on the couch in direct violation of the couch rules, staring at them with the blank majesty of an animal who had outlived his own bladder control and knew it.

"We should talk about this inside," Dave said.

"We should talk about this with a lawyer," Janine said.

"It's not a legal thing. It's a personal growth thing."

"Personal growth," Janine repeated, the way a person might repeat the phrase "controlled demolition" while watching a building fall.

Inside, Piper was in the kitchen.

Piper Fitch, twenty-four, had returned home six weeks earlier after quitting her marketing job at a mid-tier athleisure brand to become a sourdough influencer. She had eleven thousand followers, three ring lights of varying sizes, and a starter culture she'd named Gerald. Gerald lived on the counter in a mason jar and was, by Piper's account, "thriving," though Janine privately thought Gerald smelled like a decision someone would regret.

"Hey," Piper said, not looking up from her phone. She was filming a boule. The boule sat on a wooden cutting board under professional lighting, looking more cared for than anything else in the house. "How was dinner?"

"Your father wants a sabbatical from our marriage," Janine said.

Piper looked up. "Like, a work sabbatical?"

"A marriage sabbatical."

"Is that a thing?"

"There are books," Dave said.

"There are books about flat earth, Dad."

Dave set the breadsticks on the counter with the dignity of a man who knew he was outnumbered but had committed to his position. "I'm going to take a shower," he said. "We can discuss this in the morning when everyone's had time to process."

He walked upstairs.

Janine and Piper stood in the kitchen listening to the water run.

"Mom," Piper said. "Are you okay?"

Janine considered the question. She was standing in her own kitchen, holding her purse, wearing her second-best cardigan, while her husband showered away the guilt of ambushing her at an Olive Garden. Her daughter was filming bread. Her dog was incontinent. The spice rack was alphabetised.

"I'm going to need more breadsticks," she said.

She ate three more standing over the sink, which is, as any woman who has received devastating news can tell you, the only appropriate way to eat carbohydrates after 9 p.m.

Meatball waddled in and sat at her feet, looking up at her with the rheumy devotion of an animal who had witnessed every phase of the Fitch marriage and remained committed to the only consistent truth in his life: that if you sat near food long enough, food would come to you.

Janine gave him a piece of breadstick.

"Don't tell your father," she said.

Meatball ate it with the slow, philosophical chewing of a being who understood that all things — breadsticks, marriages, bladder control — were temporary.

Janine's first instinct, the one that surfaced before the anger and the fear and the humiliation, was to wait.

She was a world-class waiter.

She had waited out Dave's pickleball phase, which had lasted four months and cost them six hundred dollars in court fees — the pickleball kind, not the legal kind, though in retrospect the legal kind might have been cheaper.

She had waited out his podcast, "Net Gains: A Pickleball Life," which had lasted four episodes and was downloaded by a combined total of thirty-one people, nine of whom were Janine using different email addresses because she felt guilty.

She had waited out the fermentation phase, the woodworking phase (one birdhouse, structurally unsound, still mounted to the garage), and the brief, alarming period when he'd considered getting a motorcycle and she'd found a printout of leather jackets in his home office with certain ones circled.

She could wait out a sabbatical.

People didn't actually leave. They talked about leaving. They made plans about leaving. They watched videos about leaving. And then they came home and alphabetised the spice rack because that was who they were.

Dave would come home.

Dave always came home.

Janine went to bed in the master bedroom, alone, and stared at the ceiling fan that had been wobbling since 2019 and that Dave kept saying he would fix but never did, and she thought: Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I've been staring at a wobbling ceiling fan for five years and calling it a marriage.

Then she thought: No. That's dramatic. That's Lori talking.

Then she thought: I should call Lori.

Then she thought: Absolutely not.

She called Lori.