Tightening the Knot (15 page)

           
Meredith loved the man sitting across from her.
 
She loved the way he tipped his head when he smiled at her.
 
She loved the way his eyes laughed at her without ever being unkind.
 
And she even loved that odd way he would flip the napkin over as he placed it in his lap.
 
What she did not love, was this absurd silence.
 
She put down her fork, mid-bite, after Greg offered the seventeenth goofy grin of the meal.

           
“Greg?”

           
“Mm-hmm?”

           
“Are we going to keep doing this all weekend?”

           
Greg raised one eyebrow slightly, not a natural talent, but something he had spent time practicing in front of a mirror in college.
 
“Doing what?”

           
“This!”

           
He looked around.
 
“Dinner?”

           
“Are you kidding me!?
 
Do you really not know what I’m talking about?”

           
Greg looked as though he feared a trap.
 
It seemed he really was at a loss and searching for an acceptable answer.
 
Meredith waffled between rescuing him, because that would be more conducive to rescuing the relationship, and yelling at him, because that would be more satisfying at the particular moment.
 
She resolved to remain calm and forcefully stabbed another bite of omelet while she waited for Greg to speak.

           
He attempted a disarming smile.
 
“I know our anniversary was in October so this isn’t about that.”

           
Meredith softened a little at the joke.
 
Greg had never forgotten an important date, so was free to make light of the cliché in a rough spot.
 
Meredith still harbored a healthy level of exasperation though, and it forced her to bring the conversation back to her original question.
 
“I mean, how much longer are we going to live like a bad sitcom?”

           
Greg let out a quick laugh.
 
“Oh, yeah, that clears it up for me.”

           
“You
know,
all this weird grinning at each other.”

           
“What’s so weird about being nice to each other?”

           
Meredith couldn’t believe that Greg didn’t get it.
 
She shoved a huge bite into her mouth to keep from saying anything until she’d had a minute to reflect.
 
She was momentarily distracted by the delicious flavor.
 
Although clueless in some areas, she did have to admit that the man made a mean omelet.
 
All the same, she began sharpening her daggers, just in case her eyes should need them.

           
Greg shook his head.
 
“Alright.
 
I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here, but I’m going to ask anyway.
 
I thought we just didn’t have anything much to say, but have you been giving me the silent treatment on purpose?”

           
“No.”

           
“So you’re not upset about anything?”

           
“I
wasn’t
.”

           
“So now you’re upset because you haven’t been upset?”

           
“No.
 
I’m not upset.”

           
“You seem upset.”

           
“I’m just a little bothered that you haven’t noticed anything wrong.”

           
“But you said there wasn’t anything wrong.
 
I don’t understand why you’re angry.”

           
“I’m not angry.”

           
“You said you were ‘bothered.’”

           
“I just meant…”
  
Meredith took a deep breath.
 
Both of them were beginning to raise their voices and this discussion about whether or not they were having an argument was about to become the most ridiculous argument they’d ever had.
 
This was not what she intended.
 
“I just meant that it seems like we should be talking.”

           
“We
are
talking.”
 
Greg had also made a measured attempt to calm down, but he seemed no less baffled.

           
“Not now.”

           
“You want to talk later?”

           
“No, I mean we haven’t been talking.
 
We should talk more in general.”

           
“Okay…”
 
Greg put down his fork and directed his full attention to his wife.
 
“What do you want to talk about?”

           
“Oh, I…”
 
Meredith sighed heavily.
 
There was really only one thing they needed to talk about.
 
Only one thing that was constantly on her mind.
 
But she knew how that conversation would go, and more importantly, how it would end.
 
They hadn’t discussed their desire for a child or their seeming inability to create one since the last stalemate and she couldn’t really think how anything had changed since then.
 
She just smiled rather weakly and said, “Nothing.”

           
Greg resumed his dinner and did not display any more of those goofy grins.
 
Meredith did not revel in the victory.

╣ Chapter 20 ╠

           
Greg spent all of Saturday working in the yard.
 
Yes, it was December and yes, it was cold.
 
But other than the occasional pass with a lawn mower, Greg rarely worked in the yard and so was able to find things to do.
 
The previous owners had planted some ivy next to the house where it had grown over an archway between the front and back yards.
 
They took the archway with them when they moved, but not the ivy.
 
Not sure what else to do with it, Greg had simply been mowing over it the last few summers, but it grew faster than the grass and annoyed him.
 
Now he took a shovel and tried to dig up all the roots.
 
First, he piled the ground to the side, but he worried that it might just take root somewhere else.
 
So he drove to the hardware store for some yard waste bags.
 
He shoveled all the dirt he thought might contain roots into the bag, leaving a wide, shallow hole in the ground.
 

           
Next, he took a steak knife from the kitchen and used it to edge the dry, yellow grass along the driveway.
 
He rinsed it when he was finished and put it in the dishwasher, hoping Meredith would not notice the now bent blade.

           
He borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and carefully removed every last leaf and bit of debris from the eaves; or at least, from the eaves on the first level.
 
And since he had the ladder, thought he might as well clean the windows it helped him reach.

           
There was a row of small trees along the property line.
 
They flowered in the spring and were much smaller, more like bushes, when Greg and Meredith had bought the house.
 
As Greg eyed them now, he decided he actually liked them better as bushes.
 
Cutting them back would be his next project.
 
There was a problem though.
 
He had no idea how to trim trees.
 
In fact, the only thing he knew for sure about the process was that nothing in the kitchen would be able to handle the task.
 
So he got back in his car and drove to the library.
 

It seemed reasonable to start by identifying the type of tree he’d be working with, or rather on.
 
He located the gardening section and pulled down a couple of tree encyclopedias and another book on bushes, just in case they actually were bushes.
 
He took his small stack to a nearby table and opened the top book.
 
He immediately judged it unhelpful.
 
It had sparse, and mostly very small, pictures.
 
The book on bushes was quickly pushed aside as well.
 
On closer inspection, Greg discovered that it was devoted to “exotic” shrubbery.
 
Since nearly half the yards in his neighborhood sported the same bush, or tree or whatever it was, it seemed unlikely he would find it in these pages.

Large, full color pictures awaited him in the third book and he became more hopeful.
 
Unfortunately, this book was a bit too accommodating.
 
He was able to find four trees that all looked like his.
 
Unsure how to narrow it down, he simply picked one at random and started skimming the information.
 
There was a section on the history of the tree and a whole list of scientific words, possibly Latin, but no mention of how to prune one.
 
He began to wonder if it might have been more useful to start with a book on general pruning rather than hunting for the specific tree.
 
He was too restless to restart the search.
 
He placed all three books on the little cart, making sure they felt his full level of disgust, and then went out the automated doors to his car.

In the hardware store for a second time, he concluded that all he really needed to do was find something sharp, but not too sharp.
 
The only limbs he wanted removed were on the trees.
 
He settled on a basic hand saw and took it to the self checkout.
 
Small talk with a cashier seemed a little risky.
 
It would be seriously emasculating to find he had chosen the worst possible tool for the job.

Greg started with the tree closest to the street to work away from any staring neighbors.
 
He quickly hacked off the branches that were easiest to reach before he realized that he wasn’t making the tree any shorter, which was his goal.
 
He stepped back to inspect the tree, then continued with a better plan.

He ended up trimming all the trees in the same way, debating with himself the entire time on whether or not this was a good idea.
 
If he had done them differently, that may have made it more likely some would survive.
 
But he didn’t even know if a tree could die from a botched haircut so he decided to keep them looking fairly uniform.
 
Perhaps if they all died, he could just blame it on the fact that he never watered them.

Meredith had been peeking out the window regularly to keep tabs on Greg throughout the day.
 
She wondered what he was going to bury when he went digging in the side yard, and later why the hole was an improvement.
 
She had forgotten the ivy almost the day they moved in.
 
She didn’t have to mow it, after all.
 
She took the knife back out of the dishwasher, wrapped it in a paper towel and tossed it into the trash.
 
It wasn’t a matching set anyway.
 
She prayed he didn’t fall off the ladder and tried not to be too embarrassed when he used an old undershirt as a rag for the windows.
 
Surely none of the neighbors had eyesight that good.
 
And when he trimmed the trees, she realized how much better she had liked them as bushes, too.