When she’s mad, she sits on the front porch with a pack of cigarettes, coffee, and a collection of short stories. She doesn’t read through all of them, just the ones she can skew to her situation. She turns the pages sometimes becoming the female main character who’s been cheated on. She sees the infidelity as a symbol. When I concede and bring her another cup of coffee, she’s already decided my mistresses name. Jane or Jen or Jess. She forgets why she’s really mad, fueled by stories of actual importance. I could say I’m sorry I forgot, that it won’t happen again, but as she’s knocking the coffee cup from my hands and into our overgrown hedges, I realize I’ve forgotten those too.
“It’s so easy for you.”
She means the forgetting. The slips of mind. If I rolled all the things she thinks I’ve forgotten into a ball of memories, she’d be crushed under it’s weight. Wait.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“That’s what they all say.”
The ones in her stories that cheat on their wives. I’ve cheated on her with the forgotten bag of trash in the kitchen, the leaky faucet, and the hedges. They give us privacy so the neighbors can’t see her arms flailing. As soon as I point out it’s not so important, it becomes historic, and I’m alone. They’ve never said that before. They walk off with their heads bowed and get the clippers and trim the hedges.
