I wait until the streetlights hum and the house is finally quiet before I slip out the back door. The air tonight smells like damp mulch and old plastic. I have the green glass tucked under my arm like a heavy secret (the way I used to carry those stacks of student essays that never seemed to get shorter). When I drop the bottles into the bin, I don't just let them fall. I nestle them. I push aside the empty soup cans and the cardboard boxes from the cheap frozen pizzas we eat now that the pension hasn't quite kicked in like they promised. I bury them deep at the bottom where the plastic liners are stained with old soda, so the clink is muffled. My husband, Dave, thinks I'm just taking out the kitchen scrap bag. He's sitting in the recliner with the TV too loud, his eyes fixed on some history show about wars he never had to fight in. He doesn't look up when I come back in, my fingers smelling like stale grapes and cold aluminum. We spent thirty years making sure the mortgage was paid and the kids had shoes that didn't pinch their toes, and now that the house is quiet, it feels like we're just two people waiting for a bus that’s already gone past. I look at the dent in the cushion where he sits and it feels like a hole I’m trying to fill with something that comes in a 1.5 liter bottle. It didn't start like this. It used to be just a glass with dinner to wash down the dry chicken and the stress of a principal who couldn't remember my name after fifteen years in the same classroom. But then the classroom went away and the quiet came in like a fog that won't lift. Now the 4:00 sun hits the kitchen floor and I feel this itch under my skin (like the way chalk dust used to settle in the creases of my palms). I tell myself it’s just medicine for a long day of doing nothing at all. I keep the REAL trash on top—the junk mail, the empty cereal boxes—so if he ever looks, he just sees a normal life. Sometimes I stand at the sink and just watch the water run, wondering where the time went. I gave thirty years to other people’s children and now my own hands look like something I don't recognize. They're spotted and the knuckles ache when the rain is coming. I look at Dave and I want to say something, but the words feel like dry crackers in my mouth. What is there to say? THAT I'M LONELY? That the wine makes the house feel like it’s glowing instead of just fading? He grew up in a house where you didn't talk about things that weren't broken, and since I’m still standing and making dinner, he thinks everything is fine. I heard the recycling truck coming this morning and my heart did this weird little jump (the same way it did when I thought I’d lost my grade book back in '98). I watched through the blinds as the mechanical arm lifted the bin and dumped it all out. All that glass hitting the metal—it sounded like a car crash in slow motion. I was terrified he’d hear it, that he’d realize the sound was too heavy, too much glass for just one week. But he just kept drinking his coffee and complaining about the price of eggs. I’m still waiting for the day the bottom of the bin gives out and all those green and clear bottles spill across the driveway like a pile of broken promises I can't sweep up.