My wife, Bridgit, and I were cruising down the west coast of New Zealand in a barely running car. It was the second half of our grand kiwi tour. We’d bought the car for next to nothing from another picker in the orchard where we’d just finished working. When the apple season started winding down, we began tooling around the islands, burning through the money we’d earned.

It was idyllic. It was also a lot of togetherness. As the days wore on, our conversations in that car became punctuated with increasingly blunt comments (mostly from Bridgit), like “I want you to know that I’m not enjoying this” and “Let’s not turn funny into annoying, OK?”

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