Agreeing To Disagree

“Is this how normal couples do it?” She asks.

I tell her that there is nothing normal about this.

“So this is abnormal?”

I nod yes.

“If this is abnormal then how are we going to raise a kid?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want to raise a kid like this…you can’t raise a kid like this.” She plants the shovel in the cold hard November dirt and traipses around it like it had been a new lover. “If this is the world that we create, just think what that world will do to him?”

“Why do you always assume it will be a boy?” I watch a leaf fall from the maple and land on the rain swept hood of our shared car. “Why is it always boys with you?”

“They are less work.”

“That doesn’t say a lot for the males out there. You act like they are guns sometimes. Like as long as you keep them around and they make you feel safe, you never have to bullets into them.”

“You sound like a feminist. You should stop watching Oprha.”

She looks like she is about to laugh. I can see her mind replaying the joke in her head, as if she wanted to remember the delivery very carefully so when she says it again she will know how to make the crowd laugh, but when she sees the brittle maple leaf fall off the car and sink into a puddle she remembers the task at hand and stops thinking about brevity.

“I hate November,” she said.

“Who likes it?”

“I’m sure somebody somewhere likes this month. Everyone has a favorite month. Just like everyone has a favorite color or song.”

“I don’t think the calendar works like that.”

“…no, no I guess it doesn’t.”

I take the shovel out of the dirt and throw a few more helpings of soil into the hole and then tamp it down with the flat part until the seams of the earth disappear.

“Should we plant a tree here?”

“No,” I tell her. “Do you want to remember this?”

“No.” She looks at the scar on the lawn, the soft patch of grayish brown soil and the sea of fairway grass that surrounds it.

“Can’t you cover it up with something?”

“With what?”

“Those leaves over there.” She points to the ones scattered across the driveway like cigarette ash.

“The maples?”

“Yes.” She holds her arms around herself trying to ward off the wind that is biting into the back of my neck as well as hers.

“They will all blow away.” I tell her. “They always do.” They do, I think. They always do and that is why we never rake them up.

“Will they last the night?” She asks.

“Maybe.”

“Then do it,” she said.

I start picking up the leaves in big bountiful arm loads and throw them across the patch in the soil. She tells me I need to spread them around to make it look natural.

“Look natural?”

“Yes,” she said. “Make it look natural.”

I toss a red one here, I flick a yellow one there, and I throw an orange one here and so on. I make it look like god could have done it and then we walk back to the house.

“I thought you said you were going to make arrangements for the neighbors to take care of the cat while we were in New Mexico?”

“I thought that you were going to take care of that.” She tells me.

“Do you want to agree to disagree on this one?”
“No,” she said and we never talked about it again.