After Hours Pruning

The parking lot at GreenScape Corp was empty except for Aileen's Honda and mine, and the security lights had already kicked down to that half-dim glow they use after six, so the whole building looked like it was holding its breath. I parked the truck by the loading door, grabbed my gloves off the passenger seat, and headed in, figuring she'd have the planters already stacked by the reception desk like she said on the phone.

She was waiting there alright, leaning on the counter with a clipboard she clearly wasn't reading, and she'd changed out of her work clothes into a low-cut green blouse that I don't think appears anywhere in the company dress code. Her hair was down, which it never is on a Thursday, and she had that look on her face like she'd been planning something and wasn't going to tell me what.

"Hey you," she said, not looking up from the clipboard. "Took you long enough."

"You said seven. It's five past." I set my gloves on the counter and she finally looked up at me, and I'll admit the blouse did its job, because I forgot what I was going to say about parking.

"It's five after and you're complaining." She clicked the pen twice and tossed the clipboard down. "There's fourteen planters in the supply closet that need to go in the dumpster, and the dumpster closes at ten, so we've got time. I ordered pizza. It'll be here at eight."

"Romantic," I said, and she smiled at me in a way I hadn't seen in a while, kind of slow, like she was deciding something.

We've been married two years, me and Aileen, since we were both twenty-one, and I met her at a community college job fair where she was representing GreenScape at a folding table with free pens, and I signed up for their mailing list just to have an excuse to talk to her. She got promoted to office manager last year and she's good at it, runs the whole floor, and I do landscaping, actual dirt and mulch work, so hauling planters to a dumpster was a step down for both of us and we both knew it.

The house has been quiet since Toby left. That's her little brother, he's nineteen, he lived with us the last year while he finished up at the community college out here, and in August he transferred to a school upstate and took the noise with him. Aileen doesn't say it bothers her but I catch her standing in the kitchen at night just looking at his door, closed now, and last week I found his old sneakers still sitting by the back steps where he kicked them off every day for a year, and I picked them up and then put them right back down, which tells you something about me I guess.

"So how's the house," she said as she led me back toward the supply closet, and the way she said it, flat, like she was asking about the weather, meant she already knew the answer.

"Quiet," I said. "I fixed the fence Saturday and it took me three hours because there was nobody telling me I was doing it wrong."

"He texted me yesterday. He says the dining hall has a pasta bar." She pushed the closet door open and flipped the light on, and there they were, fourteen dusty planters stacked in towers, plus a coiled hose and about six years of somebody else's junk. "A pasta bar, Clayton. We don't even have a pasta pot."

"We have a pot."

"We don't have a pasta pot." She handed me a planter, the big ceramic kind, probably forty pounds with the old soil still in it, and I carried it out to the dumpster while she followed with a lighter one. We made three trips like that, mostly in silence, and the building did that thing it does at night where every sound bounces around, my boots on the tile, the dumpster lid banging, the servers humming somewhere behind the ceiling.

On the fourth trip she stopped in the hallway between the closet and the loading door and put her hand flat on my chest, which she never does at work, and the security lights were so low the whole corridor was just shapes and the smell of old potting soil.

"I didn't actually need you for the planters," she said. "Omar could have carried them. He's here late Thursdays anyway, accounting stuff."

"Who's Omar?"

"Senior accountant. Twenty-nine. He stays till ten most nights, you never see him, he's like furniture." She was still standing close, looking up at me. "I just wanted the house to not be quiet for one night. Even if it's this house instead."

"Aileen," I said, "we're dumping dirt."

"I know what we're doing." She didn't move her hand. "I just wanted you to come anyway."

There's a click of a keyboard somewhere down the hall, faint, and I remembered what she said about the accountant being like furniture and wondered if he could actually hear us, and the honest thing is that thought didn't make me want to step back. Aileen saw me figure that out, I think, because she smiled that slow smile again and said, "Pizza's at eight," like that settled something, and went back for another planter with her hips going the whole way down the hall.

(You've met the guy, you know how this goes. You get quiet for two months and then one night your wife wears a blouse to move dirt and you find out you'd follow her anywhere, dumpster or no dumpster.)

The rest of the planters went fast. She kept up a running commentary the whole time, about how the sales team broke the good shredder, about how somebody's been microwaving fish in the break room which is against like four unwritten rules, and I just carried and listened, and it was the best hour I'd had since August. When the last planter banged into the dumpster she dusted her hands off on my shirt, which got her a dirt smear for her trouble, and she laughed, actually laughed, loud in the empty building.

"That's coming out in the wash," I said.

"Probably not." She checked her phone. "Forty minutes till pizza. I've got to water the break room ficus, it's my responsibility and I've been lying about it for two weeks. Come with me."

"Was I going anywhere?"

"Good answer." She took my hand, which she still wasn't doing when there were lights on anywhere, and led me toward the break room, past the dark cubicles, and down at the far end of the floor I could see one little island of light where somebody's office lamp was still burning, and a faint clicking, patient, like it had all night.

The ficus was worse than dead, it was beyond dead, a crispy little skeleton in a pot big enough to bathe a dog in, and Aileen stood over it like a general surveying a lost battle. "I told the regional guy it was thriving," she said. "Two weeks ago. In an email. With adjectives."

"You're going to hell," I said.

"I know. Hand me that watering can anyway, let's at least make it look like an accident happened."

So I filled the can at the sink and she tipped water onto a plant that couldn't have absorbed a drop if its life depended on it, and water ran out the bottom of the pot and across the tiles and she stepped back right into me, the back of her against my chest, and neither one of us moved for a second. I put my hands on her hips to steady her, dirt and all, and she leaned back into it, and I could smell her shampoo over the potting soil, the same stuff she's used since we got married, and something about the dim lights and the empty building made everything feel like it was happening somewhere it shouldn't.

"Clayton," she said, still facing the dead plant.

"Yeah."

"Turn me around." I turned her around, slow, giving her every chance to laugh and go back to watering, but she didn't laugh, she looked up at me with her hair all down and loose and her green blouse low enough that I had to make a real effort to keep eye contact, and then she grabbed the front of my work shirt and pulled me down and kissed me against the counter, hard, her fingers curling into the fabric, and I kissed her back with both hands full of her because what else would a man do. It had been a while since she kissed me like that, since before August honestly, and I told her so against her mouth and she made a noise into mine and pulled me closer, the counter edge digging into my back, and I didn't care because my wife was kissing me like we were twenty-one at a job fair again.

That's about when I heard the break room door.

I felt her hear it too, because she smiled into the kiss, and I pulled back maybe an inch and looked over her shoulder and there was a guy standing in the doorway holding a coffee mug, frozen, a tall Black guy in a wrinkled dress shirt with his lanyard still on, and he was clearly doing the math on whether backing out of the room slowly would make this less weird. It would not have. "Omar," Aileen said, without turning around, her hands still bunched in my shirt. "Evening."

"I, uh, I need coffee," Omar said, and his voice cracked on the second word, and he did not leave. He did not leave, is the thing. He stood there by the coffee maker like a man at a bus stop, staring at a point approximately one foot to the left of us, and his face was doing several things at once.

"You can get your coffee," Aileen said, and I felt her shift her weight, and then, God help me, she went up on her toes and kissed me again, slower this time, deliberate, one hand flat on my chest, and I heard the machine gurgle and a mug get set down too hard and I heard him not walk away. (I know how this reads. I know what you're thinking, because I thought it too, standing there with my heart in my ears. But she had me against that counter on purpose, she'd been steering toward it all night, and I'd follow her into a lot worse than a break room.) When she finally came up for air she kept her mouth about an inch from mine, which meant she was talking mostly to my chin, and she said, quiet, just for me, "He's watching us, Clayton."

"I know," I said. "I know he is, honey."

"Do you mind?" She was already working the top button of my work shirt, the one with the dirt smear on it, and her knuckles brushed my collarbone. I looked past her shoulder and Omar was exactly where he'd been, coffee in both hands now, and he wasn't looking away anymore, he was looking right at us with his jaw set, and the honest answer was that some switch I didn't know I had got flipped over. "No," I said. "I don't mind."

"Good," she whispered, and got the second button.

I want to be fair to Omar here, because the guy gets written off as furniture, and he wasn't furniture, he was a twenty-nine year old man alone in an office at eight on a Thursday with a mug of coffee and a view of my wife's hands on my chest, and he said, in a voice like he was reading a weather report, "I should probably, the quarterly numbers," and Aileen said, "The numbers will keep, Omar," and he set his mug down on the counter with a click and